Slippery knowledge

An ongoing digging into the many moments when Constant experimented with various ways/methods/practices of sharing, exchanging and expanding knowledge.

A knowledge blob exists while being difficult to define and delimit; making dubious the many attemps to systematize its distribution and circulation. A blob, somehow expanding by travelling from hands to hands, may be changing shape, taste, size, colour and density in each hand; leaving all kinds of traces as it passes. Envisioning knowledge as a blob is useful to touch on its fuzziness and fluidity; making it possible to conceive knowledge outside of frames defined by ownership and originality.

Learning by doing, touching, sensing, smelling, tasting

Bend, sew, touch, feel, read

A workshop on soft sensors and flexible electronics that explored the possibilities of bringing electronics closer to bodies and plants.

➜ Video of the workshop

Busboîtescartesmaps

Busboîtescartesmaps was an event that took us to unexpected corners of the Brussels region. Post boxes are a familiar repetitive phenomenon in the urban landscape. Even when postoffices become privatized and disappear, these boxes remain firmly planted in the urban soil. Busboîtescartesmaps invited us to validate these entities as more than just utilitarian tools. Drifting from one box to another, the walks proposed to climb them, to explore their musical qualities, to listen to the stories that echo from their interiors. Among other things the walks contributed to a collective mapping in which the trace of one walk echoes the existence of other walks.

➜ Gymnastics with street furniture
➜ Enhanced listening while walking

Networks with an attitude

Flag semaphore workshop during the worksession Networks with an attitude given by John Colenbrander. Flag semaphore is a visual communication system based on the encryption of messages through the possitioning of colored flags

Participants were instructed to look at one person only before them and to repeat exactly the same movements in order to pass on the message to the next person.

➜ An audio of the workshop

Collective conditions

Daily tango thermique sessions given by Caterina Mora. The dancers gradually understood the negotiations of power, tensions and interactions at play while dancing the tango. Each change of dance partner required a renewal of the negotation process which unveiled the variety of needs and conditions that needed somehow to be communicated to one another.

The short lecture: Activity following Loren Britton’s presentation, Setting the environmental conditions for thinking together. Participants were invited to tell a story or explain something to someone else’s specific body part as a way to reminds us that our bodies hold knowledge and experiences.

Giving/sharing/teaching/passing on/transferring/handing over

Moments when the blob travelled: various experimentations around the possibilities and the conditions of setting the blob into movement.

Verbindingen / Jonctions 10

Sadie Plant was given the role of situated reporter during v/j10 so that at the end of the festival, she could render a retrospective look at what happened during the past several days.

➜ Sadie Plant as situated reporter

Samedies

Les ateliers Samedies: Femmes et Logiciels Libres réunissaient des femmes de diverses horizons et visaient à développer collaborativement un savoir qui touche aux systèmes, serveurs et services dans le contexte des questions sociales et politiques qui influencent la technologie.

Relearn

Relearn is a collective learning experiment with as many teachers as it has participants. It is motivated by the possibility to displace parameters of/for research, studying and learning. During the week of Relearn, the particpants work with a set of case-studies, observations, questions or stacks of study material that are called “tracks”. Relearn outlines the idea of resetting thinking modes, for a diverse set of approaches that can be reconsidered, that come out of the development of cultures towards and through digital entities. Relearn is a learning moment that was reiterated on several occasions in various settings.

Blobing the knowledge

It’s difficult to talk about transfer and sharing of knowledge for Constant without talking about FLOSS modes of thinking. Constant has a long history of thinking about/with FLOSS technologies and propositions ➜ See the weft on Constant’s position on Free culture. Most of Constant projects talk in one way or another about the generative potentials of FLOSS for collective learning/teaching practices. ➜For instance But here is a few moments when Constant tries to articulate knowledge and its various protocols for mobility; or in other words, tries to formulate the blobing of knowledge.

Authors of the future

Conventional intellectual property law binds authors and their hybrid contemporary practices in a framework of assumed ownership and individualism. It conceives creations as original works, making collective, networked practices difficult to fit. Within that legal and ideological framework, Copyleft, Open Content Licenses or Free Culture Licensing introduced a different view of authorship, opening up the possibility for a re-imagining of authorship as a collective, feminist, webbed practice. But over time, some of the initial spark and potentiality of Free Culture licensing has been normalized and its problems and omissions have become increasingly apparent. On the 27th September, Constant organised a day to see whether it was possible to start re-imagining copyleft together.

Sound extracts of the day:
➜Severine Dusollier (SciencesPo, Paris): Inclusive Copyright

➜Aymeric Mansoux (XPUB, Rotterdam): Free Only-if

➜Eva Weinmayr (Pirate Library/And-And Publishing, London): Situated collective authorship

➜Daniel Blanga Gubbay (KFDA, Brussels): Potential authorship

Unbound Libraries

“Tools cannot be separated from the knowledge systems in which they have been imagined and made”
Frozen Social Relations and Time for a Thaw: Visibility, Exclusions, and Considerations for Postcolonial Digital Archives by Martha Nell Smith, 2014

Unbound Libraries was a worksession that questioned and experimented with libraries as knowledge systems. We looked at libraries with physical and digital presences alongside their distinct elements (materials, categorisation systems, protocols, human labor, locality, missions, means…) variously configuring the libraries’ form(s), implications and significance.
We understood libraries in their multiplicity and potentialities; from an authoritative position interwove with colonial and patriarchal legacies to community-based processes rooted in local urgencies, libraries have many facets. Also, importance was given to digital infrastructures and tools which have the potential to question-by-doing the dominant practices, by widening the library’s terms of accessibility and agency.

A hotglue gathering many elements that were present or talked about during the worksession. A lot of these elements refer to practices of knowledge sharing, gathering and management such as the rasberry pi, the marc record, the manicule and the quipu

The Collective Conditions for Re-Use license (CC4r)

The CC4r articulates conditions for re-using authored materials. This document is inspired by the principles of Free Culture – with a few differences. The CC4r understands authorship as inherently collaborative and already-collective. It applies to hybrid practices such as human-machine collaborations and other-than-human contributions. The legal framework of copyright ties authorship firmly in property and individual human creation, and prevents more fluid modes of authorial becoming from flourishing. Free Culture and intersectional, feminist, anti-colonial work reminds us that there is no tabula rasa, no original or single author; that authorial practice exist within a web of references.

➜ The CC4r