June 2016 - May 2017

  • May

  • Tracks&Traces is an installation that displays the visual and sound archives gleaned during the workshops of computer generated music that took place in 2015 at the Cultural Centre Jacques Franck. Sweeping the entire musical spectrum, these sound vignettes allow to understand the infinite (…)

  • June

  • In the context of the installation Tracks&Traces in the window of Constant, Open Sound Lab will organise a series of workshops during the weekends of the Parcours d’artistes St-Gilles/Forest 2016 for anyone interested in computer generated music.
    Open Sound Lab is an introduction workshop (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Thursday 9th June 2016 (10-18h) we will meet to review the interventions of past sessions, invent some exercises & deepen some of the techniques. Integrating some of the knowledge, that’s what we’ll (…)

  • Constant member An Mertens will take part in Just For the Record, an event dedicated to presentations, discussions and Wikipedia editing, addressing gender issues around the themes of bots, robots and cyborgs.
    PROGRAM 13:00 – introductory presentations of Just For The Record and the gender gap (…)

  • We are very happy to invite you to the launch of the online Cqrrelations publication. Cqrrelations was a worksession of two weeks we organised in deBuren in January 2015. As one year counts for fifty in the world of Cqrrelations, we thought it might be interesting to transform this gathering (…)

  • Constant members Catherine Lenoble and An Mertens will present Algolit at the conference on Poetics of the Algorithms. During this lecture, they will share the latest discussions around automatic writing and reading machines. This comes with an overview of interesting ’algoliterary’ works and (…)

  • Deadline: 12 September
    DiVersions is inspired by the way versions are inscribed in daily software-practice, and explores how parallel to their conventional narrative of collaboration and consensus they can produce divergent histories through supporting difference. This one week session is (…)

  • Exhibition during opening hours of iMAL,
    Tuesday to Friday, 13:00 - 18:00
    check:http://imal.org/

  • A collective installation by: Pascale Barret (BE/FR) Miriam Raggam (AT) Claire Williams (BE/FR) François Zajega (BE) Julien Deswaef (USA/BE) Annie Abrahams (NL/FR) Opening | Vernissage: 23 / 06 / 2016 18:30 – 22:00
    Departing, taking off, leaving, going, fleeing, escaping "¦ where from and (…)

  • July

  • Aarhus University and Transmediale organise a workshop on Machine Research, hosted by Constant in Brussels.
    The workshop aims to engage research and artistic practice that takes into account the new materialist conditions implied by nonhuman techno-ecologies including new ontologies of (…)

  • A sneak-preview of The Radiated Book, an experimental publication by the Mondothèque team, will be hosted in the window of Constant.
    In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as (…)

  • September

  • "I’m the other, the different, the stranger, the supplement, the late-comer, the non-foreseen. Being not an animal, nor man, not god, I don’t take part in the primitive scene, and that’s why one is looking where to fit me. I’m a para-creation, or rather, a re-creation, but of a special nature. (…)

  • Let’s make our own internets! This workshop explores the differences and similarities between the Internet and a bunch of computers connected by cables. The aim is to start a conversation about how to imagine networking beyond conventional global communication infrastructures and the relations (…)

  • Through the lenses of 19th century photographers, the visual artist Antje Van Wichelen dives into the clichés and underlying motives of the Western colonial anthropometric collections and their view on the ’Other’. Using stop-motion methods, manual 16mm film development and printing, stretches (…)

  • Archive activists Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé will present the installation The Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism at the conference SIGNAL#5 during a round table discussing control and safety devices and their impact on urban environments. The installation was shown in (…)

  • In 1919 the Mundaneum occupied half of the majestic Cinquantenaire building in Brussels. The ambitious project was imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine as a mix between documentation center, conference venue and educational display. "The Mundaneum is an Idea, an Institution, a Method, a (…)

  • October

  • An Mertens will participate in a panel discussion on ’Transdisciplinary experiments’ in the framework of Cultuurforum 2020, organised by the Flemish Governement.
    Other participants in the panel are the following men: Kurt Vanhoutte (UA Theater- en filmwetenschap), Peter Missotten (de (…)

  • On the 5th of October the design collective LibreObjet publishes plans for a new piece of display furniture called Peggy for Fablab/Maker-Hacker-spaces. Take up the fabbing gauntlet and make your own version!
    What is done in a fablab often stays invisible for fellow users, the infrastructure (…)

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Friday 7th October 2016 (10-18h) we will gather around a few algoliterary projects that were developed before and during the Summer. We’ll look into them, discuss & tinker. We’ll also set topics & (…)

  • In the next three weeks you still have a chance to have a look at ’21C/19C. Procedures for Anthropometric Image Reversal’ in the window of Constant. On Friday 21 October, from 16:00 to 18:00, the artist will be present to answer your questions and discuss your ideas for and responses to the (…)

  • Public discussion with presentations by: Geoff Cox, Christian Ulrik Andersen, SÁ¸ren Pold: Machine Research; Sarah Garcin: Publication-Jockey; Kristoffer Gansing, Daphne Dragona: transmediale 2017; An Mertens, Femke Snelting: Constant.
    If you want to join us for a vegetarian buffet afterwards (…)

  • With Antoinette Rouvroy (Université Namur) and Seda Guerses (Leuven University): Histories of big data.
    Two lectures and a conversation in collaboration with VUB, Department of Communication Sciences.
    From 24-26 October, Constant hosts the research/Phd workshop Machine Research in (…)

  • New landscapes are in the making by how we interact with our telephones and computers. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein, an Algolit Extended group reinterpreted part of the novel using contemporary artificial intelligence, ’On Journey with Hovelbot’ in the window (…)

  • November

  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Thursday 3rd November we will start from Uncertainty Detected, a supervised machine learning script (using Python and Scikit Learn) that predicts uncertain sentences in scientific papers. By looking at (…)

  • A presentation / discussion at feminist art center La Centrale in Montreal (CA) of two projects around hybrid languages that Constant has organised over the past years in Brussels. Peter Westenberg will be presenting practices, policies, desires, complexities, and potential of the Brussels (…)

  • In this workshop organized by Luiza Crosman, a group of participants will visit the office of Constant, association for art and media. An Mertens and Femke Snelting will present the organisation, the space and some of its tools. Afterwards, the group will be free to investigate the space, (…)

  • New landscapes are in the making by how we interact with our telephones and computers. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein, an Algolit Extended group reinterpreted part of the novel using contemporary artificial intelligence, ’On Journey with Hovelbot’ in the window (…)

  • During one week Constant will show her books in the framework of the exhibition ’TYPE.CODE’ in La Maison du Livre in Saint-GIlles. These books are published by Constant, made with 100% Free and Open Source and published under open content licenses. This is why they deserve the hallmark ’Book (…)

  • There are several fablabs/makerspaces/hackerspaces active in Brussels. Every lab is different with regards to its infrastructure, machines, resources and availability of materials. Some of these labs have made their own version of Peggy, a piece of display furniture. All Peggy’s are based on the (…)

  • Contribution to Reading Rooms, a series of evenings dedicated to the act of collective reading organised by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
    This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format (…)

  • Algolit organises a first dive in neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Amongst others, we’ll build a neural-net dedicated computer / XMPP bots.
    Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.

  • As a contribution to the a.pass event The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting and Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver propose a day long session, aimed at aligning the a.pass computing infrastructure with the ambitions and aspirations summoned by the commons.
    Tech giants currently (…)

  • December

  • Constant started its worksession DiVersions with an afternoon in the Royal Museum for Art and History. Inspired by the way versions are embedded in the daily practice of software-development, we explored tools and infrastructures that invite different and divergent histories
    The program (…)

  • The collective Libre Objet will present variations of Peggy, exhibition furniture for Fablabs and Maker-Hacker-spaces.
    During the month of October, a series of labs in Belgium was asked to produce their own version of Peggy. Each working with different equipment and materials, Peggy naturally (…)

  • On October 5th, the design collective LibreObjet published plans for a new piece of display furniture called Peggy for Fablab/Maker-Hacker-spaces. Often the lab/space is used for its infrastructure, but the objects and projects themselves stay transitory or invisible for other users. The Peggy (…)

  • In the light of the versions of the display furniture (for fablabs/hackerspaces) called Peggy, we will have a talk about ’Objects in Common’, Free/Libre/Open Design (with LibreObjet and Entropie). Also on the agenda: the deconstruction of Wally, an open source knitting machine.
    Opening at (…)

  • Algolit organises a second dive in neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Amongst others, we will put a neural-net dedicated computer to work!
    Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.

  • January 2017

  • From October 2015 until December 2016 a worksession, an exhibition and lots more ran under the header of Objects in Common. The fablab and maker culture, conversion of digital objects to the physical realm, and the issues that come along (from geopolitical to licensing to infrastructure) were (…)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Participants choose how to get into the topic, through reading, tutorials, code experiments, alone or in company... Impressions and experiences are shared throughout the day. (…)

  • For the first Constant_V of 2017, Pascale Barret installs a selection of artworks in the window of Constant: a catalogue and a rice wine experimentation developed during her last residency at TEMI in South Korea.
    Spending this residency between wild and urban life, mountains with shamans, city (…)

  • Data-driven systems do not arrive from nowhere, into the world like magic. Like all technologies their development and deployment follows particular historical trajectories and continuities which are influenced by larger forces. In contrast, most of the research on ’social impact’ has drawn (…)

  • As a contribution to a symposium on design research organised by the department of design at the Hamburg University, Femke introduces the Technogalactic Software Observatory (TSO), a temporary study center, poetic training camp and walk-in clinic that Constant will open in the World Trade Center (…)

  • February

  • In the framework of Transmediale, Michael Murtaugh, Sarah Garcin and An Mertens presented how publishing activities – collective writing, editing and lay-out – lead to a pdf or a printed brochure as a reminder that digital creation can also exist without the cloud.
    In recent years Constant (…)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We will follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html ). Please make (…)

  • As a preparation for and critical evaluation of a proposal by the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) for an Internet of Things Inspector, participants from Constant, Dyne:BXL, COSIC Leuven and others gather in WTC25 to test out the testbed with their camera’s, (…)

  • March

  • "This is a book of translations - because translation permits dissemination - of certain selected texts which seem ti us to pose important questions, and which enable us to conceptualise our actions and our position in the future, in technology, in society, and in the network. Questions such as: (…)

  • DiVersions took place from 4 to 11 December 2016 and was inspired by the way versions are inscribed in daily software-practice. With 35 participants we explored how we could produce divergent histories through supporting difference. At http://diversions.constantvzw.org you can find links to the (…)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We will follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabu...). Please make sure (…)

  • ESPACE AUTOUR is an invitation for you to map out your personal perception of space. Those tangible spaces show the relationship to what is around you. The classic codes of communication are thrown overboard and make way for a nonverbal, physical encounter.
    Katrien shares her practice with (…)

  • April

  • From 7 until 12 June, the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory will explore practices of proximate critique with and of software. This worksession has been called an ’Observatory’ because we are interested in different ways to look at software, and at the implications of how it is currently (…)

  • Peter Westenberg and An Mertens are invited to Aalborg University, to give a workshop and a masterclass for a group of students of the Erasmus JMD program in Media Arts Cultures. This program is organised in collaboration with Universities of Danube, Lodz, Hong Kong.
    Their presentations and (…)

  • From 20 until 23 April, the twelfth edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
    Our colleagues from Open Source design caravan OSP will contribute to the meeting with amongst others Metabrasil, a two day workshop proposing to draw a parametric font using (…)

  • Algolit explores neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). Please make sure you watch the (…)

  • Every year Constant commissions another designer or design collective using Free, Libre and Open Source tools, to work on the two-monthly flyers for Constant_V.
    In 2016, we invited Antoine Gelgon. He decided to use the flyers to develop and experiment with the typeface Ocr-PBI that he designed (…)

  • Possible Bodies interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modeling.
    From 6 until 14 May, Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha gather a transdisciplinary group of researchers (…)

  • In the maker movement, information and sharing - primary library territory - are under scrutiny. During this session, (part of the CultuurConnect "Inspiratiedag: Focus op Makerspaces") you will get an introduction on the basic ideas and concepts behind creative commons, licenses, repositories (…)

  • Algolit explores neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). Please make sure you watch the (…)

  • The Festival Mondial des Cinémas Sauvages (World Festival of Wild Cinema) is an open space and an open event traversed by contradictory currents. It aims to bring together films and practices that defy notions of property, authorship or copyright. Sometimes consciously through free licence; (…)

  • Every year on January 1, copyright expires on thousands of works that subsequently enter the public domain. In Belgium, copyright protection lasts 70 years after the death of the author and so in 2017, the works of authors who died in 1946 will be liberated. This year we welcome the creations of (…)

  • Let’s Build a Library Together invites designers, artists, theoreticians, hackers, librarians and activists to join forces during an intense week of discussion, collective prototyping and exchange on the future of Public Libraries in the digital age.
    Femke Snelting contributes to the workshop (…)

  • In 1945 the fifteen year old girl Anne Frank died in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Her diary would have entered the public domain on 1 January 2016, but the arrival of this event caused a lot of commotion. The Anne Frank Foundation, an organisation that was set up by Anne’s father, (…)