Programm(ed/ing) Culture

An off-hand hands-on, hands-off, and on end journey into labs, code, gender and autonomy.

Club membership and special discounts

• First year NM: mandatory
• Second year NM: optional
• All years LB: optional

11:00 - 14: 00 25/10 Deriving the Equilibrium

What?

Audrey will talk about her work as an artist, in DIY groups/collectives, the work that pays the rent, and how these all fit (or not) together.

She will focus on the Genderchangers network (FLOSS, women, tech) of which she is a part of, and look at the ideological and practical tensions of the DIY culture in such a context. Is it possible for a group to exist completely without overhead, to exist almost completely outside the economic system and its dependencies? What difficulties does that entail? And what's gender got to do with it?

Insert discussion here.

Who?

Audrey Samson is a Rotterdam based media designer, artist and researcher. She manages the Digital Art Lab at the CKC culture/arts center (Zoetermeer, NL). She teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, NL). She completed a BFA Major in Design Art from Concordia University in 2002 (Montreal, Canada), and a M.A. in Media Design from the Piet Zwart Institute in 2007 (Rotterdam, NL). Her research/practice focuses on: rethinking interfaces, the use of online media for mourning purposes, the concept of finality in reproducible media, women's relationship to technology, the affordances of the internet medium in telematic performance, working from the products of planned obsolescence, and re-assembling objects to endow them with new functionalities.

Audrey is co-founder of the Roger 10-4 project together with Sabrina Basten. She is part of the Genderchangers (gender & FLOSS) network and the Aether9 telematic performance group. More info on her endeavors can be found at http://www.ideacritik.com.

15:00 - 18:00 25/10 I like tight pants and mathematics: queering up programming culture

What?

Programming as a practice is not just about loops and variables. Programming has been conceived and continues to be practiced in a cultural context: programming culture.

To get into programming, one firstly has to come to terms with the stereotypes held about programming as an introverted, male, “geeky” endavour. Secondly, one has to deal with the image of the programmer that is held within the programmer community itself, which is less derogative but has its own biases towards gender and class. Finally, there’s the reality of people actually practicing programming, which is more varied then any stereotype but still shows for example a gender makeup that is hugely imbalanced towards men.

To give programming a productive place in your arts and design practice, you need to get to know programming culture, and, ideally, take part in (re)shaping it. To feel comfortable with being a programmer, you might want to change what a programmer is. With queering up I am not referring to homosexuality, but rather to an approach that undermines existing masculine, heteronormative ideals. An historical example would be Glam rock’s appropriation of the traditional ‘earnest’ masculine rock musician into the polysexual identity mirror palace created by musicians as David Bowie and Freddy Mercury.

Within the workshop I will introduce my design practice and how I work with and within programming; then we will have a short introduction into programming culture and it’s main tropes, and finally we will do a short exercise to kickstart our reimagination of programming, and of ourselves as programmers.

Who?

From 2002 until 2006, Eric Schrijver studied autonomous interdisciplinary art at the Interfaculty Image and Sound of the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Up until 2007 Eric also studied at Leiden University, where he followed courses in literature, linguistics and epistemology. Since then he has been working as a visual and performance artist based in The Hague. Eric has a studio in artist initiative DCR and he has been funded by Stroom. His work has been shown at group shows, among others at Van Kranendonk Gallery. He has received commissions by Kunstgebouw, Onomatopee, Zeebelt and Danslab. The latter leading to an intensive collaboration with Portugese choreographer Bruno Listopad; both in his performance installations in gallery spaces and in his recent theatre piece ‘Spectatorship’.

Eric teaches Interactive Media Design at the department of Graphic Design of the Royal Academy of Art. He seeks to make design for the web more accessible to visual professionals, and investigates the role which open source tools can play in design education and practice.

http://ericschrijver.nl