Constant

Lancering publicatie

An — 2016-05-25T17:38:08Z

We nodigen je van harte uit voor de lancering van de online Cqrrelations publicatie.
Cqrrelations was een worksessie van twee weken in deBuren in januari 2015. Omdat een jaar telt voor vijftig in de wereld van Cqrrelations, leek het ons een goed idee om de ontmoeting uit te breiden tot een afterlife reflectiemoment.

De volgende gasten zullen hun laatste ideeën met ons delen:
* Geoff Cox herwerkt ideeën uit zijn boek 'Speaking Code' n.a.v recente ontwikkelingen - http://www.anti-thesis.net/
* Antoinette Rouvroy treedt op als respondente; als onderzoeker en denker bedacht ze het concept van het 'Algoritmische beleid', waarbij beslissingsname steeds meer gebaseerd is op statistieken: https://unamur.academia.edu/AntoinetteRouvroy
* RYBN presenteert Dataghost 2, een update van http://rybn.org/dataghost/archives/
* Manetta Berends & Ruben van de Ven, die beiden afstuderen aan PZI, presenteren hun eindwerk, waarvoor ze inspiratie vonden tijdens Cqrrelations
http://www.manettaberends.nl/
http://www.rubenvandeven.com/

PROGRAMMA
14-19u presentaties & discussies
19-20u: drankje & snacks

Waar: FoAM, Koolmijnenkaai / Quai des Charbonnages 30-34, 1080 Brussels

Graag reserveren via info||||| at||||| constantvzw||||| dot|||| org

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Meer informatie over de presentaties die in het Engels plaatsvinden

Geoff Cox - Speaking algorithms
In 2012, Geoff Cox published Speaking Code, a book written with Alex
McLean, examining some of the economical and political conditions of
coding and the analogy to free speech. Starting from the idea of code as
speech act, it unfolded its argument in dialogue with code fragments. In
his presentation, Geoff will further develop some of these ideas in the
light of an apparent shift in software studies: in which algorithms
increasingly replace source code as objects of critical concern. What are
the lines of continuity and discontinuity in this apparent shift? What has
been displaced in the shift of discourse? How does this relate to big data
and how value is produced through correlations? From there, Geoff will
return to the question of speech and ask: if algorithms could speak, what
would they say? If data were able to speak for itself, what would it say
about itself and its value? Geoff's presentation will be interspersed by
code fragments selected from different machine learning software libraries
selected by the Cqrrelations team.
Geoff Cox is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Culture, and Participatory IT Research Centre, Aarhus University (DK), currently engaged on a 3 year research project The Contemporary Condition funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (with Jacob Lund). He is also Adjunct faculty Transart Institute (DE/US), an occasional artist/curator, and part of the self-institution Museum of Ordure.
http://www.anti-thesis.net

RYBN - Dataghost2
Dataghost2 explores the use of hermeneutic interpretation systems of the Kabbalah applied to communication networks, in the attempt to update the hidden messages that hide there. A /daemon/, installed on a server, spies on all electronic communication and captures the content that is been generated by the active processes at work in the management and administration of the network. All this content is fed to different decipherment algorithms that reproduce the emblematic techniques of the Kabbalah - /Gematria, Temura et Notarique./
RYBN.ORG is an artistic collective based in Paris since 2000. They're specialised in the creation of installations, performances and interfaces that refer as much to the codified systems of artistic representation (painting, architecture, counter-cultures) as to human and physical phenomenons.
http://rybn.org

Manetta Berends - i-could-have-written-that
The large amount of digital text available these days, is presented as the problem that text mining can solve. Written language from social media users, product reviews and even essays from students are turned into data. Text mining is executed with untenable enthusiasm and a strong belief in the reading abilities of a text mining system. However, an actual text mining process is messy and chaotic. Although the eventual results are presented as being read or mined from the text, they show more similarities to something that is written. This research project shows how the software, workprocess and vocabulary together construct text mining results.
Manetta Berends has been educated as a graphic designer at ArtEZ, Arnhem before starting her master-education at the Piet Zwart Institute (PZI), Rotterdam. From an interest in linguistics, code and a research based design practice, she currently works on the systemization of language in the field of natural language processing and text mining.
http://www.manettaberends.nl/

Ruben van de Ven - Choose how you feel; you have seven options
What does it mean to feel 64% happiness and 12% disgust? The video work 'Choose how you feel; you have seven options' revolves around this question as it looks at software that derives emotional parameters from facial expressions. It interrogates a discursive apparatus that is being erected.
Combining his backgrounds in filmmaking and programming, Ruben van de Ven (NL) challenges alleged objective practices. He is intrigued by the intersection of highly cognitive practices and ambiguous experiences. In his last works he wonders: "what does it mean to feel 47% happy and 21% surprised?"
http://www.rubenvandeven.com/

Cqrrelating Compositions & Party

denis — 2015-06-19T11:07:31Z

We kunnen data analyseren, correleren, bespreken, visualiseren, maar ook sonoriseren.

Tijdens een live-coding concert cqrreleert de Colombiaanse Alexandra Cárdenas gegevens waarmee kunstenaars in deBuren experimenteerden. Daarna trakteert de Belgische wiskundige en muzikant Valery Vermeulen ons op een eerste staalkaart van Krystal Ball, een compositie aan de hand van econometrische data, algoritmes en modellen die aan de basis liggen van de wereldwijde financiële industrie. De geluidsgolven worden ten slotte door dj's opgepikt en getransformeerd in een stomende danservaring.

Deze avond is georganiseerd in samenwerking met CPDP.

Online bekijken : http://cqrrelations.constantvzw.org

Werksessie

An — 2014-11-11T15:10:00Z

Tijdens een residentie van twee weken in deBuren organiseren we een ontdekkingsreis doorheen de praktijk van het cqrreleren van data. Een Cqrrelatie is een notie met een bedoelde typfout. Je kan het uitspreken als crummylatie, crappylatie, queerylatie... naar analogie met de Engelse woorden 'crummy','crap','queer'. Cqrrelatie verwijst naar de schaduwzone van de statistiek en computing.
Een groep kunstenaars, hackers, theoretici, statistici en onderzoekers gaan aan de slag met data, waarbij ze op zoek gaan naar manieren om hun intuïtie, stem, zintuigen, lichamen en de fysieke context in de algoritmes en tabellen te smokkelen.

Je bent van harte welkom om deel te nemen!
We vertrekken vanuit twee verschillende perspectieven. We volgen het spoor van de aardappel doorheen digitale architecturen van lokale, nationale en internationale databanken en beheerakkoorden enerzijds; en onderzoeken algoritmes en methodes voor tekstanalyse en pattern recognition anderzijds.

Scroll voor meer informatie over inhoud en praktische zaken (in het Engels, dat is ook de voertaal van de workshop). Meer info: an *at* constantvzw *.* org

Met de steun van het Vlaams-Nederlands Huis deBuren

**The framework**

Cqrrelation is poetry to the statistician. It is science to the dissident. It is detox to the data-addict.

Cqrrelation is a typo-enhanced notion. It can also be pronounced as crummylation, crappylation, queerylation... These words try to hint at different shadowy elements of statistics and computing, and more specifically, at the problematic use of those disciplines to correlate big amounts of data and create models to determine reality and life based on parameters, criteria, numbers.

A cqrrelation is a correlation with impurities, with missing, invisible, broken or suspicious data. Differently from a correlation, it does not pretend to be neutral, its relation with digital traces is not innocent. Allowing irony and speculation to contaminate empirical models and logical truths, a cqrrelation questions its capacity to produce models or truths, and happily undermines its own authority. It will also obstaculate the practice of a correlation, if deemed necessary.

A cqrrelation is a correlation that is complicated by non-statistical constraints. We think computing and statistical techniques can be great tools for that, but there are many other tools to complement them; one should also be able to engage her own body, her own voice, touch objects and talk to people.

A cqrrelation perceives objects behind the data, and these objects can have a sweet taste or a nasty smell. In return, the relation it creates may also be sticky or irritating.

A cqrrelator breaks the statistician's oath by committing the sin of becoming emotional with data. And this generates even more data.

**Week 1: Data portraits of a potato**

The fresh potato we buy at the market will most probably have left very different traces in our digital data-architectures than the frozen sliced potato that is used for the famous 'Mitraillette' in the closest snack bar. Also the sweet potato, the potato flour or the machines that are used to harvest the potato, and oh yes, the people who cultivate and distribute them, all of them are represented with labels and numbers in databases about export and import in the European Union, in Belgium, in the Region of Brussels and who knows, also in the town of Brussels? Big treaties are being negotiated based on these numbers, like f.e. the TTIP, The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between Europe and the US.

In collaboration with people from the neighborhood, but also with an expert like Karin Ulmer, who has been following the European and international food policies for more than ten years, as a lobbyist for an NGO that defends the interests of local farmers from third world countries in the EU. We will create playful but critical portraits of the potato in all its data connections and disconnections.

An exercise in curiosity.

At the origin of the idea of the Portrait of a potato work session is a conversation with Karin Ulmer. She was explaining her frustration with the growth-by-trade paradigm. She tries to construct counter arguments to the dominant discourse that prevails in European law-making but each time it seemed that this discourse is mainly determined by data. Would it be possible to create different perspectives by de-correlating and re-correlating these data? By creating unexpected interventions and connections?

Presented with the impressive datasets like the European Commission Exporthelp or the Worldseed databases, we feel the need to take a certain distance, to find our scale. We are not experts and our knowledge about these subjects is limited. We needed the "right" object to start with. In the conversation about the flows of capital and the maneuvers of the agricultural industry, a very simple object appeared as an example: the potato. The humble potato seemed a very productive starting point for many reasons:

– This very unspectacular tuber won't outshine its relationships.
– It has a strong local identity and travels a lot. And in interesting company.
– It is an object everyone encounters in daily life (at least in Belgium), it doesn't belong only to the realm of statistics. We can go from the dataset to the local shop and back again.
– The correlations that one can develop starting from the potato are not obvious, it requires work and imagination.
– We appreciate the shape of its roots naturally inclined to create subterranean networks.
– It has its own geo-politics, Belgium has exported 247.195"¬ â‚¬ in potatoes to the Syrian Arab Republic.

How do we want to work? Some suggestions

– smuggle unusual parameters into the datasets linked to the potato (export/import, seeds, health, food), and look for less obviously related datasets.
– trace the legal status of the potato and see which new relations can emerge.
– talk and interview the people who produce and sell it. And question back our datasets from there.
– investigate its chemical composition and its "edible" properties. If we see it as an element to produce alcohol or as the French fry on the McDonald menu, we can attach to it very different relations. Seen as one or the other, we find it entangled in a very different web of connections.
– compose a corpus of texts that will serve as a base for textual analysis during the second week.
– create a neural network of potato images.
– assemble a cartography of the potato. Trace its journeys, the zones where it is produced, stored, consumed, thrown away.
– taste the potato in its different states. Organize a gastronomic session.
– let's watch together the potato-scene in Jeanne Dielman of Chantal Ackerman
– stretch our capacity of bearing boredom
– ...

**Week 2: The nearest neighbours inherit all qualities from their gold1000 parent**

Computational linguistics is the interdisciplinary field that deals with the analysis and modeling of natural language from the point of view of computation.

While its origins lay in cold-war urges and still have much to do with the cybernetic dreams of an artificial intelligence, nowadays the field has many ramifications and many practical applications. Great progresses have been made in the fields of linguistics and of language acquisition thanks to this discipline, but its outcomes are also increasingly fulfilling necessities of surveillance, economy and governance. These more mundane and materialistic sides deal in general with the translation of a multiplicity of written text into comparable, processable data, and the profiling of its authors.

Nevertheless, if we consider the historical ancestors of this discipline, where the wonder of logic and the magic of written language meet, this intertwining of knowledge and power is not new.
If we could draw an imaginary line from the mathe-magical methods of the Kabbalah, through Ramon Llull's rhetorical combinatorics, it would probably arrive to computational linguistics.
In the periphery of this line, though, there are as well many extraordinary examples of art, music, poetry and prose, attracted by the very same magic.

Starting somewhere near...

The computer-linguists of the research center CLiPS at the University of Antwerp are working on different text analysis tools and datasets to address large corpora of natural language. Between the projects they are busy with, there is a research on the recognition of gender- and age-based author profiles and the automatic detection of lies in written text, but they also release open-source libraries and tools for web mining and language-processing.

We think that these tools and methodologies merit to have a look at them. This week could be a lovely occasion for that, so how can we crummify them? And what are the creative elements latent in those technologies? For example, if the average author, built out of thousands of different authors, would write, what would the text look like? Is it possible to become a perfect liar by studying the lying-detection algorithms?

This week we want to look closely at and experiment with the non-pragmatic potential of tools that were designed as economic and surveillance means. We will scry through the magic of code and language and try to find something else than quantification and determination.

How do we want to work? Some suggestions of what we might be busy with this week:

– Look closely at a certain set of tools and the papers that explain them, eg. MBSP or Pattern for Python from CLiPS, to get a general grasp of the functioning of the actual tools as well as the theory (and ideology) that is supporting them.
– Mess around with the existing software, exploring new possible applications outside of the subset of the suggested policing/quantifying ones, re-opening the black-box of the tools, bringing them to some unusual or absurd situations.
– Explode the infinite poetic possibilities that are into to these tools, and in the timeless art of combinatorics
– Apply text processing techniques on the written material we gathered during the previous week, or to the large corpora of texts from authors in the public domain.
– Research ways of writing and communicating that escape systematic profiling and quantification, by reverse engineering the tools, hiding in noise, blending with the norm, or more surrealist techniques.

**Practical**

The idea is to work ten days, each week on a different topic. Ideally we will form smaller project groups and inform each other daily about what happens in each group, so the different questions and discoveries can circulate. It is possible to join for one week only or for both, to only join one group or to participate in different groups.
There will be slots reserved for specific presentations, if a group or a person wants to take a moment to explain in more details a certain aspect of her work, a concept or a project that is relevant for the investigation. All participants are invited to participate to Cqrrelations Loop, a public evening at Recyclart on 15th January, with brief presentations of the work in progress.
Meal will be served at lunch time so we have the pleasure to relax together.

Online bekijken : http://cqrrelations.constantvzw.org

Cqrrelaties

An — 2014-11-11T14:39:14Z

Cqrrelations was een werksessie van 12 tot 23 januari 2015 in het Vlaams-Nederlands Huis deBuren. Een Cqrrelatie is een notie met een bedoelde typfout. Je kan het uitspreken als crummylatie, crappylatie, queerylatie... naar analogie met de Engelse woorden 'crummy', 'crap', 'queer'. Cqrrelatie verwijst naar de schaduwzone van de statistiek en computing.

Tijdens deze residentie nodigde Constant datareizigers uit, schrijvers, cijfergeeks, programmeurs, kunstenaars, wiskundigen, verhalenvertellers en andere techcreatieve duizendpoten voor een ontdekkingsreis langs de non-relaties, desanalyses, vage categoriseringen en crymmylaties in de Big Data die onze dagdagelijkse omgeving en taal mee vormgeven. Ze gingen aand e slag met data, op zoek naar manieren om hun intuïtie, stem, zintuigen, lichamen en de fysieke context in de algoritmes en tabellen te smokkelen.

We vertrokken vanuit twee verschillende perspectieven. We volgden het spoor van de aardappel doorheen digitale architecturen van lokale, nationale en internationale databanken en beheerakkoorden enerzijds; en onderzochten algoritmes en methodes voor tekstanalyse en pattern recognition anderzijds.

Een deel van de documentatie vind je via cqrrelations.constantvzw.org.

Coördinatie
Nicolas Malevé, Martino Morandi, An Mertens

Expertise
Anne-Laure Buisson, Karin Ulmer

Deelnemers
Wendy Van Wijnsberghe, Valery Vermeulen, Sungyoung Choi, Stamatia Portanova, Solon Barocas, Silvio Lorusso, Seda Gürses, Ruben van de Ven, Roel Roscam Abbing, Robert Oxhorn, Ricardo Lafuente, Quentin Lacroix, Peter Westenberg, Natacha Roussel, Michael Murtaugh, Maxigas, Martin Howse, Marika Dermineur, Marc Kregting, Manetta Berends, Léo Seyers, Kobe Matthys, Kim Wende, Kevin Bartoli, Kate Rich, Julie Boschat Thorez, Juliane de Moerloze, Joseph Knierzinger, Jonny McHugh, Jack Boyer, Hans Lammerant, Guy De Pauw, Guillaume Bernier, Gijs de Heij, Geoffrey Bowker, Freija Vandeboom, Femke Snelting, Donatella Portoghese, Didier Debaise, Dennis Pohl, Dave Young, Cristina Cochior, Catherine Lenoble, Brendan Howell, Barbara Prada, Antoinette Rouvroy, Anita, Ana Carvalho, An Mertens, Alexandra Cárdenas, Anne Laure Buisson.

Een initiatief van Constant met de steun van deBuren.
Publieke evenementen werden georganiseerd in samenwerking met deBuren, CPDP en Recyclart.

Documentatie

Alle documentatie die hieronder wordt vermeld, is vrij te downloaden. Gebruik het! Met dezelfde Free Art License.

het debat over 'Big Data en Discriminatie' in deBuren op 22-1-15, met Geoffrey Bowker, Antoinette Rouvroy, Solon Barocas en Seda Gürses:

- video:http://video.constantvzw.org/cqrrelations/bigdatadiscrimination.webm

- geluid: http://sound.constantvzw.org/cqrrelations/big-data-discrimination.mp3

het werkproces:

- geluidsopnames van de presentaties: https://gitlab.com/cqrrelations/cqrrelations-audio/tree/master

- aantekeningen, code, beelden: https://gitlab.com/cqrrelations/cqrrelations/tree/master/share

- foto's: http://gallery3.constantvzw.org/index.php/Cqrrelations

een verslag (in het Frans): http://www.constantvzw.org/verlag/spip.php?page=article&id_article=145

Online bekijken : http://cqrrelations.constantvzw.org