User:Robin

(would like) to do's

Struggle

(would like) to do before end SI28

- edit personal reader, add notes from notebook, relate to course material. - reflect on new laptop set-up + connecting to Null's server ( learned about networking, internet protocols, etc. )
- reflect on open-source font library on Null's server ( learned about open licenses and practices )
- reflect on web-to-print techniques
- reflect on html / css course w/ class :)
- maybe list of tools / sources worth exploring..

wishes during holiday
- web-to-print set-up for freelance work
- learn python
- re-visit course material
- font encoding w/ fontforge (maybe for freelance assignment)

- lookup applictions for summer residencies

SI28

SIL Language Technologies, the organization behind the SIL Open Font License

[ -> research documentation ]

After setting-up my new laptop, I contacted my friend to connect to his self-hosted server, which I refer to as the Big Black Box. Then, got to re-downloading all the fonts I had lost. I wanted to make it into a little Open Font Library on the Big Black Box so everyone from their art collective with access to it could make use of it. Then, I wanted to include an overview .txt file for those less familiar with type-related stuff, which got me interested in adding a small guide to open licenses and practices (as I am learning about them myself).

While looking into different types of open licenses, I came across the Open Font License website. The SIL Open Font License, developed by SIL Language Technologies, turns out to be a license, dedicated to the 'open development of the languages of the world', and is an American Evangelical Christian Missionary non-profit organization. That info had an uncomfortable flavor to it... Why is open language development promoted by an organization that in their mission statement describes their objective is to "Bring the word of God to all the languages in the world?" And not even as a side-note, but as the central aim to their efforts!

From there, I digressed from the Open Font Library description and started diving deeper into the politics of language technologies. My discomfort lies in the huge contrast between the ideals of Open Source Communities that I started learning about and the messaging of this organization, especially how that would influence technological development and inform visibility of language diversity. Writing for the Open Font Library, I highlighted the work of Bye Bye Binary in queer language encoding. Reading about this, I felt like a huge step was being made in the visibility of post-binary language, because they made it possible to use Open Type features to write gender-inclusive language with fonts that support it! Made possible by their Queer Unicode Initiative. Queer language encoding means that gender-inclusive ways of writing are now included in the systems of Standards that make it possible to write digitally in the first place!

I was not at all unaware of the colonial/racial charges within the development of language technologies. Still, instinctively, this felt like a huge win for language inclusivity to me. Or at least for a partial recognition for ways of expression through language that fall outside established use. That, combined with Bye Bye Binaries dedication to open-source practices, that prioritize collective ownership and creation over claiming 'intellectual property' over their typefaces, make their efforts a strong anti-colonial / queer-feminist practice. And they are not foreign to a critique of colonial implications in the technologies, licenses and practices that type development depend on. There is no such thing as operating completely independently of these forces. Still, given how heavily open-source typefaces depend on the SIL Open Font License, made want to know more to what extend they still shape language technology development today. So I did some digging into the organization behind the SIL Language Technology.

Zine idea for Extraterrestrial Publishing Fair

A few times throughout the trimester, I was reminded of Butler's Essay 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination'. Where they use the figure-of-speech of a 'copy without an original' to talk about their unease with the category of lesbian as something that should supposedly be equal to the 'I' it encloses. They proceed to deconstruct the binary notion of gender identity / sexuality, where the 'gay' category is supposedly understood as a derivative of a 'straight' original. I have to confess I could relate a lot to their explanation of their unease in this understanding. I think I unknowingly held this notion for a long time. Coming to terms with my own gender-expression has involved coming to terms with the idea that I'm not trying 'pretending' to be a gender that I am not, but I didn't really know how to express this in words.

This essay has helped me a lot in that regard. Especially when they talk about drag, not as imitating, performing, a pre-existing gender, but rather, as exposing the fact that all gender is a performance. One that only gains the understanding of a fixed identity through it's repetition.

That the semblance of fixity relies on constant repetition, especially since they relay it in this speech of a 'copy without original', made me wonder about the role of media in this construction. I imagined a copy machine that did not make use of an 'original' to create it's copies from. How would the process of making a publication look if you tried to only make copies from other copies. Every individual zine would be unidentical from all others. That would go against the intended use of the medium of a copy machine, at least partially. But hopefully would make a meaningful point about how media re-produce an idea of identicality where in reality none exists.

Bonus: If I'd use cut-ups from the essay, could that be the content and a techno-text at the same time? This figure-of-speech could also explain how the publication was made, so reflecting on it's own material condition. Wooooowww...

This page will hold G(l)oss(ary)ips shared during the XPUB 2026 SI29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances.

Single-A

In the game industry, the more “A”s in the labelling of a game, the greater the size of the company, corporation, or conglomerate behind it.

“AA” or Double-A games are mid-market video games that typically have some type of professional development though typically outside of the large first-party studios of the major developers; these may be from larger teams of indie developers or from smaller non-indie studios. Double-A studios tend to range from 50 to 100 people in size.

“AAA”, also known as triple-A, is a term used to classify video games produced or distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, which typically have higher development and marketing budgets than other tiers of games.

Starting in 2020 leading up to the launch of the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, two studios started using the term AAAA (Quadruple-A) to describe upcoming games in development.

Let us foster an economy and an environment in which game development is single-A: both top quality and completely independent!

This entry was inspired by Tommi’s “mock” interview to Barbs.

Accelerationism

Speeding up the spreading of gossip, especially if venomous, to accelerate the collapse of hierarchical, unequal, unfair systems.

Negative connotations of gossiping can be weaponized against the very information infrastructure that discriminates it.

Aesthetics (in a political sense)

"The Aesthetic is anything that trains the imagination for epistemological performance." the distinction between globalization as instrumental knowledge systems and the one in the margins, the Subaltern, and goes further to say that established systems of knowledge, affected by globalization, can only exist in the abstract, in quantifiable data. aesthetic education as an embodied practice. "A deeper cultivation of the Imagination, reading, writing, understanding, dwelling in otherness, performing knowledge." And developing a capacity to deal with double-binds, tensions between ethical demands.> Gayatri Spivak

"The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable. The one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history." >

'Drag is what reveals all gender to be a copy of which there is no original.' Rather than being the imitation of a gender that supposedly properly belongs to some other group, it reveals that gender expressions were never fixed or 'naturally' belonging to a certain group in the first place. It's a sort of re-shuffling of the meanings of these categories that reveals the reproduction of that dominant story to be one copy among many. > Judith Butler

"The Distribution of the Sensible" how regimes of power influence what is seeable and hearable to it's subjects, who gets to speak and be heard, and how this defines what we can know about the world, which informs how we move through it, act in it. > Jaques Ranciere (he stays very abstract in his thinking though, quite removed from real-world experience)

Ambiguous

Not having one particular meaning but a more different sometiomes opposing understanding of a word, happening, situation. A synonym would be something like debatable, or ambivalent, or undecided. Having different feelings about it, sentences that start as: on one hand, … on the other hand. or on one side… on the otherside. Some keywords associated with: altough, however, on one hand, undecided, ambivalent debatable, confusing.

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!

Brewing

Allowing processes to take their time, to ferment, to transform.

Brewing is a kind of metamorphosis that imposes a dilated timeline, a soft and slow timeframe. While gossiping, we don’t want to push and pressure change, we make the space and the time for ideas to brew and blossom, in their own time.

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

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.

Cancel

How does the definition of “cancelling” and “deleting” change in a distributed, decentralized, nonhierarchical knowledge infrastructure?

For example, in peer-to-peer protocols the most that can be done is requesting to delete something from a node/peer, but there can be no way to ensure that any cached version of that something is still stored.

Especially to counter authoritarianism, this becomes a powerful resistance to censorship, as it becomes virtually impossible to erase all sources of some specific information.

In VCSs like git, removing something from a repository means adding a removal operation, yet the file is (almost) irreversibly engraved in the history of the repository, thus impossible to erase.

Capillary

Human anatomy can be a great inspiration for portraying and doing gossip. Capillaries are the equivalent of gossip, but for blood circulation. They bring Oxygen to the most peripheral parts of vertebrates’ bodies, and they allow it to circulate in a hierarchical yet natural way (there are bigger vessels such as arteries and veins, but they are not necessarily most important?). >>>Bigger arterieas and veins are just as important as capillaries because they are one system for transporintg important nutritions and metabolic byproducts there for they have central role in metabolic processes.

gossip : information = capillaries : blood vessels

Capillaries are the very thin tunnels of the body (not only vertebrates but also some worms already have closed circulation system) so I would say that the analogy would be a bit more accurate if the capillaries are the channels where the gossip spreads and the gossip itself is the blood that circulates within.

Capilarries more over are very interesting anatomically because the are very thin tubes (only one layer of cells) which only allows certain 'ingerdients' of the blood to pass through. In this sense and maybe relate back to your analogy capillaries also function as filters so they keep parts of the blood (or gossip) inside the circulation and they leak certain parts outside into the extracellular space.

BTW love this illustration, its just a bit weird that it seems to be upside down.. :)

Capricious

caprious

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.

Cipayo

Early Meanings

Coming from the persian word Sipâhi, it meant a soldier. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sipâhi where elite members with land possesions, tracing parallels to the figure of the knight in Feudal Europe.

Colonial Meanings

In occupied India under British Rule, the word Sepoy was firstly employed to Muslim or Hindu soldiers without formal training. in the 18th century, the word settled its meaning to determine indigenous soldiers employed by the occupying force. It is estimated that nearly 96% of British Easy India Company was composed by Sepoys. There were also Sepoys employed by French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial forces.

Contemporary Meanings

In the aftermath of the kidnapping of Venezuelan Ex-president Nicolás Maduro, it was reported in several media channels that the Venezuelan Diaspora was celebrating the fall of the dictator and thanking the invasion of their own country by US Army forces. Certain comments on social media channels called this portion of the population Cipayos.

In a latin american neo-colonial context, Cipayo took the connotation of someone whose political inclinations support foreign countries in detriment of national interests. It is used as a derrogatory term - although not ethnical - in response to latinos supporting US-american and European imperialist policies. It is a synonym of "boot-licker", or "vendepatria" (country-seller, in spanish).

Curiosity

In methods class, we conducted interviews with each other in other in groups of three.

In the interviews Sibyl, Youjung and Lea did, the term curiosity came up a lot. While all three of us are struggling to see a perspective of scale in our practice, we are very motivated to stay curious. Having many different influences—that can be personal topics of interests, or other people and communities—is crucial to "growing" our practices and stay engaged in what we are working on.

Curiosity is very strong (almost magical) and is a driving factor in a lot of the things we are doing daily. Even though it is difficult and time consuming, Youjung is leaning how to code—because she is curious!

Curiosity connects strongly to childhood. Playing around and experimenting (as a child does when it learns to get around in this world) is useful in doing research and art. When you're growing older it becomes harder to stay curious but it is still of big value.

• strong motivation

• happy vs comfortable

Computing Gender

Within western context, referring to gender as an 'instrument of abstraction', sexualized in cultural practice. > Gayatri Spivak

With 'computing' she means the abstraction of knowledge by computed data, algorythms, large language models, etc. the globalizing forces that process information into strings of numbers, basically. Something that is not sensible to the experiencing being. 'gender', she situates by saying it's the name for those forces applied to sexual differences, and were named 'gender' by feminist speakers of English. > as in, specifying that this is the meaning she gives to the word.

Seeing gender as one of these instruments of abstraction, making distinctions, categories, that are then given social / cultural relevance.

Dichotomy

As a logical manoeuvrer which splits into two categories that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. For instance the kingdom of plants are not the same as the kingdom of animals, mushrooms, or the eukaryotes but these different categories together exhausts the category of all living beings. However this is not a classic dichotomy because it is split into 5 categories therefore it would be something like a pentachotomy.

Dichotomy of Digital Commons

A more XPUB related example that came up recently about the F/LOSS movement and its embeddedness in capitalist economy. On hand there are creative groups who believe in the values of sharing, studying, modifying software source code and through the circulation of source code there is added value. On the other hand when commercial market adopts these values with the undeniable goal to extract those added values and put software on the market as quickly as possible, these values cease into becoming a business strategy and not a collaborative effort to create. This is a sketch for the dichotomy of digital commons.

Soource: Digital Collective Ownership

The yin-yang infinity signage

"Yin and Yang" as a dichotomy：A shorthand explanation often describes yin and yang as woman and man, and all the other dualistic pairs, as mentioned in Jacques Lacan’s seminars: je ne parle pas du Yin et du Yang, comme tout le monde vous savez cela : le mâle et le femelle. ​ Although Mladen Dolar, quoted earlier, deems Chinese to be incomprehensible, he nevertheless spends a long paragraph explaining yin-yang as two (and only two) poles of masculine and feminine. He concludes there is a “strong thesis” in the “Taoist” symbol: “there is a relation. There is a sexual relation. Every relation is sexual.”

The short capitulation “yin and yang” or more “yin-yang” written together, showing an unconventional order of words, perhaps already hints at something different: the masculine habit of appearing first is at least reversed on the lexical level. Since one would never say yang-yin or yang and yin, one might at least pause for a moment before rushing into turning yin-yang into another symbol of the myth of a crosscultural, universal, and ahistorical patriarchy.

Digital commons

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The digital commons refers to shared digital resources—such as software, knowledge, data, and cultural content—that are collectively produced and governed by a community and intended for public use. These commons are distinguished by open access, participatory management, and licensing practices that preserve reuse and redistribution. Digital commons play a vital role in areas such as education, research, software development, and civic engagement.

Examples of the digital commons include wikis, open-source software, and open-source licensing. The distinction between digital commons and other digital resources is that the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.

The digital commons provides the community with free and easy access to information. Typically, information created in the digital commons is designed to stay in the digital commons by using various forms of licensing, including the GNU General Public License and various Creative Commons licenses.

This Grapevine entry is coming from "Nothing in Commons: the end of digital collective ownership?" by Aymeric Mansoux

Efficacy VS Efficiency

Not to be mistaken for efficiency. Efficacy means being able to produce the desired result. While efficiency means producing with the least waste of time. Two terms I'm completely incapable of.

Elitist

“Elitist” is probably the most abused word in the women’s liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as “pinko” was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term “elite” is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.

- Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness

"..thus, there must not be any great problem with capitalist elites, political elites or international elites, unless there really are groups of friends involved “who also happen [my emphasis] to participate in the same political activities.” And this stupidity was written by a then future political scientist! Talk about blowing “smokescreens” to hide hegemony!"

- Jason McQuinn, A Review of The “Tyranny of Structurelessness”: An organizationalist repudiation of anarchism

Cultural Hegemony

There is an interesting connection between elitism, as Jo Freeman interprets it, and cultural hegemony as theorized by Antonio Gramsci.

How intentional or how spontaneous is the formation of such groups? Cultural hegemony is based on the accruing and gatekeeping of cultural and social awareness by an elitist few.

Cultural hegemony is only one of the representations and enactions of hegemony enforced by elites who take advantage of their position of power to perpetuate and reinforce the security of their position.

Grapevine

When you hear something through informal exchange, such as gossip, you 'heard it on the grapevine'. The word stems from black communities during the time of slavery in the US, an:

"illicit 'grapevine telegraph'—a network spreading news and correspondence between enslaved communities maintained by mobile bondpeople. Through this system of communication, enslaved men exchanged subversive ideas as well as daily news". (Lussana, 2016)

The first recorded use is from April 17, 1852:

"The following important dispatch was recived [sic] by the ‘Grape Vine’ telegraph—It came to hand just in time for this week’s ‘issoo,’ and the attentive ‘operator’ at Tiffin city has our thanks for his invaluable favor.” (O’Conner and Kellerman)

This statement is followed by an anonymous, satirical letter to the editor, "full of outlandish misinformation about an election for township offices". (O’Conner and Kellerman) From then on, the grapevine cut ties with its revolutionary origins and started to symbolise unreliable and informally shared information.

The Motown song 'I heard it through the grapevine' by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, uses the word as a central motif, symbolizing the spread of information and secrets within a community. In the case of the song, the information is heartbreaking.

At XPUB the expression is interpreted in a visual way, as people overhearing and discussing things because they are in close proximity to each other, like in a vineyard. (de Haan and Arrrigoni, 2026).

References Lussana, S. A. (2016). Enslaved Men, the Grapevine Telegraph, and the Underground Railroad', My Brother Slaves: "Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South" (Lexington, KY, 2016; online edn, Kentucky Scholarship Online, 22 Sept. 2016), https://doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813166940.003.0006

O’Conner, P. and Kellerman, S. (2018). Roots of the grapevine. Grammarphobia. Available at: https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/05/grapevine-2.html

de Haan, R. and Arrigoni E. (2026). Personal communication.

Hegemony

Appeared in The Tyranny of Structurelessness in FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES.

This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.

Hegemony is the political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states, either regional or global.

Cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who shape the culture of that society so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, and that it perpetuates social conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

When the social control is carried out by another society, it is known as cultural imperialism.

Difference between Hegemony and Imperialism Hegemony is more commonly used when it exerts overwhelming economic, military, and cultural influence. Iimperialism emphasizes visible direct domination and expansion such as territorial occupation or colonial rule.

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.

Home

In UNIX, the tilde character (~) is a shortcut for the users home folder. Apparently this relates to the position of the character on a key named home on an early UNIX terminal.

Why was '~' chosen to represent the home directory?

Where is our digital home?

In the context of the Special Issue 29, Barbs, Tommi, and Youjung used this open question as the key metaphoric element for their workshop Our Digital Home.

Interaction

From Soda's interview

Interoperability

One of the most crucial problems of technology is when machines or software don’t know how to talk to each other, because of many overlapping potential reasons: proprietary and closed implementations, inability of humans to agree on standards, deprecated or obsolete protocols that limit the scope of what it is now possible to do…

xkcd #927: Standards

The challenge remains: interoperability among tools can be associated with confabulation among human beings. It may not be the fastest, most efficient, and most productive way of achieving a goal, still, it is the most accepting, inclusive, communal.

Even if interoperability was not conceived as a fundamental principle in the making of a tool, as hackers it is our imperative to crack things open, and bridge them!

We should also compel big tech to be at least a bit more fair by enforcing Adversarial Interoperability: ensuring that widespread closed technologies adopt open standards. A perfect example in the legislative domain is the European Union’s Digital Markets Act

Interrupt

Interrupt is a mechanism of intervention, where an external action comes in the middle of the routine and stops the code exectution. It is the implementation of interaction within a cybernetic system. It is this paradigm that broke the linear turing machine and gave origin to shell comands and the REPL (read-eval-print-loop) paradigm.

'interrupts aren't hidden'- a statement that is as much aesthetic as it is technical. - Linus Torvalds

Interrupts gives the possibility of a user - and glitches. This fundamentally turns any system into a chaotic, non-deterministic one. The incorporated noise originates a new system.

Notes taken from All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses, by Simon Yuill.

Investigatory

Investigatory is not one method but and attitude towards reasearch. Can stem from one word or a text, event, a memory, or anything that triggers curiousity and associationS to the topic of the research. It is not exactly a set steps to follow but more of an exploration of possible meaningS, possibiliteS, directionS, conclusionS even. It is tough a step back from THE dictionary definition of a word/expression which allows for discoveries by folowing clues, threads, traces. It is indeed that feeling of discovering something which the researcher/ interpreter of the traces could not foreseen in the beginning of the investigatory process. It is highly biased by the investigators previously adopted pattern recognition.

Jargon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This was was initially found on Awkward Gestures by Femke Snelting read during Methods Class.

Jargon, or technical language, is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a particular occupation (that is, a certain trade, profession, vernacular or academic field), but any ingroup can have jargon. The key characteristic that distinguishes jargon from the rest of a language is its specialized vocabulary, which includes terms and definitions of words that are unique to the context, and terms used in a narrower and more exact sense than when used in colloquial language. This can lead outgroups to misunderstand communication attempts. Jargon is sometimes understood as a form of technical slang and then distinguished from the official terminology used in a particular field of activity.

The terms jargon, slang, and argot are not consistently differentiated in the literature; different authors interpret these concepts in varying ways. According to one definition, jargon differs from slang in being secretive in nature; according to another understanding, it is specifically associated with professional and technical circles. Some sources, however, treat these terms as synonymous. The use of jargon became more popular around the sixteenth century attracting persons from different career paths. This led to there being printed copies available on the various forms of jargon

---

Addition by Ema:

Idiolect

The term Idiolect can also be put in comparison to Jargon to better expand very situated laguage and its uses - this comes from my semiotic knowledge.

Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.

The term is etymologically derived from the prefix idio-, from Ancient Greek ἴδιος, ídios, 'own, personal, private, peculiar, separate, distinct'; and -lect, abstracted from dialect, ultimately from Ancient Greek λέγω, légō, 'I speak'.

Materialize

1. Become actual fact; happen, appear or be present when expected.
2. (of a ghost, spirit, or similar entity) appear in bodily form. represent or cause to appear in bodily or physical form.

Language helps us to materialize ideas and thoughts. Once you address a lingering thought in mind the idea becomes tangible almost becomes a truth. When gossiping, something you say out loud becomes apparent and loud. It becomes difficult to erase it from your mind.

Mastery

Appeared in Awkward gestures: designing with Free Software

Designer and socialist William Morris was convinced that workers should not only have collective ownership of their own means of production, he also believed in another form of 'mastery,' i.e. the skilful employment of techniques and materials.

I strongly resonate with the idea of mastery. In today’s world, many people are highly goal-oriented and emphasize efficiency, often neglecting the learning process itself. However, achieving true mastery requires spending a great deal of time learning and understanding the systems and mechanisms behind things. In this sense, pursuing mastery may also be a way to respond to the challenges posed by AI.

Pedagogy

The more technology becomes cryptic, seamless and alienating, the more pedagogy becomes a radical skill. Pedagogy skills aren't technical but social or cultural, it's another muscle to train to slowly bridge the gaps between our feelings of empowerment or alienations toward tech. Explaining what we know in simple way, or making space for other's concerns, can be really difficult. Anyone in HowSpot can exercice their abilities in collective learning.

- Doriane on the HowSpot website.

The word "pedagogy" originated from the Greek words for "boy" + "leader", literally translating to "a man having oversight of a child", which is a now-obsolete meaning.

The term's definition is often contested. Some define it as "The science of teaching", approaching it from an academic point of view. Others see it more as "The art or craft of teaching", which I think fits Doriane's interpretation better.

Perma-Hybridity

We do not want interoperability to be limited to machines and protocols at the present time. The true value of making different technologies work together is to pursue a technological ecosystem made for old and new tools to work together. Let’s fight obsolescence with permacomputing, let’s defeat the standardization of the new with hybridation.

Inspired by Lovink’s Principles of Perma-Hybridity:

The uprising against planned obsolescence is well underway: Extraction Rebellion. The solution will not just be less consumption + recycling, but it will come from a full-scale integration of old and new products and services. The challenge will be to design and scale up these modes of perma-hybridity. What Ocean-Cleanup is rolling out in the Pacific Ocean for plastics will soon be done for hardware, software and related infrastructures. Material nets collecting everything from record players, DVD and VHS players, PCs, tablets and laptops, synthesizers, mobile and smartphones, switches, motherboards and amplifiers, Walkman, iPods, radios, TVs to video projectors. Analog, digital, scheißegal. Gathering them will only be stage one, hybridizing them stage two; synthesizing past and present, high and low tech. The integration of second-life hardware into the everyday life of the billions is upon us. Welcome to the fifth industrial revolution.

Pinko

A derrogatory term to define someone who is mildly left-wing, socialist or communist.

To differentiate from someone who is a left-extremist or radical, which would signify a saturated red in the political (color) spectrum. A pinko would sit in a pastel-like pink, a washed out red tone.

[Elitist]... is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. - THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS, by Jo Freeman

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.

Practice

practice:

   1st sense: personal artistic practice

practice, as opposed to theoretical practice. 'embodiment', action, doing in the moment. vs. putting into practice, taking a theory and applying it. in the sense of a profession, a collection of activities that together should give some answer to the question 'what do you do?'

practice, as verb: repeating a task to get better at it.

To practice is putting things into action by a constant trial-and-error method. practice is something that executes overtime. it is not a one time only shot. in the context of the tiranny of structurlessness the author underlines how pratice is mostly a lacking factor. Freeman suggested 7 points to form principles that are essential to democratic structuring and are also politically effective. it can being regognized as putting things into practice but for some of them i won't say so! we can discuss on em. Practice makes perfect. it makes sense but it doesnt only mean repeating one exercise several times, it also hint that people would smmarize the experience in these practice. In the context of the article, I feel the examples provided for “practice” are insufficient and not precise to support the author's argument. Practice is something that people do but not only what people do but in what context they do. Where, when and how? Book : Publishing as Artistic Practice https://www.are.na/block/24649567

   is talking a  practice?
   to put things in practice
   repetition +3
   context +3

repetition over time, but in two senses: one as development of a skill. is grocery shopping a practice? A routine to sustain myself developing a skilll m has to put energy in it, intentional practicing ruynning ,

requires effort, something intentional actively

Proselytize

Converting someone to a specific group. Mostly to religious groups, but can also be to a political group. Can be seen as a synonym to coerce. It derives from the Greek word prosélytos meaning 'newcomer' Commonly it's done in public space, maybe with cardboard banners or by handing out pamphlets or books. In some countries it's illegal to proselytize.

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]

Struggle / trouble

Lol, I seem to have mixed-up two terms.. well, anyway, maybe they're sysonyms: struggle / trouble. An attitude towards word usage and meaning / embodied practice. It has something to do with accepting that language is not a means to describe reality, but also actively produces it. Rejecting a fixity in reality, or seeing it as a pre-given. Understanding that reality is made through practice, action, embodiment, repetition. I guess the struggle is, then, to be aware / play around with how that active production is done. And finding ways to re-establish it over and over again.

Swindler (Charlatan)

Found in Keywords for Radicals: Introduction on page 3. Also referred to as 'charlatan'. A term used to characterize someone who tricks people for own financial gain or status. A person being dishonest to their own advantage. I'm thinking of real estate owners/agents, banks covering up investments, big tech progression facades. Presenting a tasty reality which is far from truth. Though my examples given before are much framed, I think every branch of work or community can have their own swindlers. A colleague, in a big artistic institution, opened up in a political discussion after the big PVV win that it might be the end for us artists. That we're often referred to by the far-right as losers, fakers, people who only talk and have no actual skillset, charlatans.

Other funny related words provided by dictionary.cambridge.org which I thought we're worth mentioning:

air guitar

phoney baloney

“star” system

· "star"/"spokespeople"

"The public is conditioned to look for spokespeople."

The development of social media has, to a certain extent, cemented the 'star' system. People are eager to categorise themselves into a group and then swiftly rally behind a spokesperson. ​

​

·"system"/"community"/"group"

Taking the well-known story of “Alice in Wonderland” as the starting point, Iskra Geshoska terms the "labyrinth with no way out" as a metaphor for the confrontational relationship between an increasingly self-serving and individualized neoliberal system and the declining collective community. Facing the difficulties of contemporary social life and productions, Geshoska’s challenging yet unapologetic text calls upon us to re-examine and learn a lesson from the crucial thoughts behind Democratic Socialism, in order to seek possible resolutions for our dilemma. ​

At present, we live in cruel times in which market parameters are also applied to practices of ontological exchange—of identities, thoughts, and feelings. The psycho-dynamics of this exchange determine the paths our lives take. And this journey goes by extremely fast. This speediness produces an even bigger emptiness, where we are losing exactly what we are trying to exchange. Enticed by the mystery of new individualisms, we have tripped and fallen down a rabbit hole. At this moment, a collective, or if you wish, cloned, Alice rules the roost. She is endlessly reflected in microscopic prisms that she hopes will clearly reveal all aspects of her journey. Hers is a quest to make distinctions between communities and mobs, between critical and creative resistance to the silently, democratically, and consensually accepted suppressive concepts of social order. She still proceeds, intent on creating maps of specific trajectories that will lead to a common space. Alice’s journey this time is not in Wonderland, but in the land where our longing and our bodies are thrown on the garbage heap of economic and political violence. Alice finds herself in the infinity of emptiness, in a hall of mirrors showing crooked images of reality instead of what she’d wished to see. In these reflections, reality is simulated through a false overcrowding of activities, actions, products, “projects,” “works”—all sorts of engaged acceleration. And the rabbit is always late and never manages to get to the most important tea party. And he is confused because the celebration is still going on, but without him. Fear has become the only consistent thing that can retrieve and construct the stories we tell about our wholeness, about the justification of our existence here and now—our avowals that we are not virtual, that our lives are not phantasms, that we are not writing them out by following certain commands. And nothing but the fear of our own impermanence feels more fitting to provoke our reflections on community. Nothing is more disturbing than the entropy of the idea that the community is property jointly owned by the subjects that join in it. ​

​

Eric Hobsbawm noted: “Never was the word ‘community’ used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life.” He proceeds to say that people look for groups to belong to, temporarily or permanently, in a world in which everything else moves and shifts and nothing else is certain. And at the very moment when the community collapses, identity is invented. The community is a home that, for the majority of people, is just a fairy tale rather than the reality of their personal experience. ​ ​

The Collective Alice, or, on Fear, Death, Multitudes, and Pain [Iskra Geshoska] ​

Gossip

<what's new :)> Fast-forward to SI29, We're reading Keywords for Radicals with Marloes. The introduction carries quite some resemblance to Butler's essay. In both 'Keywords for Radicals' and Butler's 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination' struggle comes back as a way to relate to what is being studied. What is being studied is language, or the use of definitions or categories. And the 'struggle' in both is the rejection of the idea that such definitions or categories are supposed to set anything in stone, or refusing to accept that definitions could be fixed or pre-given.

For Butler, this started with their discomfort with the category of 'lesbian'. Not because they are not one, or don't want to be one, but because there is a contradiction in the category that they want to expose. The one of both being one and acting like one at the same time. They reject that the category as such preceded them and they happen to be an 'instance' of that category, so to say. And point out instead, that the category only derives it's meaning from being done/embodied/performed/repeated. As they say, there is nothing lesbians could be said to have in common. And if the category was fixed somehow, that should be the case.

In Keywords for Radicals, they start the question of struggle with the implication that the radical effort is not completed with assigning 'true names' as in calling power out on it's bs. Using 'the fable of the emperer's new clothes' to make the point, even after the king is called out, the fact he's not wearing any clothes exposed, he will carry on as if nothing ever happened because he is already too invested. The stakes are too high.

There is actually a line to be drawn here with Butler as well. As they show, the straight 'norm' somehow needs or uses the visibility of queerness as the 'other' to constantly re-establish itself as that normative position. And at the same time, the visibility of queerness poses a thread, as it exposes the possibility of that seemingly fixed reality-of straightness as norm and as true-to be inherently unstable.

So for Butler, the site of struggle is to move beyond the fixity of names, categories, realities, and finding new meaning in them, not to discredit them, but to have a new stance towards them. One that can actually challenge the very oppressive systems that uses them, and needs them, in order to keep up it's semblance of naturality.

In Keywords, this reads as 'words do not merely describe a given reality but also play a key role in helping to produce it. Though the focus is more on how language, how definitions change over time, and their struggle interpreted from seeing their historical context, seeing the pattern, the repetition is still the new way to approach reality-formation. Through repetition (in language) reality is actively being produced.

Deconstructing LCD screens

[ -> experiment documentation ]

In my bachelor's graduation work, I used prysm sheets from old LCD screens as pages in a book. It was the start of an interest in how media shape social/political life. And part of it was to literally take apart these screens, learn about how they work. Though the project itself was a photo book with street photography, I am starting to realize now my interest was maybe not so much in the images, but in the media itself.

Having read about media-specific analysis during the first semester gave me a way to better contextualize this. And I went back to the LCD screens to do some more experiments with them. ( and I also keep collecting them to make business cards out of them ).