User:C3/XPUB2/Project proposal 3

1. What do you want to make?

A series of cheatsheets and activities/workshops that revolve around learning and annotating in the forms of cheatsheets.

I want to use cheatsheet-making as a way to document and share learning processes.

By both making them and by organizing activities to make them, my goal is not just distributing methods and tactics that deal with learning, but encouraging others to annotate their own observations themselves (in this case, in the form of cheatsheets).

The writing process will be guided by prompts/puzzles/drawings that aim in setting up annotating exercises as if trying to explain/share something to the participants best friend, to their grandma, to their past self, excercising writing with the intent of knowledge sharing.

The cheatsheets/activities will be playing around with different tones (playful, personal, mock, dry etc.) and formats (small puzzles, drawings, annotating, mapping) to aid shuffling and taking up unsual roles/scenarios.

2. How do you plan to make it?

▪ In the beginning I plan to select some of the notes that I took last year and make them into a cheatsheet format.

▪ Afterwards, I will start to distribute them around the 1st and 2nd years (as most of them come from the situated context of the course).

▪ Working on invites to the activities that I have in mind trying to reach out to both amateurs, beginners and curious people.

▪ I will start using the cheatsheets I made as part of some activities that I have in mind (lost in terminal workshop w/ XPUB2, maintenance activities in the XML w/XPUB1 & XPUB2...).

▪ Based on the success/failures and observations gathered from the previous points take some time to develop prompts/protocols for taking notes with others.

▪ ...

3. What is your timetable?

Nov/Dec:

▪ process some of my notes into prototype cheatsheets examples that I want to share (wiki lurking, lost in the terminal...)

▪ interview people around what is a cheatsheet for them and what is their view at cheating. I generally use and like technical cheatsheets, but I think they are a broad format that can be applied to many things.

My aim is to explore more the format rather than focusing on a specific content that I am used to see.

Dec:

▪ prototype and try out at least two activities with both XPUB2 and XPUB1, start looking for other spaces to hold some tryouts with non-xpub people too. (Varia, Klankschool maybe)

Jan/Feb:

Two activites or more involving a place outside of XPUB

Feb/March:

▪ If people decide they want to leave me or share with me some of the cheatsheet made, I would like to start thinking of a way these could be published and a way to navigate across them. (online? physical? both?)

4. Why do you want to make it?

Cheatsheets are compact and lightweight, easy to jump in, they are interesting to me because they are a conduit to transfer "knowledge"(clarify knowledge), they travel a lot trough time as well because they constantly get duplicated, rewritten, screenshotted, redesigned etc.

Cheatsheets can be documentation aimed at people who are still learn something, they are mented to be used more frequently rather than encyclopedias.

Yes, they are surface level, but I feel like they are connected to action.

During my first year I learned a lot of things that I wanted to engage with for a long time (mostly bash and python scripting and the general programming concepts). It was a long repetitive and iterative process and it was, for the most part, solitary...

My approach to programming is creating small tools depending on needs/ideas, sometimes with some (diaristic) elements embedded in them (for example, I am interested in using the scripts to talk to the people to you them across time, making documentation more playful, having these scripts talk about themself in a way [through me writing to a potential person that could use them]), an approach that I feel people loose over time after the 100th time you do something, what is interesting for me is finding new ways in which the repetition does not lead to dread or boredom but still remains playful.

I expressed an interest in distributing and sharing knowledge, at the start of last year I envisioned the server as a potential social space for collective reading and writing and sharing or tools, but this did not turn out to be the case due to everyone's set of diverse interests, in short, it is not a hangout space, it was mostly a functional resource for the special issue projects.

So, while still dealing with technology, I want to try take a step back from computer-only work and try to integrate physical elements in a social way.

The goal is not only to have these cheatsheets consumed but also inspire others to make their own and potentially also make them for others, hoping this sort of system can propagate like a virus.

5. Who can help you and how?

As I have not done workshops before other than a frontal skillshare series of meetings on prototyping methods with Touchdesigner, any tips, sharing of experiences in hosting a workshop and so on is appreciated.

Pippin bar, would love to talk more about his way of documenting his projects as I see some overlaps with mine, what I think is great about his projects is that he embeds it in his github repositories.

I also feel like talking with Aymeric would be helpful, but at the same time I still don't know about what.

6. Relation to previous practice

SI26 3DS zine

#repurposing #old-devices #tactics #strategies #media-archeology #occupy

During SI26 we explored web-making as a craft (by working with html and css) and media archeology (by working with HPGL, Postscript, pen plotters and dot matrix printers). Together with Charlie, Tessa and Eleni we overlapped these two topics for the SI project by focusing on a forgotten device from our past, the nintendo 3DS. We made a work on it by taking advantage of some outdated web-standards to show/hide information from other devices, making our publication/puzzle/game solvable only through the use of the nintendo 3DS (important: we did not rely on emulation for the realization of the project, we just used simple HTML, CSS and vanilla JS). It was a project about working within the limits, by doing so we wanted to show people that the devices that are catching dust at the corners of our lives are potentially interesting to engage with. The making of this work was a whole learning process. We had to engage with both hardware and software, we went trough a lot of trail and error that culminated in a collection of strategies we wrote to make what we had in mind visible on the 3ds, but not on any other device.

Looking back I think that the most important part was the process of discovering and making of these strategies. We partially documented it on the wiki, but I think that I wanted to show and share our small actions that lead us to make this project, something that got lost in the final project.

In relation to my current interests, the sharing and distribution questions remained opened from that time, I see the cheatsheets as a potential method that I want to use to try to tackle this two unresolved topics.

SI27 Terms of servers

#read-write-execute #servers #terminal #distribution

Terms Of Servers is a terminal based publication that runs on our communal sandbox server (cerealbox). Working with the server for the first year of our studies evoked questions of its materiality and reliability. Together with Kim we wrote python script that cycles through a text we wrote together, over time, as a way to reflect on these two topics. Each section of the text was intermitted by some live commands that we used to ask simple questions back at the server, showing and commenting on the results (lshw, ping, uptime).

What we tried to do with our project was to include an audience into the dialogue we had ourselves and the way we used simple commands to ask some of the questions we had to tools we used, retrieving information and using it to continue our discussion. I feel this is the part that relates to what I've been interested lately, shining a light on the process of putting something together, in this case, the text we wrote.

What we did not have time to solve is the way we could distribute our work, as the terminal is our main mode of interfacing with the server, we were wondering what would it mean to occupy this technical space to distribute our writing work (that is not just text it included some live commands).

Tic-tac-toernament

Tic-tac-toernament is a (unfinished) project I started last year that deals with computer programming, game making, documentation and device exploration.

it is a text based (terminal) 1v1 tic tac toe program that prints the board, the moves, a generated commentary and a leaderboard on either a dot matrix printer or a receipt printer. I was inspired by the famous work of art PenSnake by Joseph, I wanted to make a game with the dot matrix and receipt printers that could then be used for a printer/plotter gaming exhibition, to explore "what is a game" through the repurpose of old technology.

What was interesting to me when I tought of this work was the possibility to print the history of the matches, playing with some simple text formatting, collecting usernames, commentary and messages left on the scoreboard I wanted to document/record the whole process of playing together, rather than thinking of a single big scoreboard that collects only who won in the end.

Thinking about my current direction, I feel this example is interesting to highlight for its playful tone and its take on documentation.

Overall, I see the cheatsheets as being an evolution/annex of my previous works, into a direction of sharing and distribution of the processes that lie behind these and all of my projects. Most of these started as something that was not clear and that required observation to learn how to make possible, I feel like this method is something that is not tied to something in particular and my aim of sharing mine is to also shine light on how others might recognize their inner way of learning and listen to it by trying to bring it out.

Every time I dealt with something new during my first year I instictively started to note down the steps it took me to become accostumed with it.

Paying more attention to this learning side and trying to capture it is my intention during this second year and is what I'd like to share as a methodology.

7. Relation to a larger context

howspot by Doriane Timmermans

"The Skill Issue, or: How I Learned I Could Learn, and So Can You!" (video essay)

Speedrunning

If you can cheat at something it means that there are some rules in place, and that there is a "proper" preferred way to do something. By cheating at those rules you can show that alternatives exist.

This reminds me of the online speedrunning community, various groups of people that gather around ways of completing a game as fast as possible.

This is made possible by discovering and sharing tactics and glitches that allow to jump around entire sections of a videogame (or skipping them entirely), breaking the overall programmed linearity/order/structure of the software (ex. by accomplishing some actions before the time they are supposed to happen).

Generally speaking this is a form of competition, ultimately people aim to break or keep their own records, but what I find interesting is that this process revolves around cheating and sharing cheats(methods) for others to see and replicate.

User:Imre/Creation Relations Workshop

Imre (current XPUB2) had a workshop during the prototyping sessions where we all explored the relationship between creation (object, etc.) and creator by writing letters from the point of view of either these two figures, I have to say that it was very compelling and inspirational to lean more towards social activities with physical objects.

8. References/bibliography

wizard zines

analognowhere comics

Simple Sabotage

Advice well taken, Dasha Ilina

..., (2020), Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures

?. Xtra: Questions

▪ At this stage I wonder how should I approach external people, was thinking about the who can help you and why section. Should I reach out even tough I don't know how exactly the connection with someone might be helpful? Should I try to stat a conversation in a sort of "pitch sense"?

▪ What is the difference between relation to larger context and references/bibliography?

▪ I imagine there are limited word counts for both proposals, are there?