User:LEa/SI29

Special Issue #29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances

January—March 2026

Outputs: small events (such as HowSpot), a glossary, file sharing prototypes

Notes from Class: SI29

Gossips With Guests

Week 3: TMUX (to web2print) with Kaa

Doriane and Kaa introduced us to TMUX—a “terminal multiplexer”. It allows you to keep sessions in the terminal alive, even when closed (you can “detach”). Also, many people can join the same session as one user. Chaos!

Kaa made a little tool that logs all input from a TMUX session into an html file hosted on a server. The logging crashed easily, but we still managed to make some websites, that we then turned into printed zines with css.

📎 Serving Gossips: Class documentation by Doriane

📎 tmux2web2print: Kaa's project on github

📎 grokette: one example of a logged session

Week 4: Datacenters with Anti & Marloes

Week 6: Smartphone Web Hosting with Marie

Week 8: Mapping with Julie

Week 9: Bootleglibrary with Simon

Week 10: 83 Snails with Chae & Kamo

P2P Prototypes

Our house—our garden: A prototype for intimate P2P file sharing

Proposal

We have been using Soulseek to download music. It is P2P, but different than torrents. In Soulseek you share a whole folder from your computer (this could even be your home folder—then you share everything). Doing this for the first time, it feels a bit scary and very intimate, kind of like inviting someone to your house and just letting them look around, touch, take…

We would like to expand on that intimacy by building a more personal P2P environment that is not limited to music. We thought it would be cute to actually use the house analogy, either by naming the folders (“room”, “close to the window”…) or trying to include a visual layer with a map or drawings of home-y items.

How to implement?

Soulseek prompts to add buddies

• We could use Soulseek and figure out how to only share files with a selected group of people. (Might possibly be easy with adding friends?) In this scenario, everyone has one personal environment that can be shared with others. They can browse, download, but not change anything.

• We could use Syncthing, but not for syncing between personal devices, but between different people. This way, we could tend to a house (or garden?) all together—everybody can add, move or remove files.

Testing

No connection yet…

We can all find our profiles on Soulseek and add each other as buddies. What is not working at first is sharing files—the right port is not open. Using a VPN that allows port forwarding (e.g. airvpn), we can open it which then makes our shared files accessible for everybody.

Since all three of us are using a different OS, the configuration of the VPN is different as well. But after that is taken care of, we are able to share files with each other using Soulseek. It's very easy to add a folder that is only accessible to buddies.

For Syncthing, it is crucial to enable "Global Discovery", as only then it is possible to sync files over the internet. Otherwise, the sharing only works if all devices are on the same network. We added each other's laptops to our list of remote devices and shared a folder among us.

Careful: Not setting the correct path (e.g. missing a subfolder) can easily make more files available for syncing than were intended to share.

Syncthing shares

The house

We each added one folder to our Soulseek shares, but made it only available to buddies. Barbara made a complex folder structure that makes it possible to explore her desk, bookshelf and more.

Soulseek logs who is looking at your profile, browsing your files, or downloads something from you. This makes the experience very interactive!

The garden

First draft of the file garden

Lea started cultivating files in the garden: music, drawings and photos, as well as html files with text styled to fit the setting. The html files she built are also available on sergio:

📎 a-sign-at-the-entrance.html

📎 a-book.html

Sibyl later added a folder with a pdf of the book that she is currently reading, and instructions for knitting and cooking. She also shared movies, which lead to big folder sizes (that take quite some time to sync).

Sibyl's cooking: We could have a picnic in the garden!

Conclusion

intimacy, being in close proximity (and available to discuss things at the same time) makes things easier

risk of sharing private files (setting the wrong path in syncthing, sharing a folder with more devices than intended, or having files in a soulseek share that you forgot about)

potential for text adventure games (folder structures and text files)

potential for "multiplayer" games (soulseek logs, collective "gardening" in syncthing)

potential for a visual layer (with drawings, photos, html files)

syncthing API explorations

playing around with "folder poetry":

• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Exploring_our_file_systems#touring_around
• https://www.radicalnetworks.org/archives/2019/participants/melanie-hoff/

Campfire: A prototype for local-first file sharing

Proposal

How can we share files in a direct and personal way with the people in our immediate surroundings? We would like to develop a prototype for a server that we can sit around in a circle, exchanging files with each other without using the internet. It works like a cozy campfire—only instead of stories, we share files.

How to implement?

We could use a server charm such as those from the actinomy collective (see: Server Charm Workshop). This is a portable server made from a ESP32 microcontroller, powered by a small battery. Instead of transmitting one site via a WiFi from a server that belongs to one person only, it would be interesting to see if we can all connect to the same server. One goal is to be able to share images with each other, despite the small storage space. To share images with small file sizes, we could use pixelated or dithered images,or SVGs.

Another option is to use a RaspberryPi, which would allow for a bit more freedom in regards to storage space.

Testing

guestbook page

The model of the microcontroller that we used is ESP32 C3 Super Mini. It has 4MB flash memory, so our options for playing around are very limited. Youjung flashed the server with a template from the workshop—a small guestbook page that allows users to interactively leave their trace on the page by leaving a comment. The code can be found in this manual. When trying to add a function that allows image uploads, the page kept crashing on clicking the upload button. So for now, we settled on just the guestbook page as is.

Outlook

We could work further on making the guestbook work with images, or just try to host a static website that uses images to test the boundaries of our storage space. After the class with Doriane and Marie, we might also ask: Do we really need images during our campfire?

Instead of buying new hardware (more microcontrollers or a RaspberryPi)—Can we use an old smartphone as our shared server? Using Termux during the workshop with Marie, we were able to SSH into each others phones, and to interact by turning flashlights on, changing wallpapers, and adding files. This fits the idea of the campfire, even though it was very device-centered.

Ferment Sharing: A prototype for starter piracy

You wouldn't download a bread

Due to a recent move, I parted with my SCOBY. Wanting to start again with kombucha-brewing, I sent a message to a group chat with neighbors. Within a few hours I obtained a new starter—and met a new person.

When sharing files, they multiply. Unlike sharing a physical book with one friend at a time, an e-book file can be shared with all of your friends at the same time. Starters used in fermenting—such as a sourdough or kombucha starter—are physical in the same sense as a book, but much more like a digital file in their sharing properties. They can be distributed without loosing the original, and each copy (child?) can be distributed again, endlessly. Sharing starters with peers is a social and cultural practice that enables us to make our own bread (or our own drinks, our own yogurt) instead of relying on the availability and affordability of store products. It can strengthen the relationship to the food we eat and our bonds within the community in which we share the cultures and the knowledge around tending to them.

Cool things to make with kombucha

Ideas: Kombucha battery (Mastodon post by Tommi), Electronic circuits on kombucha mats (Source)

Workshop: Communally spotting AI imagery

Proposal (Step 1)

Introduction

We would like to host a workshop on identifying AI-generated imagery. The rise of AI content is a painful development with great dangers for all layers of society. The lines between what is real and what is fake are becoming increasingly blurred as large language models are trained better and better, with more and more information. Still, fake images are not new and have been used to obfuscate reality for a long time.

The idea for the workshop is to bring examples of images, and asks participants to bring their own, and then determine whether they are legitimate or not. Together, we will share moments of being unsure whether something was AI or not, our feelings about that, and how we can address this in our communities. In small working groups, we will analyze the content and take collective notes. We would like to discuss potential consequences of ubiquitous AI imagery and how we can counteract doubts in our own ability to tell truths from fake.

Crowds & Places

The goal is to reach people from different backgrounds and generations. Ideally, we would like to host the event at Tante Nino in Rotterdam. Another option would be Leeszaal West (also in Rotterdam).

Technology & Social Practices

The workshop will largely revolve around discussion and shared experiences. We ask participants to bring their own images—either printed or on their phones or tablets. The images we provide would be printed, as this makes it easier to look at them all together. (Alternatively, we could use a computer and a big screen or beamer). We would also provide pens and paper to allow for note taking, scribbling and sharing visual ideas.

To make a collective zine out of our notes, we need a scanner and a computer. If we want to print copies during the workshop, we also need and a printer.

Another interesting practice could be to do research on the context of one specific image, and then share this with the group. This would require multiple devices with internet access.

Schedule

Timeframe: 3 hours

Introduction (30 min)

• Get everyone together. Introductions of the people who will be leading the workshop. Names of all participants.
• What is this afternoon about? A brief overview of the history of social media/the internet and how we have now entered the age of AI.

Break (10 min)

Group discussions (60 min)

• We get out the images we brought, and collect the content that has been brought by others.
• For every image, we go through the same process:

1. Speed round: Do you think this is AI or not? 
2. Describe the image: What do we see? Anything that that stands out? Ask the person who brought it about the context.
3. Pass around the printed cards and look for clues. Make notes, mark and highlight.
4. On bigger sheets of paper, we can note down general thoughts that might be unrelated to the specific image.
5. Ask again: Do you think this is AI or not?
6. Reveal a point from our list what to look out for.

Break (20 min)

Debriefing & creating a zine (60 min)

• What have we learned from the analysis? How can we read images in the future? We summarize our findings.
• We scan the mind maps, collect the (non)AI images, and digitize our notes. We use these to create a small zines that everyone in the workshop can take home.

Communication & Documentation

For now, the plan is to promote the event by printing posters and/or flyers and distributing them around the location of the workshop, as well as around similar communal spaces. We can also consider to post a sharepic in local Rotterdam groups on WhatsApp or Signal. Maybe there is a mailing newsletter of the venue?

For documenting, it would be very interesting to encourage participants to take notes (could be handwritten or on a device), then scan or photograph those and make a zine out of them—possibly right away so people can take it home if they want to. To make the information accessible to people engaging with the and around the location, we would like to share our take-aways on the website of the venue as a recap of the event. If possible in terms of time, it would be cool to make a website or a small publication that documents the workshop steps and our learnings in a more polished way.

Process

Pad

https://pad.xpub.nl/p/idai

Organising

02-02-2026: Reaching out to Tante Nino We start out by writing an e-mail. There's no response for quite a while, so Daan sets up a meeting with Maaike from Tante Nino via their website. Some questions that we gather beforehand:

• Which info do you need from us upfront?
• How do feel about hosting an event in English only? Are you doing that regularly, or would you prefer if we aim to promote it in Dutch as well, and offer resources and feedback in both languages?
• Do you have a scanner and/or printer available?
• Do you have a newsletter? Or other practices to inform people of events at Tante Nino?

13-02-2026: Meeting with Maaike & Willem at Tante Nino

Lea made a work-in-progress flyer. Needs to be updated with the new title!

Maaike relates to our experiences and shares her own anecdotes. She suggests that we work with the Dreamland101, a project from the local elementary school, and target the workshop to the kids aged 8-12. Her and Daan come up with a title idea: Echt Nep?! (meaning Really fake?! — an expression used frequently in Dutch). Possible dates for the workshop could be March 4 (Wed) or March 6 (Fri). Needed to go on:

• a flyer/sharepic
• a short text to promote the session
• decision on the date

01-03-2026: Reorientation The communication with the different actors is slow-moving: Maaike only works at Tante Nino two days a week, and we have no direct contact to Dreamlab010. March 4 (or 6) is approaching FAST, and there are no clear plans arranged. According to Maaike, it might not be feasible to host the workshop in March. We decide to look for other venues, while still being open to doing it at Tante Nino, possibly after the Special Issue.

02-03-2026: Reaching out to Leeszaal West We write an e-mail to Leeszaal West, and decide to go there in person the coming Wednesday. Doriane gives us some feedback and food for thought:

• Document the process of organizing and going through the loops!
• If you want participants to bring their own material to the workshop, be as specific as possible. Example: Gossipy questions from class. "When was the last time you experienced X?"
• How are you going to navigate different viewpoints on AI among the participants? AI is political, and people like to express their opinions (loudly). It is important to include a plurality of beliefs and emotions, but it might be good to clarify some common grounds / negative aspects of AI. In the promotional communication, we could already try to target people who are at least somewhat critical of it.

04-03-2026: Visiting Leeszaal West At 11:30 we met in front of the Leeszaal and went in there. Talked to the volunteers who were having coffee, said the person we needed was Dolf, was coming in a little bit. The person who told us this kindly asked us what the workshop we wanted to host was about. He said it would really fit the space and they'll probably have a spot for us. The atmosphere of the place is very calm and welcoming. I think it's really an actual community space. Lea went to work with her writing group and we (Ema and Daan) were told by Dolf that we needed Michiel for this. This was kinda funny as it shows to me the spontaneity and informal environment the place. Dolf gave us Michiel is number, we called him and he invited us to a meeting on Saturday morning. The comforted us on the phone by saying they're super flexible and they are likely to fit it in!

07-03-2026: Meeting with Michiel at Leeszaal West

New flyer!

• Via facebook and instagram of Leeszaal we can share the flyer and text.
• They can co-post it with us - maybe via XPUB instagram?
• We could do the workshop multiple times
• Maybe put a qr-code on the flyer so people can apply
• If it's gonna be 15 or more people participating, we might need to consider the back of the Leeszaal. That would be 50 euros for a day (?)
• We need to bring a printer ourselves if we want to print zines, but it would be okay to use it!
• Not on Saturday afternoons - Taalcafe NL (14:00 - 16:00)
• Not on Wednesday, 18 March - municipality election
• Not on Monday 23 March - XPUB2 presentations at Leeszaal
• At other times: free to walk in with a group up to 10 people
• Communicate with Leeszaal which day(s) and with how many people we want to be there, so the volunteers know what to expect.
• Contact information: verhuringen@leeszaalrotterdamwest.nl & promotie@leeszaalrotterdamwest.nl

To-Do's:

• Find dates we would like to host! Maybe 19th or 20th and 26th or 27th of March?
• Make updated flyers - for these dates
• Make final small text with these dates on it
• Share flyer and text via chatgroups & instagram.
• Print simple A5 flyer in b/w
• What printer can we bring?

Lists: What's important?

Dangers surrounding AI content

• Slop is everywhere: The internet as well as the real world are increasingly flooded with low-effort content, and it is hard to find something valuable in between.
• Creating realistic fakes is made easy: scams are harder to detects, identities get stolen, and women get sexualized without consents.
• Visual crafts (and others such as writing or coding) loose recognition.
• People are less inclined to actually learn a skill.

> Add examples

Common giveaways that something is AI-generated

• weird hands with more than five fingers
• faces that are too perfect / smooth
• glitches of things growing into each other)
• in videos or multiple images: moving doorframes, furniture moving around in the same room
• Logo's being mimicked, looking legit from a distance but actually its abstract shapes when looking closer
• Butchered text (look closely!)
• Multiple contexts juxtaposed to each other (Colosseum within the streets of Venice)
• Heavily saturated and bright colors & heavy contrast
• Super bright/focused main subject, everything in the back blurred
• Jagged patterns/structures

> Add examples!

Contexts!

• What is the image showing?
• Who published it? What do I know about the publisher?
• What is it trying to communicate? Is it just slop or trying to sell me a product or idea?
• Are there multiple examples depicting the same item or event?
• Do I know someone who has more experience with the thing in the picture or detailed understanding of the situation?

Things we need to bring to Leeszaal

• printer (with double sided printing) > Daan will ask Guus
• flatbed scanner > Daan has one
• A4 paper to print on > Look in the studio on Wednesday
• paper to take notes on > Look in the studio (or WdKa shop?) on Wednesday
• printed example images > Print in school on Wednesday
• printed lists of giveaways and contexts (each 3-4 times) > Print in school on Wednesday
• scissors, pens, glue > Bring from the studio and from home

Reading & Sources

In just the last few years, even months, the quality of AI content has improved immensely. By now, obvious six-finger glitches and horribly rendered texts are mostly a relict of the past, and there is no surefire way to tell if an image is generated or has been digitally altered. Online tools are supposed to help with identifying, but they are not reliable, and watermarks used by some chatbots can easily be removed. So—how to decide if an image is real or fake?

In this article, Meaghan Looram—director of photography at the New York Times—describes the process that journalists go through to determine the authenticity of a photo. She, too, states that AI-detection tools leave room for uncertainty. Instead of relying on them, the most important step is to look for context. Context can include the source of the image, or other depictions and reports of the same event. This is relevant for ones one understanding, as well as for sharing images further. Looram also mentions a back-and-forth discussion within the team. This might be good journalistic practice before publishing anything, but gossip can also be very helpful in personal moments of doubt. Lastly, Looram emphasizes the importance of making human judgment calls!

___

[Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World,] positions alienation as a key mechanism of capitalist simplification and control. Alienation severs the interdependence and relational value of humans and more-than-humans, commodifying them and reducing them to exchangeable assets—a process she describes as "barcoding life".
- Ruby Bayley

___

AI is political! In that regard, the article Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Langdon Winner) is very interesting. We need to study inherit qualities of new technologies, and pay attention to the context in which they are emerging. Assessing the political consequences of a system (ideally—haha) needs to happen before it's widespread adoption, as the social and environmental requirements change (sometimes drastically) with the use of a technology. In the text, two types of political technologies are explained—1: A thing becomes a way of settling an issue in a particular community. And 2: A thing is inherently political. At least in their current form, LLMs are part of the second category. As Jürgen Geuter (tante) puts it in a response to an article published by Cory Doctorow: "Capable LLMs require a logic of dominance and of disregarding consent of the people producing the artifacts that are the raw material for the system. LLMs are based on extraction, exploitation and subjugation […]."

(How) Do we discuss that in the workshop?

___

links

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/29/south-korea-world-first-ai-regulation-laws

https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055423001454/type/journal_article

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/04/insider/how-the-times-assessed-maduro-photos.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/style/fake-exhibition-amsterdam-rijksmuseum-scli-intl

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4TXO4kQwSQ

Feedback from Doriane

Hey those are a few notes (for myself at the moment) but let's discuss all of those next monday!

in the intro you state "to obfuscate reality" as the main concerning thing about "the rise of AI content". i think this is def one aspect, but there are more danger to that: fake images have always existed and have a long history, yet there is something more specific about AI content. on the top of my head i'm thinking of things like

• zombification and slop - how AI content is fueling infinite feeds of things to consume where we genuinely don't care anymore if it's "true" or not but just want endless generation of empty dopamine-induced quick satisfaction
• another aspect is stealing and dis-forming other people's identity and sexualising them (mainly women), what is wrong isn't the "truthness" of such images - as it should be ok to purposefully sexualise yourself if that is your own will (anti-slutshaming) - but how AI (but also law and platform!) makes it easy for one person to steal and change the identity of another (?)
• it also impacted all practices of "visual craft" from drawing to graphic design, that are now seen irrelevant by some because they can "make the same with AI", in that case the impact is how it existence is in friction the cultural importance of intentional visual craft - and with the (loss of) valuable skills that goes with it)

it could be a very good exercise for you to list such things (and of course expend it depending on peoples stories) after the workshop! also i love this (the feeling, the doubt and creating solidarity and connection in them) - but try to do it, through note taking? through making lists (of feeling, of doubt) ? if you can look into some ref or an example for each of those in the news or in essays it would be amazing ;) if you want i could also forward you some essays or news on the topic.

Together, we will share moments of being unsure whether something was AI or not, our feelings about that, and how we can address this in our communities.

again i think that developing the skill of detecting when an image is AI or not is good for what you call "detecting the truth", but not only, it's also about detecting the "traps of attention and slop", or detecting "when someone is stealing someone else image", or when "the culture of visual craft is being attacked or not respected" - which all 3 aren't inherently linked to notions of truth (!)

for the images that people bring it could be good to ask them (of course why they picked that one - linked to a specific feeling ?), but also in which context did it existed and to document that too! (from insta, from tiktok, over vinted, in a DM, printed!) tracking the context in which people are most confronted to those also says something on how digital places are situated (for example there will be overlap of context, and some place - like the fediverse are i think less prone to that).

something else that matter for me to say, is that you are basically giving a collective therapy session over AI generated content (which i think is amazing! to be mostly computer-less and really focused on conversation), and I'm all for giving autonomy to individuals. However when approaching political global problems like that one they are 2 directions:

• individual gestures (being better at recognizing, and healing or understanding better our feelings)
• infrastructural actions (banning genAI over certain platform - like certain mastodon instance, or lobbying for a law that all social networks should have to respect, implementing genAI "waterwarks", etc)

i think for preparations, it would be good to research and list some "infrastructural actions" that have been taken already, either by small communities or by group lobbying for them in the law. My opinion is that both individual gestures and infrastructural actions goes together, but since your workshop focus on the first one, i still think it's good to do even a small research and have 2 or 3 initiatives that have been done in the other direction!

finally, i think that 2h is a bit optimistic. When we do our "gossip round" in class it usually take 1h ;) and personnally i wouldn't shorten it further. what about extending your workshop to 3h?

EchtNep?! @ Leeszaal West

Communication

Chat groups & Social Media

We posted the event on the XPUB instagram, and it was co-posted by Leeszaal. We also shared the image and text in different chat groups on Signal and WhatsApp.

Flyers

We left flyers in different locations in Rotterdam, one of them being Leeszaal itself.

Personal invitations

Daan invited friends (from outside of XPUB). This proved to be the most effective, because all of our participants (two 🥲) heard about it in this way.

Workshop

Ema showing one of the example images

Joe and Valentin during the break

Daan scanning the zine pages

Chatting

For about half an hour, we waited for people to arrive (one person who was planning to come ended up not to), and took the time to chat (mostly about dogs).

Introduction

We introduced us to each other, and asked the participants why they decided to come. This already started a very interesting gossips and discussion! We then shared our motivation and intention for the workshop.

Gossips

V: My aunt are working in a travelling agency (biggest in the country!) and had some new posters arrive—all were AI generated. I had just finished school in graphic design and it really annoyed me to see this development.

V: My sister has a friend who is writing a book and wants illustration. Instead of hiring an illustrator, they were just asking which LLM to use.

G: Albeda has posters around the city with three children on it and all three of them have eyes that are slightly too big. It is very uncanny!

D: I have not used Instagram for quite some time, and once I did again, I was taken aback my how bloated with AI it is now.

V: In Hungary, AI is used heavily in elections. There is only two parties, and the ruling party is heavily generating propaganda: Comic style, the opposition is changed to appear half European-faced, half Ukrainian-faced.

G: When I get AI generated content sent to me in a chat (of course, by boomers… always boomers), I'm asking myself: why can't they send me anything personal? It makes me feel irritated and annoyed.

V: I have an example of an image that I actually enjoyed: A disgustingly perfect image. Drawn by colored pencil. Like an animation, psychedelic image. It is a style that I really like, so I did feel interested and maybe a bit excited.

G: I don't want give in. Don't want to look for "good" reasons to use AI. I don't want to be part of it. Its scares me how easy things would become. I don't want to betray myself, so I stay away of it as far as possible. I WANT the struggle of coming up with concepts.

Discussing the images

image	context	what do we think about it? why is it confusing/alienating/exiting…?
	Taken from Vinted from a verified pro account	This image looks fairly okay.
	Taken from Vinted from the same account as above	This image looks a little too polished, and the plant is similar to the one in the first image, but not the same.
	Taken from Vinted from the same account as above	This image looks very fake—seems to be either heavily edited or generated.

Break!

Documentation: Making a zine

At the end of the workshop, we reserved one hour to make a collective zine. We cut out parts of the images we discussed, snippets of our notes, and wrote down a few anecdotes shared during the two hours before. We didn't have the time to scan everything and print the zine that day, but are planning to do that afterwards (also distributing the zine to the participants).

Slightly related: A book next to our table at Leeszaal

Debrief

Debriefing in the sun

What went well?

• First question round: Why did you decide to join the workshop. It already triggered very interesting answers and a lot of discussion.
• Before, we were worried: Did we choose a boring topic? Will it be lame? > It wasn't boring at all!
• Once you ask people why there are there, and what is interesting or important to them, the stay engaged.
• Game was fun!
• The fact that there were only 2 people gave a lot of room for extraspecial experiences - gossips.
• Lots of gossips! Without asking for it specifically, the setting allowed for story telling, sharing of anecdotes and experiences around peers and in family
• Sharing experiences and doubt really shapes the workshop. When somebody shares openly the vibes become more open cozy.

What could be improved?

• We lost some valuable time with chatting and having a somewhat long intro. (Might have been different if strangers had been there)
• Communication/promotion wasn’t great: Only two people came. Through chatgroups and social media, we are mostly reaching our peers, and not the intended audience of older (and younger) people.
• Communication and organization with Tante Nino quickly became high maintenance. We then choose a comfortable, low effort promotion, which was not very effective. A middle ground would have been good!

Interesting for future editions of the workshop

• Frame it differently? A workshop is interesting to people who are engaged (maybe studying already). Could we do a community get-together? A consulting hour? Shared story time?
• How can we deal in future with people who would be less critical then Guus and Valentin? Might be a lot harder to approach
• The fact Guus said everything she looks at shes questioning if everything is AI. Very aware eventhough she isnt that technical.
• How can we help people with that feeling / being so anxious or unsure?
• Maybe (like Doriane said) thinking less about if it is AI or not, but if it is harmful or not, how it changes the way we engage and make decisions
• But it is getting harder and harder. What if there’s a moment where we cannot recognize it. Lets not overlook the fact that its important to keep it apart from each other.

Class debrief

• Possible other editions: pub quiz, group therapy
• Visual communication does not have to be pretty or artsy, but target the intended audience (older people, or kids)

Grapevine: Glossary entries

backronym

occurs in: the etymology and usage section of the Wikipedia article about Rapping

Backronym is a blend of “back” and “acronym”. It describes an existing word that is treated as an acronym and expands its letters into the words of a phrase, even though this phrase does not represent the etymology of the word.

The claim that rap is an acronym for Rhythm And Poetry is a backronym. Similarly, Extraterrestrial Publishing is a backronym for XPUB!

brittle

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 8

Brittle is a synonym for fragile. It is often used to describe something—a material object such as a vase or a tooth, or a concept such as friendship or language—(being on the verge of) breaking, and doing so without prior stress or stretching. In my mind it therefore has a mostly negative connotation.

Interestingly, the authors of Keywords for Radicals use the word in a positive way. Language is especially brittle in “periods of change” (cf. Introduction to Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams), and this is an opportunity to reflect on understandings and contradictions of words, and to mold language into new and possibly better forms.

For context, this is the full quote by Williams from the introduction to Keywords:

When a particular history is completed, we can all be clear and relaxed about it. But literature, aesthetic, representative, empirical, unconscious, liberal: these and many other words which seem to me to raise problems will, in the right circles, seem mere transparencies, their correct use a matter only of education. Or class, democracy, equality, evolution, materialism: these we know we must argue about, but we can assign particular uses to sects, and call all sects but our own sectarian. Language depends, it can be said, on this kind of confidence, but in any major language, and especially in periods of change, a necessary confidence and concern for clarity can quickly become brittle, if the questions involved are not faced.

chatter

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 9

Chatter is mentioned in Keywords for Radicals as a form of horizontal communication among workers (manifested in countless calls or in a never-ending stream of messages). The authors state that the service-orientated economy of today revolves mostly—if not entirely (see Paolo Virno)—around communicative work. Later in the text (p. 20), they use chatter in a sense more close to a definition by the book: talking idly and on trivial subjects. Can then be concluded that modern labour is babbling and therefore is obsolete?:)

Chatter can include gossip.

hip

occurs in: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, p. 5

What is hip is constantly changing. Sometimes it might be hip to say hip, and sometimes not.

Jo Freeman claims that “being 'hip'”, but “not being too 'hip'” is one criterion of many to effectively participate in political movement groups.

The term was recorded already in the early 1900s, and by the 1940s, it had become a common slang word in the American jazz scene. The etymology of the word is unknown. Theories include that it is derived from the west African Wolof language word hepicat, which means “one who has his eyes open”; or that the origins go back to—socially influential, or hip—opium users that would lay on their hips while smoking. Both claims sound far-fetched, but entertaining still.

You went an' found you a guru
In an effort to find you a new you
And maybe even raise your conscious level
While you're striving to find the right road
There's one thing you should know
What's hip today, might become passé

(Tower Of Power, 1973)

The true wisdom of toilet quotes. From the leftmost toilet in the restroom of the fourth floor of the Wijnhaven building. "In the post-Fordist classroom, the reflexive impotence of the students is mirrored by reflexive impotence of the teachers. De Angelis and Harvie report that 'practices and requirements of standardisation and surveillance obviously impose a huge burden of work on academics and few are happy about it. There have been a number of responses. Managers have frequently suggested there is no alternative (TINA) and have perhaps suggested that what we need to do is 'work smarter, not harder'. This seductive slogan, introduced to dampen staff resistance to further change which in their (our) experience has a devastating effects on working conditions, attempts to couple the need for 'change' (restructuring and innovation) in order to meet the budget pressure and increase 'competitiveness', with staff's resistance not only to worsening of their condition of work, but also to the educational and academic 'meaninglessness' of the 'changes'.' The invocation of the idea that 'there is no alternative', and the recommendation to 'work smarter, not harder', shows how capitalist realism sets the tone for labor disputes in post- Fordism. Ending the inspection regime, one lecturer sardonically remarked, seems more impossible than ending slavery was. Such fatalism can only be challenged if a new (collective) political subject emerges." (Fisher, 2009)

References

Freeman, J. (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The Second Wave vol. 2, no. 1. Available at: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.

polysemic

occurs in: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, p. 18

The term polysemy comes from Ancient Greek: polys meaning “many” and sema meaning “sign”. An expression, for example a word, a phrase or a symbol, of polysemic character has several distinct but related meanings, and is therefore ambiguous.

In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams states that “[…] questions are not only about meaning; in most cases, inevitably, they are about meanings.” He goes on to explain that when writing a dictionary entry, the meaning of a word is usually strongly tied to a specific place and time. However, with words, especially those that describe ideas or values, we usually encounter a complexity of meanings that includes changes over time. In this sense, most words are polysemic and difficulties arise when one tries to squeeze them into a single definition.

Ironically, the first thing I did for this glossary entry was to write a definition. When I first read the word polysemic, I did not know the meaning and had to look up a definition myself to make sense of it. Looking back now—I could have translated it had I given it little more thought.

rap

occurs in: The Tyranny of Structurelessness, p. 1 (“structureless rap group”)

Del the Funky Homosapien similarly states that rap was used to refer to talking in a stylistic manner in the early 1970s: "I was born in '72 ... back then what rapping meant, basically, was you trying to convey something—you're trying to convince somebody. That's what rapping is, it's in the way you talk."

[lazily copied from Wikipedia: Rapping]