TTY

From Karen Brodine, Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking (https://davidbuuck.com/downloads/tripwire_4_brodine.pdf)

Introduction

This issue will start from a single technical object: a teletype machine. The teletype is the meeting point between typewriters and computer interfaces, a first automated translator of letters into bits. Equipped with a keyboard, a transmitter and a punchcard read-writer, it is a historical link between early transmission technology such as the telegraph and the internet of today.

The teletype ushered in a new mode of inscription of writing: if the typewriter set up a grid of letters and voids of the same size, turning the absence of a letter (the space) into a key itself (the spacebar), the teletype finished it by inscribing the space in the very same material as all other letters: electrical zeros and ones, that were to immediately leave the machine.

The Teletype Model 33, one of the most widely produced and distributed text-based terminals in the 1970s, introduced multiple technological concretizations that are present in the computers of today as a sort of legacy, such as the QWERTY Keyboard with control keys, the ASCII character encoding and the TTY terminal capability. This makes this interface from 50 years ago highly interoperable with present ones, which gives us the possibily for a very hands-on approach for developing our theory of this medium, creating short-circuits that allow us to re-think technical progress and computational genealogies.

A Teletype Model 33 will be hosted and available for use and experimentation for the trimester.

Format

Each week we will host a guest contributor who will join us in unfolding the many cultural and technical layers that we found stratified in such a machine, reading them as questions to our contemporary involvements with computing and with networks.

This issue will experiment with a shapeshifting form of publication that will follow and respond to the content of our guests' contributions with weekly releases, that will experiment over three months on how this content will be collected, re-interpreted, re-circulated and launched every week.

The format of the issue will consist of on an on-going publishing arrangement, to be re-considered every week, imagine the publishing medium as a sort of an "Exquisite Corpse Network" or maybe as a "Publication of Theseus". Let's call it a Blob for now, it will surely shift names, too.

Every Monday, the week's caretakers will be responsible for collecting materials from our guest contribution, which might take the form of a lecture, collective reading, hands-on exercises, an excursion... Depending on the situation, the caretakers will be responsible for recording audio, editing notes, transcribing code or taking pictures, and making them available as rawer materials.

The week's editors, instead, will be responsible for coming up with a further step in how the publishing Blob will progress, by adding new connections or new interfaces, removing/re-interpreting the existing ones, and/or changing the format of the weekly release. They will then have another week of time to realize these changes with the help of the prototyping class and re-circulate the collected materials.

As the format is an evolving meta-format and can and hopefully will get confusing, every Monday we will take a moment during the day to discuss the progression of the publishing Blob, to understand together what the formats brings, where to bring the format.

This mode of publishing will make us develop our own collective understandings of inter-operation, of networked care and access, backward- and forward-compatibility, obsolence and futurability.

Schedule

Tuesday April 11th

With: Martino, Michael, Manetta, Joseph, Steve

Monday April 17th

With: Andrea di Segero Alighieri, Martino

Monday April 24th

With: Roel Roscam Abbing, Martino

Monday May 8th

With: Elodie Mugrefya, Martino

Monday May 15th

With: Femke Snelting, Martino

Monday May 22nd

With: Isabelle Sully, Martino

Monday May 29th

With: Zoumana Meïté, Martino

Monday June 12th

With: Jara Rocha, Martino

Thursday June 29th

Grad show..