User:Aglaia/Final assessment

17.06.2024

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FIRST YEAR IN XPUB

SI 19 - Garden Leeszaal

The SI19 How do we library that? or alternatively Garden Leeszaal was crucial in diving into the structure of libraries as systems of producing knowledge and unpacking classification as a process that (un)names, distinguishes, excludes, displaces, organizes life. It was fruitful for me in order to start understanding the notion of infra-structure. Libraries as complex social infrastructures. From the library to the section to the shelf to the book to the page to the text. The zooming in and zooming out process. The library as a plain text.

During the collective moment in Leeszaal was really moving seeing people literally diving into recycle bins, grab books, tear pages apart, drawing, pen plotting, weaving words together, cutting words, removing words, overwriting, printing, scanning. A whole book made by all of us in the evening. Having them creating the object. Stations, machines, a cloud of cards. A sleeve that warms up THE BOOK.

[img scanned book] [img work-station with Irmak at Leeszaal] [img the bins]

SI20 - Console

https://issue.xpub.nl/20/index.html

[img] [img] [img]

SI21 - TTY

https://issue.xpub.nl/21/index.html

During SI21 TTY we messed around and worked with dusty machines like teletype and typewriters. These machines used to be instruments of administrative workforce and a expressing tool for concrete poetry and literature. This emerging workforce, in a large scale made up of women and minorities who were until then excluded from most qualified jobs, used typewriters and administration aesthetics to express themselves, re-organize and underline structural inequalities. This was an inspirational moment within XPUB for starting developing bureaucratic forms as interface of potential personal stories and discourse.

[the box] [img] [img]

Methods with Steve-Project that may or may not be made

Forced Memory Story form

An every-day ritual that I established in the context of the 'project that may or may not be made'. A tiny website generated randomly these bureaucratic forms and my classmates had to fill these forms at the end of each class. The forced memory story forms is a writing interface to archive ourselves poetically or just for fun.

Life with the XPUB chickens

Dozens of bootleg books made by us. We distribute, we circulate, we share, we read together or alone, we give to friends as birthday gifts. Moving unstable librarying practice

[img Chae and Kamo feed us before the thesis submission - April 2024]

SECOND YEAR IN XPUB

Research Framework

the art of asking your boss for a raise - flow chart - george perec

How everything started.

mention also the Perec's, Khosravi, Graeber

and some other important readings and methodology.

Thesis: Performing the Bureaucratic (Border)lines

My friend Chae made for my birthday this Dutch-government-like biscuit forms, recreating the entire layout of the document using the interface of a crunchy biscuit. She used the same color blue scheme and she placed the biscuit form inside the same standardized dimension folder 229x162 mm with the same transparent layer that reveals my name and surname.

Thesis

In the first chapter, I touch the concept of borders in relation to migration. I begin with a personal inspection and comprehension of material borders as entities. Alongside, I interweave in the text the concept of hospitality as a cultural attitude towards 'strangers' from the state’s perspective. Conditional and unconditional. How the document I hold in my hands reflects positions on the government’s conditional hospitality and what constraints it dictates.

In the second chapter, I unpack bureaucracy and focus on its bordering function. From migration ghost bureaucracies to the educational bureaucracies of my surroundings to even smaller components of this apparatus. I end up analyzing the document as a unit within this complex network. Through the "interrogation" of the form as an artifact are emerging issues related to language, graphic design and transparency, universality, and underlying violence.

In the third and last chapter, I bridge the written text with the ongoing project that runs simultaneously as part of my graduation work in Experimental Publishing, where I mainly speak through my prototypes.

To change the material artifacts is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of meaning is especially possible when the words interact with the inscription technologies that produce them” (Hayles, 2002).

Project: Talking Documents

[what][why]

Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. I utilized the paperwork interface of my smaller-scale bureaucratic story in order to unravel and foreground questions related to the role of bureaucracy as less material border and as a regulatory mechanism reflecting narratives, ideologies, policies.

The transformation of the materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in public aims to examine these artifacts and highlight the shrouded performative elements of these processes.

The marginal voices of potential applicants are embodying and enacting a role. “The speech does not only describe but brings things into existence”(Austin, 1975). My intention was to stretch the limits of dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document and turn individual administrative cases into public ones. How do the inscribed words in the documents are not descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized in getting things done” (Butler,1997). Words as active agents. Bodies as low-tech “human microphones”.

I imagine the theatrical play as a “human microphone”, a low-tech amplification device. A group of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the corridor of the school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right across, outside of the municipality building. 

The term is borrowed from the protests of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. People were gathered around the speaker repeating what the speaker was saying in order to ensure that everyone could hear the announcements during large assemblies. Human bodies became a hack in order to replace the forbidden technology. In New York it is required to ask for permission from authorities to use “amplified sound” in public space

The scenario

[how]

the scenario booklets

Central element of this project is a seven-act scenario that construct my personal paperwork story, unraveling the actual struggles of my communication with the government due to my eviction. I ended up conducting accidentally auto-ethnography as the project was dynamically being reshaped due to the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline. The body of the text of the “theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents, email threads as well as recordings of the conversations with the municipality of Rotterdam I documented and archived throughout this period. I preserved the sequence of the given sentences and by discarding the graphic design of the initial forms, I structured and repurposed the text into a playable scenario.

INDEX

ACT 0: Storyline

ACT 1: Postal address application

ACT 2: Call with municipality about the rejection of my application

ACT 3: Objection letter

ACT 4: De-registration question - communication with the University

ACT 5: Communication with the agency for my deposit

ACT 6: Departure from the Netherlands application form

ACT 7: Confirmation of de-registration application

APPENDIX: Passport Reading Session with Ada, Aglaia, Joseph, Stephen

Talking Documents in Public

[how]

The collective readings of these scenarios can be seen as an instant publishing method and as a communal tool of inspecting bureaucratic bordering infrastructures. These are some public performative readings in different (institutional) contexts, public and semi-public like WDKA, Art Meets Radical Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny theater.

[Title]: “Department of Bureaucracy and Administration Customs Enforcement”
[When]: November 2023
[Where]: Leeszaal
[Who]: XPUB peers, tutors, friends, alumni
[Description]:

During the first public moment at Leeszaal, I decided to embody and enact the traditional role of a bureaucrat in a graphic and possibly absurd way performing a small “theatrical play”. I prepared a 3-page and a 1-page document incorporating bureaucratic-form aesthetics and requesting applicants’ fake data and their answers for questions related to educational bureaucracy. People receiving an applicant number at the entrance of Leeszaal, queuing to collect their documents from the administration “office”, filling forms, waiting, receiving stamps, giving fingerprints and signing, waiting again were the main components of this act.

I was thinking of queues as a spatial oppressive tool used often by (bureaucratic) authorities. The naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for “something” to happen at “some point” under the public gaze in an efficiently defined area. 

Waiting can be considered as a dramaturgical means embedded in bureaucratic procedures that camouflage power relations through the manipulation of people’s time.

People queueing at Leeszaal to collect their documents, sign and leave their fingerprint to the Department of Bureaucracy and Customs Enforcement

One applicant's form from Leeszaal

[Title]: “Passport Reading Session”
[When]: January 2024
[Where]: XML – XPUB studio
[Who]: Ada, Aglaia, Stephen, Joseph
[Description]:

This prototype is a collective passport reading session. I asked my classmates to bring their passports or IDs and sitting in a circular set up we attempted to “scan” our documents. Every contributor took some time to browse, annotate verbally, interpret, understand, analyze, vocalize their thoughts on these artifacts, approaching them from various perspectives. The three passports and one ID card were all coming from European countries.

This is a 20-page A6 booklet created out of the transcription of the recording during a session of "scanning" verbally our identification documents

[Title]: “Postal Address Application Scenario"
[When]: February 2024
[Where]: Room in Wijnhaven Building, 4th floor
[Who]: XPUB 1,2,3, tutors, Leslie
[Description]:

This scenario is the first part of a series of small episodes that construct a bureaucratic story unfolding the processes of my communication with the government. he main actors were two bureaucrats vocalizing the questions addressed in the form, in turns and sometimes speaking simultaneously like a choir, three applicants answering the questions similarly while a narrator mainly provided the audience with the context and the storyline constructing the scenery of the different scenes. The main documentation media of the act were a camera on a tripod, a recorder in the middle of the table and myself reconstructing the memory of the re-enactement at that present - 6 days later.

They were seated having as a border a black long-table. A border furniture between the bureaucrats and the applicants. The narrator was standing still behind them while they were surrounded by the audience.

This is the first page of the ACT1 Postal Address Application Scenario that people performed for the first time at Wijnhaven

[Title]: “Talking Documents”
[When]: May 2024
[Where]: Art Meets Radical Openness Festival Linz, Austria
[Who]: XPUB, participants and visitors of the festival
[Description]: This session happened inside the tent that we built in the context of our performance Turning Off The Internet at AMRO. Around 12 people took part. We read the Act2 and Act3. The session was recorded with a zoom recorder.

Reading of the Act 2 and Act3 inside the tent that we build at AMRO

Kamo as the orange applicant

[Title]: “Talking Documents”
[When]: May 2024
[Where]: City Hall Rotterdam
[Who]: XPUB, and XPUB friends
[Description]: One month ago I send tiny invitations to some peers and friends and 11 people gathered at 20:00 in the evening at the front entrance of the Gemeente to perform three acts of the story. Act2 "Call with the municipality of Rotterdam after the rejection of y application ", Act5 "Asking for my deposit - communication with the agency", Act 6 "De-registration from the Netherlands Application". We eventually performed the reading at the garden of the City Hall cause the main entrance was quite noisy because of the traffic jam. Some fancy dressed people were watching from distance but nobody interrupted our session. It lasted around 25'. We recorded using two zoom recorders.

A really spontaneous snapshot of the reading outside of the main entrance of the City Hall of Rotterdam. Reading of the Act2 "Call with the municipality of Rotterdam after the rejection of y application ", Act5 "Asking for my deposit - communication with the agency", Act 6 "De-registration from the Netherlands Application"

The statue at the garden of the Gemeente is performing my scenario

The tiny website that holds the vocal archive of the public moments

I documented and recorded these public acts and I re-created the collectively voiced scenario. This audio piece is a constellation of different recordings and soundscapes of these public moments, a vocal archive, published in the graduation exhibition of XPUB in 2024.

[website] File:Act0 storyline.mp3
File:Act1 postal-address.mp3

Graduation Show Plans

how much space do the documents occupy? potential layout for slash gallery

-measuring the actual square meters of my documents and the scenario roughly 7.48 m2

-exhibition 2 set of headphones reproducing the 7-act-play, the vocal archive

-one 10’-15’ performance where I plan to curate a new scenario of documents. The new script will be distributed to the visitors and perform it all together at the event day.

Thank you note

Gesture Glossary SI 21- I love you/ I see you