Prototyping/2025-2026/T1

Syllabus (IN PROGRESS) for prototyping during Special Issue 28 (September-December 2025): Writing Machines–Protocols–Feedback

During the prototyping classes in your first year of XPUB we will work with a range of tools and technologies, to explore how they can shape our practices and thinking. There is no fixed definition of what prototyping is -- welcome to the journey of finding your inner prototyper! -- but we like to think of it as an explorative mode of hands-on learning based on more short and small material experiments.

"It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties." – Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press., p. 12

Throughout the year, a lot of tools will be put on the table to form starting points for further exploration how something is made and how that matters, with a special focus on tools that allow for collective modes of working. Below you can find some points of references and examples of practices that we can keep close to us throughout this year:

• tools (crossing with Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), technofeminism, decolonial computing, permacomputing, community networks, media archeology, ...)
• collectivity (crossing with self-organising, communities of practice, inter-dependance, trans-local networks, collective practices and distributed practices, but also sharing, ownership, licensing, distributive practices, referencing experiments, ...)

While meeting you in the middle of your context/s, your practice/s and the tools/digital infrastructure/s of your practice... we will explore all these things and we're looking forward to do so together!

Prototyping trimester 1

This trimester, we will focus on the following questions:

• How can collective ways of working shape writing machines, and vice versa, how can writing machines shape collective work?
• How do "collective practices" and "distributed practices" (Simon Yuill) overlap and differ? How can we explore this together? What works, what not, and why is that?

There will be 2 main strands:

• writing machines making (protocols/bots/pipelines)
• collective print publication making

SESSION 0

Tuesday 16 September
with Manetta + Thijs

Pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/R6Pd0dXHjWGgZcYqURY7

• What is prototyping?
• Sandbox time!
• (A note on the wiki)
• collective story writing exercise

SESSION 1

Tuesday 23 September
with Thijs (+ Manetta)

Pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/prototyping-20250923

STATE MACHINE SESSION ------------------------------->

• What are state machines?
• Becoming state machines
• State writing machines
• Graphviz (wiki page)

If you are interested in a deeper exploration rooted in theoretical computing science, take a look at this syllabus by Alexandra Silva (absolutely not required reading :))

SESSION 2

Tuesday 30 September
with Manetta (Michael filling in)

• sync
• connecting to sergio
  • SSH proxy jump (to SSH from home)
• chatty writing machines
  • IRC on Sergio
  • Python installation + pip
  • virtualenv
  • code editors
    • install one on your laptop
    • alternative to nano=tilde
  • Python intro notebook
  • regular expressions?

SESSION 3

Tuesday 7 October
with Thijs (+ Manetta)

Pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/prototyping-20251007

TEXT ADVENTURE SESSION ------------------------------->

• text adventures
  • various old ones, various new ones
• protocols for collective decision making
• The wiki as hypertext
  • WikiTA
• a mystery???

SESSION 4

Tuesday 14 October
with Michael

Eliza session

BREAK

Tuesday 21 October

Vacation: Autumn break

SESSION 5

Tuesday 28 October
with Manetta

Writing from the middle

SESSION 6

Tuesday 4 November
with Thijs (+ Manetta)

SESSION 7

Tuesday 11 November
with Manetta

event support or something else (tbc)

SESSION 8

Tuesday 18 November
with Manetta

SI28 event support

SESSION 9

Tuesday 25 November
with Manetta

CSS print, compiling the release

SESSION 10

Tuesday 2 December
with Manetta + Thijs

CSS print, compiling the release

Postprint

🔖 Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Katherine Hayles (2021) (bootleglibrary)

cognitive assemblages

• the media-archeology approach

In practice, media archeology often focuses on legacy media such as early cinematic devices, telephones, telegraphs, and so forth. The tendency in media archeology is to promote, as Ernst describes it, an “awareness of moments when media themselves, not exclusively humans anymore, become active ‘archaeologists’ of knowledge.” The differences between narrative and media archeology deepen when the devices are cognitive or, as Ernst writes, when “techno-epistemological configurations” underlie the “discursive surfaces”— that is, when software architectures generate the output that humans see. 40 If one focuses only on the (human- centered) display, the machine’s viewpoint is lost, and one consequently has little or no idea of what is actually generating the display and the results it conveys. (page 29)

The latter point has another aspect, too: in focusing only on the technical capabilities of media, salutary as that may be, the media-archeology approach sometimes leaves to the side the historical circumstances in which those devices were created, including why the inventors focused on certain functionalities rather than on others, why some devices were commercially successful and others were not, and how the devices transformed the media ecologies in which they were embedded. (page 30)

• the cultural techniques approach

Bernhard Siegert’s excellent introduction to his book Cultural Techniques articulates the central ideas of this approach and locates it within media theory more generally. Siegert quotes Thomas Macho’s argument that “cultural techniques—such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music—are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the 32Introducing Postprintimage; and to this day, people may sing or make music without knowing anything about notes or musical notation systems.” (page 31)

Siegert writes that “operations such as counting or writing always presuppose technical objects capable of performing—and to a considerable extent, determining— these operations.”⁴⁷ By focusing on technical objects (construed quite broadly as including doors, filters, and grids, each the subject of one of Siegert’s chapters), the cultural-techniques approach claims to have a view of culture at its source (...). (page 32)

Although sharing with media archeology a focus on objects, the cultural-techniques approach diverges from it in taking a keen interest in how objects are created, used, modified, and discarded, which necessarily expands the scope of the approach to human interactions with technical objects. (page 32)

• the cognitive assemblages approach

The cognitive-assemblage approach travels along the same path as media archeology in affirming that objects may have viewpoints, and it shares with the cultural-techniques approach an intense interest in understanding the chains of connection and causality that enmesh humans and objects together into assemblages. The main point of difference lies in the emphasis on cognitions as processes central to understanding how cognitive assemblages are constituted, function, adapt and evolve, and have become pervasive in contemporary societies. (page 32/33)

Hence, in the cognitive framework the emphasis falls not solely or even primarily on hominization as creating distinctions between humans and nonhuman animals (Siegert’s “humans as such”) but rather on the ways in which humans are now inextricably bound up with networks of intelligent devices, from jet aircraft to underground fiber-optic cables and almost everything else in between. (page 33)

Similarly, the cognitive-assemblage framework acknowledges that cognitive devices do more than interface with humans; they also interact with one another and through more or less complex networks of sensors, actuators, and transmitters perform actions independent of human interventions and in many instances removed from human knowledge of their actions. (page 33)

(hmm, the entanglement with shadow libraries and our bootleglibrary!)