Constant

Constant Padology

dickreckard — 2023-01-25T17:13:11Z

The article Constant Padology focuses on an essential component of Constant's tool-ecology, a simple piece of software that has permeated most activities and practices, from internal organization, to collective writing situations and publishing efforts: Etherpad.

Constant's Etherpad-lite installation has been a technical companion for nearly ten years now, and is a fundamental tool in our daily practices. This essay annotates the aspects of the software that make it versatile and the different roles it fulfills, that altogether describe the type of chosen technological horizon that we try to foster in our practices.

This article is written by Martino Morandi and is the last one of a series of six that MARCH, journal of art & strategy, invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry "Publishing As Protocol".

View online : https://march.international/constan...

Machines as Literary Companions

Elodie — 2022-07-15T11:51:03Z

This article examines Constant's many literary collaborations with machinic agents.

Working with machines as literary companions in the network of Constant also includes studying the machine, the dataset, and the process. This means that the literary quality of these works is dependent on how much the machine is taken seriously as a literary companion. In other words, the circumstances are created for this companion to narrate “its” point of view in the most critical way possible, rather than using the tool to create digital stories. The creation of spaces for exchange, collective experimenting, and sharing – in, for example, Constant's worksessions or the Algolit meetings – allows for a kind of versioning effect in the resulting works.

This article is written by An Mertens and is the fifth of six that MARCH invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry Publishing As Protocol.

View online : https://march.international/machine...

A Reparative Approach to Publishing

Elodie — 2022-04-28T13:42:32Z

This article examines Constant's Reparative Approach to Publishing.

In a wide array of materials and methods, from thermal printers to talking servers and “algoliterary” poetry, many forms of publications come out of Constant's projects and networks. What they often have in common is not so much the shape of their content but the conversations that lay the groundwork of how they are negotiated into being.

This article is written by Mia Melvær and is the fourth of six that MARCH invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry "Publishing As Protocol".

View online : https://march.international/a-repar...

Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use

Elodie — 2022-04-04T17:25:49Z

The article Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use details Constant's alignements with Free Culture across time and examines the questions and necessities raised in the document Collective Conditions for (re)use (CC4r).

"The Collective Conditions for Re-Use (CC4r) license is one of many attempts at an affirmative critique, an experiment with possible and impossible, desirable and absurd, experimental and utopian (extra-)legal models for authorship. It provided a welcome opening into a new chapter in Constant's thinking about sharing culture and knowledge"

This article written by Femke Snelting and Elodie Mugrefya is the third of six that MARCH invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry "Publishing As Protocol".

Becoming Sponge: Sustaining Practice Through Protocols of Web Publishing

Peter Westenberg — 2022-02-21T09:39:13Z

"Becoming Sponge" motivates choices and structures involved in building and maintaining the Constant ecosystem of sites, servers and tools. Michael Murtaugh shares thoughts on among others working with publishing protocols, relations to historical web developments and the attitude of care and continuity that is foregrounded by the work.

"As part of its ongoing work exploring the importance of infrastructure, we search for forms of ongoingness; ways to explore the feminist potential of free software, practices of maintenance, short and longer time frames, and how technology both produces norms and marginalizes."

This article is the second of six that MARCH invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry "Publishing As Protocol".

View online : https://march.international/becomin...

Study, Practice and Proximate Critique

Peter Westenberg — 2022-01-26T09:49:10Z

The article Study, Practice and Proximate Critique that Élodie Mugrefya and Peter Westenberg wrote for MARCH, journal of art & strategy, briefly collects some thoughts to relate the work of Constant to publishing as an act of: tool thinking, generating publicness, being together, intervening in realities, bringing into existence and doing with protocols.

"For Constant, publishing as a practice holds the potential to generate opportunities for opening up and revealing hidden structures and, beyond that, to incite interaction and change. We see recursive publishing, which comes with the explicit invitation to rewrite and republish, as generative work."

This article is the first of six that MARCH invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry Publishing As Protocol.

View online : https://march.international/constan...

Constant in MARCH journal

Elodie — 2021-12-23T12:15:45Z

MARCH invited Constant to publish a series of 6 articles from January 2022 till June 2022 in the context of the journal's first long term inquiry Publishing As Protocol, which aims to explore the relationship between self-organizational models and technological sovereignty.

Publishing As Protocol complicates the dual implications of the word ‘protocol' by purposefully conflating its meanings 1) as the accepted or established code of procedure or behaviour in any group, organization, or situation, and 2) as a set of rules governing the exchange or transmission of data between computing devices; in order to consider both definitions equally as protocol that can be not only read and activated, but also written and rewritten.

MARCH is a journal of art & strategy that embraces publishing as an act of protest to address the critical social and political issues of our time.