User:Lucatorsera/Special-Issue29

Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances

Links

ᛜ SI29: Gossiping at the Intersection of Crafts and Resistances

ᛜ Grapevine

Week 1

ѻ Monday 05.01

Pad of the Day Thinking of the words Cipayo and Gusano.

Assignment: make an html page presenting yourself with gossips and crafts. Index of all pages

ѻ Wednesday 07.01 - Methods

Pad of the Day, Wiki page

Discussed Patterned languages, the birth of WWW and Wikis, programming languages. Talked about Raymond Williams' Keywords.We read and discussed Keywords for Radicals as well as Silvia Federici's Witches, Witch-hunting and Women chapter on Gossip.

Added the keyword Cipayo to the Grapevine.

Week 2

ѻ Monday 12.01

No class

ѻ Tuesday 13.01 - Prototyping

File sharing

Pad of the day, wiki page

What is a file?

A file is a container of information. I immediately think of heavy metal drawers with beige carton pieces of paper, with two little white plastic hangers on each side. The carton would fold and wrap around pieces of paper, photographs, IDs, bills, letters, certifications, etc - a folder. Those would sit on a rail inside the drawer. The file would contain several documents, organized according to some arbitrary classification.

Life-sharing

I recently made a visit to my grandpa's office during christmas, with the intention of investigating the family tree. I asked my grandpa about some documents. He took me to the office, put his walking stick aside, opened one drawer, licked the tip of his fingers, and flipped through labelled carton folders, quickly arriving to "italian citizenship". His office in itself is a "file", comprised of several subdivisions. The wooden shelfs with encyclopedias, atlas, books, CDs, tapes, certificates, prizes, golf trophies. The wall with pictures of colleagues, pictures of family, two cubist paintings by him, two pencil portraits of him at an early age, a small picture of his dad, plans for a caterpillar tractor. A metal drawer with four levels. A wooden desk filled with different stacks of paper. A 2010's dekstop computer, equipped with a webcam, scanner and printer, containing several folders of digital files. A fax telephone. On that day, he handed to me a piece of heritage, where not only included generations of life documents, but his and my dad's research on the family's roots.

This research dated from the 90s contains scribbles, investigations, embassy applications, and ultimately led to me "becoming" Italian. I stood in the office with my grandpa in my dad, where a generational, hand-to-hand, file-sharing act took place.

Alternative file-sharing assignement

From the prototyping page:

• file sharing as resistance: What role does Big Tech play when it comes to sharing files with our peers, friends and family? Which strategies are there to learn from to counter their power, such as mirroring and peer2peer networks? How can file sharing be an intimate process? What limits do we want to embrace, in response to all the infrastructure that is needed to process an insane amount of files everyday?

We will add filesharing descriptions and discussions to an ongoing pad. As an assignement, we will think of one particular way to share a file with someone in class, and document it.

I can think of the following prototypes:

• • Two people sit straight with their backs touching each-other, or with hands on the other's backs. They both wear noise-cancelling headphones. They can only send-and-receive files by increasing and decreasing breath and the vibration of their bodies (e.g. by speaking nasally). The receiving end has to be in a deep "listening" mode.
  • Dropping battery-powered ESP32 tags in public space. The tag is an access point which hosts html files.
  • Reading Images da Branquitude I revisited the indigenous practice of Antropofagia - the action of consuming human bodies - in a decolonial way. Antropofagia was always conflated by european colonizers with cannibalism. Portuguese and spanish saw the action as a mere feeding practice. Schwarcz proposes the practice as a practice of communication between different indigenous nations, since the main goal of Antropofagia, was to share vitality between deceased peoples. Therefore, could Antropofagia be an ancient form of file-sharing (or life-sharing)?

ѻ Wednesday 14.01 - Meeting with Michael

Pad of the day

Discussing the XPUB code of conduct and the first official assesment.

T2 assesment points (taken from the pad): https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Calendars:XPUB/XPUB_Calendar/30-03-2026_-Event_1 Week after SI29 ends, 2 days, each student has an individual slot.

Michael, Manetta, Marloes/Lidia will be present.

• Check-in moment, how has the course been going for you so far?

• Present things from your perspective and experience.

• Show the things you did during and besides the two SI's. What stood out for you about the first two SI's?

• Do documentation, gather loose threads, housekeeping ✨ , use the wiki (you don't have to) and link everything together, write a few sentences. You don't have to include everything.

• Important discoveries you might want to follow up on later. Start to develop a bridge to T4 assessment in year 2 and your thesis project proposal!

• Look at last year's students pages for examples.

• Documentation!

• Things outside of xpub (organizations/activities/anything) you can bring too!!

• Space for reflection

Week 3

ѻ Monday 19.01 with Doriane and Kaa

Pad of the day, wikiPage

I saw my name on the pad when someone asked about experiences with Cargo, so I replied with my gossips on the platform:

Luca: it is only possible to scrape the website. Everything built in cargo is propietary, and there's no "download" button within cargo interface... I fought cargo many times to get away with not paying their fees, and keep my portfolio that i built in 2022. I managed to get the student account of a friend, and copied my own website into his account. In this way, I could publish the website for "free", when my student account expired. Now, when I got into xpub, I managed to get a student account again. What did I do? I copied the website back again into my own account hihi. Bottomline, I want to make my own website, but lack the time to do it and I don't want to just throw away the content I've published so far. In the meantime, I managed to never pay cargo...

I didn't manage to follow the tmux session, and even though I read the notes it is a bit hard to keep up...

On this side of the globe, I am working with a friend João on his eco-farm in Brazil. I went on a hike with him where he showed his practice of installing wildcams in his farm. He is currently cataloguing all appearances (750+ entries) and the species that visit the farm. Using his database, we are developing some animations to project on the massive rock behind his house.

João sharing his practice of documenting wild life in his farm in Ipeúna, Brazil

João is building a sustainable tiny-house in Ipeúna, Brazil

laser-projection using a footpring of Seriema found in João's farm.