Category:Implicancies

Radio Implicancies

If technological systems are implicated in the structuring of knowledge and knowledge systems are implicated in how technology operates … how do we start to think the world otherwise?

The question above triggered Special Issue #12. It might sound impossibly abstract, but Radio Implicancies is rooted in a concrete concern. From the way the Latin alphabet has become ubiquitous in human-machine interfaces to the naturalized alignment of computation with binary separations, from mis-directed critiques on algorithmic discrimination, or harm done to marginalised knowledges by on-line learning platforms^[1], to eco-solutionism immersed in technocapitalism^[2] … we know that technology orients knowledge and constrains what world(s) can be thought, studied, imagined and critiqued. We also know that dominant knowledge systems and technological systems are soaked in colonial thought, if not practice.^[3] But where do we start?

Special Issue #12 invites you to experiment with propositions by feminist, non-binary, queer, anti-colonial and other disobedient researchers in response to this complex knot. Their resistant praxes widen the toolset for ‘thinking the world’ by paying attention to both matter and form. Their work considers feelings, intuitions, inventions, humour, diffractions and figurations in order to expand epistomologies (knowledge systems) as well as ontologies (thinking about what exists). They imagine knowledge infrastructures beyond binary separation, ask what non-exclusionary categories could do, or what other ways of calculating, validating, ordering collections of digital material could emerge. Of course none of them offers simple fixes to any of the issues on the table.

I borrowed the term “implicancies” from Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Arjuna Neumann. In their film ‘4 Waters: Deep Implicancy’, “implicancy” stands for entangled forms of responsibility that keep modern operations in place: extraction, disposession, segregation, externalisation and optimisation.^[4] But “implicancy” is also a technical term used in propositional calculus, explained as ‘the hypothesis of an implication’. Without having much experience with this type of mathematical logic, to me it suggests the possibility of a paradigm shift, not just by external agents, but by the power of imagination. As Da Silva writes: ‘What will have to be relinquished for us to unleash the imagination’s radical creative capacity and draw from it what is needed for the task of thinking The World otherwise? Nothing short of a radical shift in how we approach matter and form.’^[5]

Radio Implicancies starts in the middle. It asks you to take a deep breath and jump in so we can work together on ways that knowledge and technology might intersect differently. Let’s not wait for tomorrow to pay attention to the colonial conditionings of contemporary techno-cultures!^[6]

How does this work

From April 22nd onwards, we meet every Wednesday afternoon between 14:00 and 17:00. Most afternoons an invited guest will join to propose an exercise, a question, something to read or a discussion. We will use these afternoons to build a set of materials, playlists, keywords, references, resources to be used for the Radio Implicancies broadcasts.

Radio Implicancies experiments with (and thinks with) technological and epistemological objects such as Structured Query Language (SQL), library standards, queer analytics, other catalogs, alternative orders, streaming protocols.

Wednesday mornings we can make individual or small group appointments as needed.

On Thursday afternoons, Radio Implicancies broadcasts from 14:00-17:00. These public broadcasts are ongoing experiments with a specific subset of technological tools for sharing and formatting knowledge. Radio Implicancies will use any means necessary i.e. different protocols and editorial approaches: audio streaming, live-on-tape, DJ-ing, on-line reading groups, web-rtc, liquid soap, podcasts, xmpp chat, … A dedicated wiki will be set up to support communication, documentation and archiving of the broadcasts.

In addition to the materials provided by guests, Aymeric, André, Michael and Steve will provide input and support for your ongoing technical and conceptual work through regular tutorials and on-line sessions.

Special Issue #12 will be special in many ways. It will take place entirely on-line for only nine weeks, including a two-week break. It is hosted by someone you have never met in RL while we individually and collectively plot through uncertain times. The Radio Implicancies schedule is therefore on purpose repetitive, so that we can use the time together to make changes and re-invent what it means to deal with implicancies and with being implicated. In a way Issue #12 will be launched again every week!

Schedule

// Week 1

Wednesday 22 April

• 10:00-12:30 Introductions
• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line (guest: Michael Murtaugh)

Thursday 23 April

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.0

// Week 2

Wednesday 29 April

• reading week

Thursday 30 April

• reading week

// Week 3

Wednesday 6 April

• spring holidays

Thursday 7 April

• spring holidays

// Week 4

Wednesday 13 May

• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line (guest: Zoumana Méïté)

Thursday 14 May

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.1

// Week 5

Wednesday 20 May

• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line (guest: Helen Pritchard)

Thursday 21 May

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.2

// Week 6

Wednesday 27 May

• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line (guest: Varia)

Thursday 28 May

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.3

// Week 7

Wednesday 3 June

• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line (guest: Unbound Libraries (Elodie Mugrefya + Martino Morandi + An Mertens))

Thursday 4 June

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.4

// Week 8

Wednesday 10 June

• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line with Aymeric (guest: t.b.c.)

Thursday 11 June

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.5

// Week 9

Wednesday 17 June

• 14:00-17:00 meeting on-line (guest: t.b.c.)

Thursday 18 June

• 14:00-17:00 broadcast #12.6: Unbound Libraries

Friday 19 June

• 10:00-13:00 assesment

Resources

• Sylvia Wynter (2015), On Being Human as Praxis -- interview with Katherine Mckittrick
• Elodie Mugrefya (2019), Mise en Valeur et Omission https://diversions.constantvzw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Afrique_aux_noirs
• Donna Haraway (2019), A Giant Bumptious Litter: Donna Haraway on Truth, Technology, and Resisting Extinction https://logicmag.io/nature/a-giant-bumptious-litter/?fbclid=IwAR13RpmuwM17aSvo6V-G5EDWF8MpxKunBf-1KuTfExrDsfCK1BHFvCWNv3
• Denise Fereira Da Silva (2016), 'On difference without separability'
• Edouard Glissant, One World in Relation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTNVe_BAELY
• Zach Blas & Micha Carde (2015), Imaginary computational systems: queer technologies and transreal aesthetics
• Noah Tsika (2016), CompuQueer: Protocological Constraints, Algorithmic Streamlining, and the Search for Queer Methods Online
• Anaïs Nony (2017), Technology of Neo-Colonial Epistemes
• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2009), Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race
• Syed Mustafa Ali (2016), A brief introduction to decolonial computing
• Sara Ahmed and Anne-Marie Fortier, "Re-imagining communities", in International Journal of Cultural Studies 2003, Volume 6(3): 251–259.
• Michael Murtaugh, Eventual consistency https://diversions.constantvzw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Eventual_Consistency
• Saidiya Hartman, The Plot of Her Undoing
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace, Black Feminist Calculus Meets Nothing to Prove: A Mobile Homecoming Project Ritual toward the Postdigital
• Taskeen Adam (2019), Digital neocolonialism and massive open online courses (MOOCs): colonial pasts and neoliberal futures

Guests + contributors

André Castro

André Castro is a media artist, with a background in sound art and experimental music. His recent practice deals with digital publications, offline digital libraries (bibliotecha.info), MIDI songs, and chatbots.

André is a 2013 alumnus of the MMDC program and has previously studied under the Sonic Arts MA at Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts (Middlesex University, UK).

Currently André is a tutor at the Piet Zwart Institute.

http://oooooooooo.io

Cristina Cochior

Is a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. With an interest in automation practices, situated software and peer to machine knowledge production, her practice consists of artistic research investigations into the intimate bureaucracy of knowledge organisation and sharing systems.

Seda Guerses

Seda is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Previously she was an FWO post-doctoral fellow at COSIC/ESAT, a research associate at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at Princeton University, and a fellow at the Media, Culture and Communications Department at NYU Steinhardt as well as the Information Law Institute at NYU Law School.

Julie Bosschat Thorez

Is an artist and researcher whose work re-appropriates scientific methods to explore the impact of digital systems over human agency and governance. Trained in Fine Arts at the ERG in Brussels and Media Design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, she has developed a practice based approach to digital art preservation over the years, with a focus on variability, circulation, co-authorship and access. She's into these things: infrastructures, archives, cartography, spatiality, inexactitude, human ecosystems, biopower. She also cultivates a passion for embarassing puns and consternating news headlines.

Aymeric Mansoux

Aymeric Mansoux research deals with the defining, constraining and confining of cultural freedom in the context of network based practices. His past and current collaborations spawn across the creation of festivals and conferences (Le Placard, make art, FREE?!), music and sound works (0xA, Raid Over Moscow, stmsq1), installations (Go Forth & *, Hello Process, Meshy), software (Puredyne GNU/Linux) as well as collectives and communities (GOTO10, La Société Anonyme, 80c), books (FLOSS+Art, Elastic Versailles) and all sorts of workshops related to media, net, generative, software art and culture.

His latest collaborations are Naked on Pluto (VIDA award [ES]), with Marloes de Valk and Dave Griffiths, a project that aims at unfolding the issues of software mediation in the context of privacy and communication within a proprietary and commercial social network such as Facebook; and The SKOR Codex (Japan Media Arts Festival award [JP]), with La Société Anonyme, a limited edition of eight hand bound books of raw data dumps that mimic NASA’s Golden Disc Record, aiming at documenting the life at a Dutch institution before it ceased to exists with the 2012 Dutch art funding cuts.

He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London [UK] under supervision of Prof. Matthew Fuller, researching on the creative misunderstandings between art, politics and the law within free culture. He regularly publishes essays and papers linked to his ongoing research: http://bleu255.com

Martino Morandi

researches at the intersections between technology, politics and art. His interests and projects articulate around the material conditions of technologies and their genealogies, using non-hegemonic paradigms like conviviality, semi-efficiency, dys-functioning. He collaborates with LAG in Amsterdam and Constant in Bruxelles.

Zoumana Méïté

is a performer and theatre-maker based in Brussels with a practice in artistic research, dramaturgy and improvisation. He concluded the post-master programme in a.pass, advanced performance and scenography studies. In his performances he moves with radio-waves, ink-drops and the memories of his own body.

An Mertens

Elodie Mugrefya

is co-responsible for artistic research & project development at Constant. She is interested in the issues surrounding the procedures for disseminating, passing on and maintaining knowledge, customs and beliefs.

Michael Murtaugh

Michael Murtaugh completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (’94). Subsequently he was part of the Interactive Cinema group, led by Glorianna Davenport at the MIT Media Lab where he completed a masters degree (’96). His research focus was on building tools for “Evolving Documentaries”, or how traditional film/video model evolves in the context of digital networked media such as the Web.

Currently Michael teaches in the Master Media Design and Communication programme at the Piet Zwart Institute. He is a member of Constant, a Brussels based collective engaged in the fields of free and open source software, feminism, copyright alternatives, and collaborative networks. With Constant he is currently working on Active Archives, a platform for diverse material ranging from texts to images and video. Seeing the project as both technical and cultural, the system facilitates, re-use of material while enriching content through metadata, vocabularies, and taxonomies. Next to these activities, Murtaugh is the founder of automatist.org, a new media design firm specialised in community databases, interactive documentary, and tools for new forms of reading and writing online.

http://automatist.org/

Helen Pritchard

http://www.helenpritchard.info/

Aymeric Mansoux

Aymeric Mansoux research deals with the defining, constraining and confining of cultural freedom in the context of network based practices. His past and current collaborations spawn across the creation of festivals and conferences (Le Placard, make art, FREE?!), music and sound works (0xA, Raid Over Moscow, stmsq1), installations (Go Forth & *, Hello Process, Meshy), software (Puredyne GNU/Linux) as well as collectives and communities (GOTO10, La Société Anonyme, 80c), books (FLOSS+Art, Elastic Versailles) and all sorts of workshops related to media, net, generative, software art and culture.

His latest collaborations are Naked on Pluto (VIDA award [ES]), with Marloes de Valk and Dave Griffiths, a project that aims at unfolding the issues of software mediation in the context of privacy and communication within a proprietary and commercial social network such as Facebook; and The SKOR Codex (Japan Media Arts Festival award [JP]), with La Société Anonyme, a limited edition of eight hand bound books of raw data dumps that mimic NASA’s Golden Disc Record, aiming at documenting the life at a Dutch institution before it ceased to exists with the 2012 Dutch art funding cuts.

He is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London [UK] under supervision of Prof. Matthew Fuller, researching on the creative misunderstandings between art, politics and the law within free culture. He regularly publishes essays and papers linked to his ongoing research: http://bleu255.com

Michael Murtaugh

Michael Murtaugh completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (’94). Subsequently he was part of the Interactive Cinema group, led by Glorianna Davenport at the MIT Media Lab where he completed a masters degree (’96). His research focus was on building tools for “Evolving Documentaries”, or how traditional film/video model evolves in the context of digital networked media such as the Web.

Currently Michael teaches in the Master Media Design and Communication programme at the Piet Zwart Institute. He is a member of Constant, a Brussels based collective engaged in the fields of free and open source software, feminism, copyright alternatives, and collaborative networks. With Constant he is currently working on Active Archives, a platform for diverse material ranging from texts to images and video. Seeing the project as both technical and cultural, the system facilitates, re-use of material while enriching content through metadata, vocabularies, and taxonomies. Next to these activities, Murtaugh is the founder of automatist.org, a new media design firm specialised in community databases, interactive documentary, and tools for new forms of reading and writing online.

http://automatist.org/

Steve Rushton

Steve Rushton writes and edits.

Femke Snelting

develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software. In various constellations she explores how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research to interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of bodies in the context of volumetric technologies. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha), she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations. Femke teaches at XPUB (experimental publishing master, Rotterdam) and at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels).

References