User:Barbs/SI28

WRITING MACHINES - PROTOCOLS - FEEDBACK

LINKS

⟢ Writing_Machines–Protocols–Feedback
⟢ SI28 Reader
⟢ Writing Machine Directory
⟢ Radio Shows
⟢ Methods
⟢ Prototyping

Week 0

Pads

⟢ 16-09-2025 - Prototyping

Radio Worm visit

On Monday we visited Radio Worm for the first time. The atmosphere in that place goes craaaazy I love it. I feel a little intimidated by the technical side of things, I have never done much with audio technology, but there's a first time for everything!

Prototyping

Ahhhh I'm so excited about all the influences that Manetta named during the intro to prototyping class. I've been very interested in technofeminism and permacomputing for a while now and can't wait to put it more into practice.

After logging in to the server and naming it Sergio, under Manetta's guidance we used the Babblebash writing machine, sending words to a printer hooked up to the server. I was assigned the role of the reader in the first round and it was fun thinking through the machine's limitations and how to work around/with them.

Further reading

• A Brief Introduction to Decolonial Computing - Syed Mustafa Ali
• A Feminist Server Manifesto

Methods

We discussed personal annotation and notetaking practices and the value of collective annotating. How does the individual notetaking change/reading of the text change when annotating with a group? It made me think about my practice in making moodboards and gathering references for concept art which evolved a lot over time. I find a lot of value in starting with an isolated PureRef file and gathering ideas/inspiration in a vaccuum before opening it up to collective work. That way I can get the most out of my own mental library before opening myself up to influence from others. Not that that is necessarily a negative thing, but if you gather inspiration as a collective from the start some ideas might get lost before even getting the chance to form. And it's fun to then switch between collective work and individual work a few times and see what happens as a work takes more shape!

I also spoke to Marloes about permacomputing as Manetta mentioned she knows a lot about the topic. She sent me some great resources on Zulip later!

Further reading

• Permacomputing wiki
• Permacomputing - Ville Matias Heikkilä
• Permacomputing - Marloes de Valk, Ville Matias Heikkilä
• Permacomputing Aesthetics - Aymeric Mansoux, Brendan Howell, Dušan Barok, and Ville-Matias Heikkilä
• Stock Taking Sense - Varia

Week 1

Pads

⟢ 22-09-2025 - Radio show 1
⟢ 23-09-2025 - Prototyping
⟢ 24-09-2025 - Class meeting

Prototyping

Youjung and I's writing machine!

We learned about state machines and working in Graphviz. I already had some familiarity with state machines through game dev and it was fun to apply them in a completely different context (visualizing writing machines). I made two that can write my name, which I will add here later as they're on the server which I can't access remotely yet. Youjung and I made one together which is inspired by the telephone game, but with headphones (it was a challenge YouTubers used to do back in the day haha). In the process we recommended each other some music!!

Youjung's music recs

• AAA - Sunset Rollercoaster
• Vanilla - Sunset Rollercoaster
• Barbara - Enzo Carella

Further reading

• Graphviz documentation
• Deterministic finite automaton
• Languages and Automata - Alexandra Silva

Week 2

Pads

⟢ Week 1 - Radio Show 2 group meetings
⟢ 29-09-2025 - Radio show class notes
⟢ 01-10-2025 - Class meeting
⟢ 01-10-2025 - Reading annotation w/ Sibyl
⟢ 01-10-2025 - Methods

Hosting my first radio show

Daan, Kiki, Tommi and me at Radio Worm

You can find the full recap of the show on the radio wiki page!

This radio show was prompted by Tommi sharing with me that he might get the opportunity to interview the founder of the internet archive, Brewster Kahle, and his wife Mary Austin at the Internet Archive Europe that week. It immediately caught my interest and Daan and Kiki soon joined us! We sadly couldn't all join in on the interview and Tommi had to do it alone, he did a great job regardless.
It was fun to annotate the interview recording after and edit it down to what I found the most interesting to share on the radio show. I also immediately thought of connections to current games industry publishing practices and my favorite speech by Ursula K. Le Guin. I didn't fully agree with Kahle's opinion that capitalism is not inherently the problem when it comes to barring us from open knowledge & publishing practices. I agree more with Le Guin's point of view that profit incentives are inherently against the practice of artmaking and publishing. There is an interesting discussion to be had there I think.

The radio show itself went really well aside from some technical issues, I'm happy with the result. I thought I would be a lot more nervous, but it wasn't as bad as expected! Afterwards I was extremely exhausted though :')

Some ideas that I didn't get to explore here but want to in the future:

• Jeff Vandermeer's Area X is a writing machine
• Ted Nelson's Xanaduspace, alternatives to writing documents digitally, literal writing machines, tool shapes practice shapes tool

Methods

Personal Reader

The special issues topics are predetermined, so the personal reader is the place for our individual obsessions and research! A corner of the wiki where we can keep track of everything we're reading/watching/playing/etc.

In the first 2 trimesters of the year we collect everything that crosses our path. In the 3rd trimester we will sift through it and see what the main topics are that fascinate us. This is helpful for the start of the 2nd year.

Homework: Start a personal reader on the wiki! Add 1 text (can be tiny) to get you started. Something that you personally resonate with and want to revisit later.

Annotation Practices

Be kind to your future self, record author's name, title, location of publication so you can easily find it again. Be precise: Tempting to have lots of quotes. Short & to the point > better scanning. Use the wiki to sediment the key notes.

How to annotate

• 1st reading:
  • Highlight, underline, scribble in margins. Anything goes. Find a way that allows you to find your notes quickly again.
  • Locate key vocab that you're unfamiliar with. (2nd trimester glossary development)
• 2nd reading:
  • Summary (neutral, overview of themes & topics, assess if its valuable.)
  • Evaluation (Analyze source & highlight strengths & weaknesses to YOU. Agreements & disagreements.)
  • Interpretation (Closer reading, engage deeper themes, implications. Can be analytical or freestyle! Draw parallels with other texts, or connect to own research. Helps understand how you relate to the text.)

Further reading:

• Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective - Donna Haraway
• Another Science is Possible - Isabelle Stengers

On Friday I created my personal reader!

Week 3

Pads

⟢ 06-10-2025 - Radio show 3
⟢ 07-10-2025 - Prototyping
⟢ 09-10-2025 - Class meeting

Radio Broadcast #3 & Steve's afternoon class

Steve's discussion about the "radio ghost" character being a sort of patchwork Frankenstein's monster of split together sounds and media, struggling to communicate with us really resonated with me. I tend to gravitate towards characters in media that have an "otherness" about them, and they constantly appear in my own work too.

He also showed us more examples of the cut-up technique used in different mediums besides text and I started asking myself if it's possible to cut up a game. It reminded me of the term asset flip games, which is usually used derogatorilly, but over time has spawned some very interesting games. Cosmo D's games also came to mind.

Prototyping

We spent the day learning about, playing and creating text adventure games! While interactive narratives have been at the forefront of my gamemaking practice, I've never made a text-input adventure game before. The Hobbit gave us a guide along with it, but I'm more intrigued by the blank open typing space presented to the player. You can type anything but the program only responds to certain inputs. What does the machine accept as your language? You have to speak in a specific tongue that the machine will understand. Map out the parameters and learn to speak its language. How does this rewrite your reality? Thinking about Arrival/Story of your Life by Ted Chiang (need to add that to my personal reader)

Luca, Ema and I played around with Thijs's python script. One of our additions was the command "say". If you spoke in a room where no other character was located, the script would echo your input back to you:
return f"You hear a long echo: {inp} {inp} {inp}..."
I let my partner play the text adventure in the evening and this part surprised him the most. Maybe useful to come back to later.

Interests

Although next week is our proper "reflection/feedback" week, I already spent this week's annotation station day going through all my class notes and writing down all the things that have resonated with me the most so far. A brief overview:
text adventure games | language constraints | linguistic relativity | choose your own adventure books | passivity/activity of player in narrative | games as poetry | other ways of interacting with the interface besides assumed design | (mis)communication | encountering the "other", more-than-human, patchwork beings, Frankenstein's monster | making oddkin | rewriting reality | nervous systems, soft machines, body language | utopian alternatives to GenAI

In the afternoon I spoke with Steve and he gave me some fun personal "assignments":

• Write down my analysis of Star Trek's Data (aka utopian sci-fi AI characters) vs Generative AI models. Is this fantasy of Data a thing of the past, or a more important than ever alternative to our current hypercapitalist AI paradigms? Who is the Data of the 2020s and beyond?
• Research the hypertext fiction Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson.
• Annotate one of my readings without words, only visuals.

Week 4

Pads

⟢ 15-10-2025 - Class meeting

Eliza doesn't like me asking her questions in return.

Eliza

The mother of all chatbots.

I got sick after Tuesday so sadly had to miss out on Wednesday's methods class. I spent the rest of the week coding a text adventure in Python together with Robin!

Autumn Break

Pads

⟢ 20-10-2025 - Design team meeting

SI28 visual design

Radio Worm asked us to deliver images for an Instagram post on Monday 27/10, so even though we have the week off, we met with the design team (Kiki, Youjung and Sibyl) to discuss what we need to do. More to come~

Women as Technology (Design Museum Den Bosch visit)

Coming soon!