Constant

0v ⏚ zero volts

dickreckard — 2025-01-27T02:06:28Z

Two days of return to ground, research of electronic legacies, recognition of mineral ancestors, dissolution of black boxes.

The complexity of electronic devices keeps increasing, their size keeps shrinking. Through miniaturization and embedding, they saturate cities and houses, public and private spaces. All electronic things are becoming computer things, increasingly connected to networks. To allow the electrons to flow, a whole bunch of minerals and natural elements is necessary, but that extraction happens away from sight, at mining sites that impact the livelihoods of local forms of life.

This encounter is dedicated to reconstructing a relation both to what is inside the devices and to their earthly origins, joining hands-on experiments to break open sealed electronic components with critiques of colonial extractivism. Finding the minerals that link together these economies, they will be experimented with using sound and noise as methods to probe their properties.

The workshop is full but you are welcome to attend the evening program:

-> Wednesday 5 March from 20:30 to 22:30
“Critical” minerals, critique des mines, a conversion with Audrey Samson, Alexandre Mulongo Finkelstein, Fiona Panziera

-> Thursday 6 March from 20:30 to 22:30
Collective listening session + Organised Atoms performance by Dave Griffith (Then Try This)

If you would like to know more about this event, please send an email to martino@constantvzw.org

XPUB Special Issue 24: On Loitering

dickreckard — 2024-05-31T14:18:13Z

The students of the first year of the XPUB master course of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam shared their Counter-Tourist Information Center a.k.a Special Issue 24.

The issue was the outcome of the trimester "ON LOITERING and other forms of in-situ computation", guest edited by our colleague Martino Morandi.

The issue will experiment with loitering as a method to do research in and about the city. It starts from the intuition that when we allow ourselves to be out in public spaces without a defined purpose, we open up to unplanned encounters with a dense fabric of human relations, economic vectors and technical networks. The proposal then is to find appropriate spots to loiter in and around Rotterdam, spend some time in company of its networks and its inhabitants, and find suitable ways to develop, execute and alter scripts for the public space. Many of us today have computers in our pockets most of the time, and the streets and squares are full with different networks and other forms of computation, too. For three months we explored together the possibilities to compute and publish while being outdoors.

This all culuminated in the pop-up counter-tourist information center, a bakk-fiets loaded with different projects that prompts you to engage with the urban space in alternative ways.

View online : https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/...

Li-Bat-Quest: Pack your battery workshop

dickreckard — 2024-05-31T14:16:28Z

A clandestine cinema in the middle of an empty terrain, the mobile radio system in a demonstration, a market stand to digitise and exchange books, or a sound-system in the middle of a pedestrian area...
Many of the activities that take place to re-appropriate the city and to deviate public spaces from their usual consumerist routines, share one ingredient in common electricity and in many of these situations, the availability of this element is limited.

There are different methods that people use to get power while out in the streets, but this workshop proposes to develop a way to support these activities starting from a resource that has become ubiquitous in cities: lithium batteries. As the streets get more and more filled with networked devices, the batteries that allow them to work "wireless" need more and more lithium to be extracted. On top of the damage that the mining of this mineral does, far and close from here [1], many of the e-scooters and e-bikes dropped in the cities by venture-capital-driven rental companies often end up in garbage dumps and water ways. There are a lot of reasons then to return this resource to common use.

In the Li-Bat-Quest workshop, Rufus and Alix Turcq introduced us to the re-purposing of batteries from electric bikes, to turn them into portable battery packs to support collective activities in the public space.

The workshop was free of charge, no pre-existing knowledge or skill was necessary to participate, except the curiosity and desire to take electronic things in our own hands.
We imagined for people to join this workshop in collectives/small groups of 2 or 3 people, so it was also possible for people to join different days of the workshop, relaying to the other people in the group.

The workshop took place over three days: June 20, 21 and 22, and the main practical part of the workshop will took place from 15:00 to 20:00.
The mornings, from 11:00 to 15:00 were open and dedicated to cooking together for the day, discussing ideas, theories and experiences.

As there were limited places available, priority was given to groups/projects/individuals that planned to use the result of the workshop to create and support spaces of experimentation and solidarity in the city.

To sign up for the workshop (before the 14th of June!), receive more information, share your questions, write an email to martino@constantvzw.org

[1] Lithium mining has been expanding in South America, in Africa, in Australia and in China, and recently Europe has defined the control over this resource "critical", resulting in mines been opened or prospected in Portugal, Serbia and France.

Permanence: Placeholder

dickreckard — 2024-01-26T10:42:17Z

A picture of a map burned out by sun and weather. The city appears as a series of opening and cracks and folds.[fr]test[nl]test" />

In 2024 Constant started a series of informal encounters with no precise plan yet, except to be a meeting point on these questions:

the different proposals of a so-called "smart city", and the reasons and ways to oppose them;
the proliferation of networked objects in the streets and their study;
the re-development processes in the city, the differential inclusion and exclusion of inhabitants they put in place.

These encounters can include reading texts together, opening up black boxes, doing walks to observe surveillance infrastructures, meeting other forms of life in the city...

If this speaks to you, please get in touch with: martino@constantvzw.org.
Don't hesitate to share questions/proposals/wishes!

! Keep an eye on the Constant's website for upcoming dates !

Curseurs #2!

dickreckard — 2024-01-26T10:26:10Z

Constant had the pleasure to announce that the second number of the Curseurs magazine was out in paper format!

This number was dedicated to the increasing pressure of computational infrastructures and methods on education, and to the possible 'F/LOSS' paths to divert from the forced 'platformization'.

You can find the editorial and the table of contents for this number here.

In this issue of the magazine you could find an article from Alex Zakkas, Janneke Wubs and Martino Morandi on the use of DiCE, course evaluation software, at The Hague University for Applied Sciences.

The close examination of the software, in collaboration with a group of teachers from the sociology department, was strongly inspired by the projects: Monday Readings and the Relarning Series.

You can find Curseurs in many cultural and alternative spaces in Brussels, and at our office!

The magazine is initiated by Constant's partner, Tactic.

View online : https://www.curseurs.be/

XPUB Special Issue: TTY

dickreckard — 2024-01-25T20:31:45Z

The students of the first year of the XPUB master course of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam shared the outcomes of the TTY trimester, a.k.a Special Issue 21, guest edited by Martino Morandi (Constant).

This contribution was part of the yearly graduation show in WORM, where visitors were able to see the works of the graduating students!

This issue started from a single technical object: a Model 33 Teletype machine.

The teletype is the meeting point between typewriters and computer interfaces, a first automated translator of letters into bits. Equipped with a keyboard, a transmitter and a punch card read-writer, it is a historical link between early transmission technology such as the telegraph and the Internet of today.

Under the administration of our kubernētēs, Martino Morandi, each week hosted a guest contributor who joined us in unfolding the many cultural and technical layers that we found stratified in such a machine, reading them as questions to our contemporary involvements with computing and with networks.

The format of the issue consisted of on an on-going publishing arrangement, constantly re-considered and escaping definition at every point in spacetime, a sort of Exquisite Corpse Network. It evaded naming, location, and explanation; the Briki, the Breadbrick, the Worm Blob. A plan to release weekly bricks was wattled by a shared understanding of time into something more complex in structure, less structured in complexity.

Special thanks to Martino Morandi (guest editor), Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Femke Snelting, Isabelle Sully, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, and Zoumana Meïté.

Their generous contribution made those releases possible, and we were deeply grateful for your gesture.

Yours,
xpub1

View online : https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/TTY

Anti-Colonial Tech through Resistance and Discomforts @ Transmediale

dickreckard — 2024-01-23T12:39:12Z

Constant joined its friends and comrades from the Translocal Pipas Club for a panel at the 2024 edition of Transmediale Festival in Berlin.

This public conversation wanted to bring together a network of networks that had been organising collectively towards joyful, systemic techno-political change for many years.

The common desire across this constellation is exploring modes of resisting the financialized, extractive modes of Big Tech companies which profit heavily from online activities on the platforms they provide, aggressively pushing into new areas and turning any content into a commodity. Deeply implicated in military and prison operations, the infrastructures of The Cloud regime reinforce historical racist structures and support new forms of colonization through digitized oppression. Urged by the current political climate, we decided to share some of our modest proposals for moving networks and political engagement away from toxic cloud environments.

From Counter Cloud Action to Digital Discomfort and trans*feminist servers, our techno-disobedient practices aimed to unsettle computationally mediated depletion and activate paths towards anti-colonial tech.

View online : https://transmediale.de/en/2024/eve...

Reflecting in the Debris of High Tech: Tube Channel

dickreckard — 2023-12-22T10:20:46Z

For all the duration of the installation "Reflecting in the Debris of High Tech" in the window of Constant, video's and other streams were shared via the systerserver peertube instance ( https://tube.systerserver.net ), a techno-feminist queer collective video-praxis platform!

ALGO-RHYTHM, Manu Luksch, 2019.

https://tube.systerserver.net/w/wwLjXp6okDE4AGji6Kdq8u

A hip hop musical against automated propaganda, directed by Manu Luksch.

Starring: Gunman Xuman, Lady Zee, OMG.

Convenience, not choice. Efficiency, not freedom. Frictionless experience. In marketing and the retail sector, data analytics is widely used to profile and micro-target consumers and to predict behaviour. The ultimate goal, apparently, is for humans to be able to outsource all decision-making to machine intelligence (make Google do it!). What is at stake within the political realm?

ALGO-RHYTHM, shot in Dakar with the participation of leading Senegalese musicians, poets and graffiti artists, probes the insidious but comprehensive threats to human rights and agency posed by the rise of the quantification and algorithmic management of daily life. Using hiphop, drama, street art and data-driven filmmaking, the work explores how our embrace of the convenience of machine intelligence, refracted through the slick interface of smartphone apps, makes us vulnerable to manipulation by political actors. Recognising the urgent need for a new visual language to illuminate this concern, Manu Luksch collaborated closely with Jack Wolf and Mukul Patel to develop a hybrid narrative form that unites photogrammetry and volumetric filmmaking with traditional approaches. Through its auratic and poetic use of computational imaging technologies, ALGO-RHYTHM scrutinizes the limitations, errors and abuses of algorithmic representations.

I thought I was hearing Citizens, Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel, 2023.

https://tube.systerserver.net/w/me4dKVuGmimE9X9UBZQ2Lj

A short film by Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel

As it becomes possible to generate convincing avatars of ‘fake persons', who have never existed outside of an algorithm, the question arises – when does it matter that there is no body behind?

AI-animated avatars, bots and text-to-speech systems, typically used for corporate training, are spreading to other human-facing scenarios – from primary education and senior care to crowd management and border control. As it becomes possible to generate convincing ‘fake persons', who have never existed outside of an algorithm, the question arises – when does it matter that there is no body behind? This short film casts AI avatars generated from human actors to relate excepts from recorded discussions on information politics and democracy. The title alludes to Harun Farocki's I thought I was seeing prisoners / Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (2000), which piercingly questions our outsourcing of seeing to machines, and the moral ‘air gap' it creates. I thought I was hearing citizens points to a new space of human-machine encounter where such distancing occur.

BLACK-box-cookie-monster, Yufei Gao, 2023.

https://tube.systerserver.net/w/saqBXM3uanA5svCmg8uD25

This essay is derived from my research about the socioeconomic issues as well as the underlying moral and ethical concerns in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine learning fields.

This essay consists of four chapters. It begins with the polysemy of the word “MINE,” chapter one talks about the extraction and exploitation in the workflow of AI/ML systems, both material(mineral and energy) and immaterial(data); and the sense of ownership and privacy when it comes to data. By demonstrating the “data mania” mentality in the field, chapter two talks about the problematic ways of processing data and why more data cannot solve our problems. Chapter three is about our perception about AL/ML systems, what it claims to do, how it actually function, and the potential misusages. The final chapter is dedicated to the alignment problems which have been central to the AI ethics discourses, as well as another kind of alignment problem on the societal level.

This video essay is designed to be read/watched in no particular order. However, in the written version, it is inevitably numbered. Furthermore, the written version of the essay has an additional abstract and an afterword to make it more structured.

Workshop KaraoPo - Singing in the Debris of High Tech

dickreckard — 2023-12-22T09:16:01Z

Karaopo is a strategy for diverting our favorite, sometimes problematic songs. It makes us think of songs we can afford to sing at the top of our lungs, at parties, with friends, in the street, at demonstrations. Singing in the Debris of High Tech was a collective workshop in which we chose a song together and then twisted its lyrics into a techno-feminist 'detournement'.

We were then able to sing our new hits on Sunday 14 January in the occasion of the closing of the installation "Reflecting in the Debris of High Tech". The Karaopo - KARAOkés POlitiques - are led by Amal Alpha and for this workshop she was supported by her comrade Lambda*.

An example from a previous KaraoPo session: 'Oops i burnt it again!'-> https://tube.systerserver.net/w/aqXkVsf6DfLibwAULN7CE2

* Amal Alpha uses karaoke as a medium to emancipate and liberate the voice. She organizes Queeraokés where everyone can shine in front of a passionate audience. She is also one of the instigators of the Sharkaraoké, a float that travels around Geneva demonstrations broadcasting #karaopo videos. Lambda is a member of the Du love révolutionnaire sur vous radio team, where she writes the Super Poke Radio Ball Z Mortal Queer Fighter column. She sings in artificial duets and coordinates a feminist choir in Geneva. She also tells stories as an artist and game designer.

Since the workshop was open only to 10 participants, priority was given to gender non-conforming creatures, trans, dyke, bi, inter, non-binaries and women.

Practicalities of the workshop

Inscribe before the 7th of January 2024 by sending an email to info@ooooo.be!

Constant joins the Translocal Pipas Club

dickreckard — 2023-11-28T17:06:38Z

Moved by the intensification of the violence brought on Palestinian people by the state of Israel, and by the many mobilizations happening around us, Constant reflected on different modes to engage with the current situation that could make our solidarity practical.

We started from our own impasse, being faced once again with how proprietary digital platforms are once again go-to places for information, organising, and the raising of voices in our geographical and social surroundings. This is dangerous because, as we have seen in mainstream social media, they will use their power to throttle and silence some voices and foreground others. We were also concerned with activism against apartheid having to depend on tech provided by the same companies that are directly involved in creating tech for apartheid.

We decided then to join forces with friends moved by similar urgencies to start the Translocal Pipas Club, a thinking space on these an related issues, starting with an account on the post.lurk.org instance of the Mastodon federated network, as a way to desinvest our energy from Google, AWS and others.

@pipaswill share news, stories and events linked to the liberation of Palestine, and to other struggles too, with the special interests in figuring out what role computational infrastructures play in these struggles. You are very welcome to join the conversations!