User:Senka/Notes Thoughts and Annotations

☽ Given resource ★ Found resource, head over heals about ☆ Found resource, thoroughly enjoyed ⛆ Found resource, it was okay ▵ Thoughts and tangents

Special Issue 1

☽ Peggy Phelan Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction ☽

I'm kind of in conflict with this work a bit. Mostly because Boris Groys's essay "Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction" [1] really informed how I see performance and tech-mediated performance. He for instance posits that all digital files are performed, since their "score": the metadate and encryption has to be read and executed for the content to be generated, which is a kind of reproduction.
What also served as thought is all of this talk of visibility, and the position of invisibility sometimes being a survival strategy. Perhaps not formally but this idea that if there is no representation for you, sometimes you can also circumvent the violence and discrimination that a system that sees you can subject you to.

★ Legacy Russell Glitch Feminist Manifesto ★

Read this manifesto for the radio show Nightly Manifesto I host with Julia Wilhelm. It really spoke to the experience I had growing up in predominantly queer spaces on Tumblr, and the liberty that offered compared to the real world. I like that Legacy proposes that we should use AFK (away from keyboard) instead of IRL (in real life) so as to not prioritize real life and say that the lives we live digitally are 'lesser than'. After all, so much happens online that has consequences on the lives we live afk and vice versa. Politically, socially, economically... to name a few. Legacy's idea of not being named, working from the point of invisibility as a strategy to enact change is also something that makes me quite excited. The idea of the glitch and error as being this disturbing forces that dismantle and confuse the system is also very seductive (although I did start thinking about the fact that even errors are named).

★ Saidiya Hartman Venus in Two Acts & Intimate History, Radical Narrative ★

I read both of these texts for a research fellowship I'm doing and was really blown away. Critical fabulation as a method might be one of the most important writing and thinking tools I have encountered, in relation to archival practices but also on it's own. It really searches for loopholes in oppressive archival structure and dares to imagine otherwise, an alternative. In one of the talk I listened to, Saidiya also described how does she go about shifting the power dynamics through her writing. Because many times, she'll encounter these archival material that are filmed, recorded and preserved by the white gaze. So she gave the example of an image of girl on a balcony that was taken. Instead of narrating from the perspective of the photographer, she will narrative from the perspective of the girl observing the camera man. By doing so she destabilizes who is perceived and observed.
Talked to a friend about Hartman's work since she's reading Lose Your Mother now, and she brought up the wonderful quote:

If the past is a country, I am it's citizen.

Referencing:
Hartman, Saidiya V. (2021) Venus in Two Acts. Los Angeles, Calif, New York, N.Y.: Cassandra Press ; Museum of Modern Art.
Hartman, Saidiya V. (January 1, 2021) “Intimate History, Radical Narrative.” The Journal of African American History 106, no. 1. pp. 127–35. https://doi.org/10.1086/712019.

☽ Making tapes ☽

When we did this prototyping class we manipulated and re-recoded things on manual tape. At one point while playing around the group I was in (with Victor, Wang, Michel and Maria) figured out that we manually move the tape to achieve different speeds of recording. So we made this ghostly, haunting slowed down version by manually moving the tape. It's a very finicky process but I enjoy moments when you can use a machine how it's not meant to be used. Later Joseph build a crank for it so that his action is more streamlined.

☽ Jo Freeman The Tyranny of Structurelessness ☽

In short: no organizing structure (collective, initiative, group) is without a structure, it has either an informal or formal structure. Without an effort of making explicit what the structure is, an informal structure, power dynamic and hierarchy will arise regardless, based on what roles we take on or are put in normally.
I've read a piece called Conversations are a Cybernetic Technology by Dan Taeyoung, that builds heavily on this piece positing that no conversation is structureless either, and gives possible methods and recipes one can experiment with. [2] It's a good read for anyone who works with conversation, interviewing or workshops.

☽ Simon Yuill All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved By the Masses ☽

Dense, dense, dense BUT really useful. When I think of the running collaborations I have, for instance with ARK, they generate a truly collaborative practice and not a distributive one. There's a prominent dissolution of roles and knowledge, what we often talk about as "knowledge convergence", so gaining a shared pool of knowledge by learning from collaborators. This is my preferred way of working in collaboration.

☽ Wendy Chun Queering Homophily ☽

This piece was dense but really asked me to reconsider some ways in which I perceive behavior and the online realm. It poses that homophily, the idea that we love people who are like us, has been treated as if it's a biological fact. It's just how we as humans are, yet this is not really the case. It is just a weapon to further perpetrate segregation. If homophily was a principle that held some truth to it, the majority of people would be homosexual, which is not the case. To make matters worse this is the principle that is the heart of network sciences, informs algorithms, design online platforms... It's not looking pretty
I talked to my friend's partner, who's a biologist, about homophily and he also rightfully pointed out that if homophily was something we could observe around us, there would only be monocultures. So biodiversity would not really exist or be present in the way that it does now.

★ Svetlana Alexievich In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul ★

A text that really spoke to the work I was doing around memory and trying to understand how it is mediated through digital technology and text.

It took me a long time to find a genre that corresponded with the way I viewed the world... to the way my eyes saw and ears heard... a genre that corresponds to my memory. I choose the genre of the human voice.

Svetlana goes into the generational divide, how the generation of her parents were bewitched by utopia and mortally infected with communism, and how her generation has trouble understanding them. She searches for answers through what she calls domestic socialism.

Feelings are documents too. I study missing history, the things that history usually overlooks.

Her resistance to portraying a 'hero journey' often causes anger among those trauma victims that have grown to expect this kind of narrative, instead of something along the lines of what Ursula K. le Guin suggest with the The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

We lived together in a country where we were taught to die beginning in childhood. We learned death and dying. We weren't taught that humans are born for happiness, or love, it was drilled into us that humans exist in order to give of themselves, in order to burn, to sacrifice.

This kind of deeply instilled militarism is not just characteristic of the Russian condition of course, and brings be back to some ideas I was raised with too. Not by my direct family, but but the informal and formal education I went through. This Orthodox Christian insistence on suffering and sacrifice, coupled with the socialist and collectivist ideas that you do not belong to yourself, but to a larger community. Your life is not just your own, it is the the family's, the neighbourhood's, the nation's life. This last ideological conditioning is one which I never managed to escape in life, and admittedly, it has not always been bad. In the context of queer community and kinship, these thoughts have been the support structure I needed to take care of myself but didn't want to. So I took care of myself for the benefit of the community, as without that care, I could not care for others.

★ Paul B. Preciado An Apartment on Uranus ★

This is a book Riviera recommended to me. I'm still in the process of reading it but it's resonating with me a lot from the point of trans embodiment. Equally it is bringing me back to some of the queer currents I'm more fond of: such as embracing the monster label society has stamped on us, reclaiming slurs and similar. It also brought me back to Ece Canli's lecture Monserizing the Master's Tools [3]. The title and core ethos is tied to Audre Lorde's work The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, and Canli's suggestion here is to embrace the monstruos tools the master does not and will not recognize as valuable.

⛆ When Computers were Women ⛆

The title says it all. Important read, especially if you are thinking about how many of these professions not are presented as being for men in some form or fashion. It also points to how deeply devalued the women that joined this labour force were, only for them to be working on the same computers that replaced their labour.

☆ Dead Web Club with Kendal and Thomas ☆

The lecture of Marijn Bril brought up come interesting thoughts and references I charted down:

• "Archive now ask difficult questions afterwards" - this is an archival approach a lot of archival practitioners applied in preserving digital matter such as websites. The didn't make overcomplex protocols in the initial time of archiving, but instead just scraped everything and made sense of it later.
• A network of care - a concept from Annet Dekker in which she proposes experts and laypeople who are enthusiasts about archiving the digital to work together in archiving the web
• Informal and Formal memory - the informal being the individual/personal one and the formal being the more institutional memory. Archiving the digital is of course comprised of both but largely impacted by informal memory.

Questions

Retrospectively, I guess a lot of questions I was thinking about during this term were what to preserve in case of an emergency. As a radiomaker of Worm radio, I'm far to familiar with small emergencies where things get lost. Just recalling the leaks from NRC, the club upstairs, which could have whipped all of the recordings from the playing archive which is the USB hard drive. Thankfully it only damaged the keyboard. Anyhow, digital files are fragile, this is nothing new. Somehow with this question of preservation, the audio files themselves seemed too many, too disorganized, too irrelevant in the face of live radio. Not everyone there even records their sessions. But the space is something that we all share there, and it is present in small interruptions throughout each radio show. The sound of the kitchen during a talk show, the sound of the vacuum bursting at the beginning of a dj set, or the clamoring and party of people just outside the aquarium, the radio studio room. This seemed like something to preserve, not for eternity, but as a snapshot from which we can rebuild after, not a 1:1 ratio, but from the principles of how this studio was assembled.

Special Issue 2

☆ Johanna Hedva Sick Woman Theory ☆

Listened to a reading of Sick Woman Theory from Sen's Anarchist Library here [4]. (The text could be found as a pdf as well [5]) It was really created from this urgency of Hedva wanting to participate in BLM protest but not managing to because of sickness, chronic illness and disability. They advocate for radical kinship, an inter dependent sociality, a politics of care, since we we will all sooner or later encounter disability in our lives. (I live with a few chronic illnesses myself, and the space of this text carries me thru it all).

And, crucially: The Sick Woman is who capitalism needs to perpetuate itself. Why? Because to stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care—its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die. “Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal. Here’s an exercise: go to the mirror, look your self in the face, and say out loud: “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.” Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time.

The lecture To Those Mad, Sick, Crip Selves [6] also just so important, a lot on productivity capital and disability...

Referencing:
Hedva, J. (2020) "Sick Woman Theory". caring structures. Hildesheim: Kunstverein Hildesheim, pp. 38—47. Available at: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.kunstverein-hildesheim.de/assets/04ac220f66/caring-structures_Heft-booklet-v2.pdf (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

☽ Keywords for Radicals entries care and accessibility ☽

I've mostly described this in the Care entry of the ((in)ter)dependence editorial teams reader here [7].

▵ Third Spaces ▵

After our first method's class I found myself thinking a lot about third places. Partly because the architecture of the Netherland has always puzzled me in many ways. In front of buildings, there are no places to sit outside with your neighbours, there are just chairs placed by the brave few, most socializing happens in house, in the garden tucked away in the back, out of sight of the streets (not to mention that a garden is a sign of either luck, privilege or both). Generally third places—places where you don't have to spend money to socialize—are rare. Which is troubling because without them, communities cannot form, at least not easily. And if they cannot have a shared place, they cannot organize, unionize, protest, and the rest. As with many other issues one glances at capitalism with a side eye. I was listening to the video essay Nowhere to Go: The Loss of Third Places [8] which influenced quite a bit of my thoughts about this topic.

▵ Bleja ▵

I've been thinking a lot about the Serbian concept of bleja. It's a mix of hanging out without a purpose, wasting time with a group of people who gather usually at a third place of sorts (parks, abandoned buildings, ruins and forests are all up for grabs). In its original form it is non-hierarchical, no one is a host or a guest, most people are familiar with the gathering location and there is no pressure to perform an activity of any sorts. On Vukajlija[9], an online slang dictionary that any user can contribute to, a lot of people posit bleja as socially looked down upon by elders, because of its association with not being productive (and drinking or smoking). I think there's something really valuable to be gained from the idea of passing time together, resembling a herd of sheep just grazing grass (the word bleja comes from the onomatopea for sheep in Serbian).

★ Johanna Hedva In Defence of De-Persons ★

Here Hedva really builds on their work around crip justice. They advocate for what they've titled 'de-persons' or people affected by depersonalisation and derealization. They write in favour of the messy thought pattern and construction that riddles people with these states. This work speaks to me not just because I am often affected by these states, but because they ask for a different narrative approach when trauma is involved, something I have also tried to highlight in my own work. Some quotes that stuck with me:

To reckon with being haunted is important political work. It can account for why the world right now has come to be as it is. And it can re-imagine a world that is not already foretold.

I cannot think of a form of embodiment that is not somehow disordered. The enforcing of self-possession has happened probably because of the self’s radical disorder. How this can feel unbearable has resulted in the political implication that we are all ungovernable. “Governance then becomes the management of self-management,” as Moten and Harney write.

Referencing:
Hedva, J. (2016) "In Defence of De-persons". GUTS, Issue 6: Futures. Available at: https://gutsmagazine.ca/in/ (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

☽ Susan Leigh Star Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology ☽

Dense, but rich text, for not I will just leave the highlight and imprints it left on me, the rest is in the reader:

A method is distinct from a recipe or formula, in exactly the sense that science is not embodied in a textbook and cooking is not a cookbook. It is a real-time, lived, and experiential form of ordering practice.

Method is a way of surviving experience.

[..]''how—a fundamentally methodological question.

Patti Lather, a brilliant feminist methodologist, has written about this under the rubric transgressive validity (Lather 1993). Her map of attributes of a feminist method, which I read after I wrote the passage above, has some remarkable resonances. She asks the question, where, after poststructuralism, can we find validity? Her answer has four points that together equal a validity which rests reflexively on the contemporary crisis of representation: Ironic validity (which problematizes the single voice, realist representation of nature); paralogical validity (which emphasizes paradox and heterogeneity); rhizomatic validity (which undermines the taken-for-granted and keeps opening up new ways of situated seeing); and voluptuous validity (which precisely goes too far, and joins ethics and epistemology) (685–686).

A monster occurs when an object refuses to be naturalized (Haraway 1992); a borderland occurs when two communities of practice coexist in one person (Anzaldúa 1987). And feminism has had a great deal to say about this, for borderlands are the naturalized home of those monsters known as cyborgs.

☆ Mindy Sue Design Lecture (On the Cyber Feminist Index) ☆

[10] A lot to be said here, Mindy Sue marry meeee but also love the quote: "Hyperlinks are almost a citational practice" [11] Also this as a presentational/sharing method. Presentation notes in the code when you hit right+click Inspect

☆ Mahmoud Darwish Journal of an Ordinary Grief ☆

Darwish titles his work Journal of an Ordinary Grief when writing about the ethnic cleansing, displacement and systemic oppression of the Palestinian people. He places this as an ordinary part of Palestinian life. It's an incredibly important read, and brings closer the reality that Palestinian people had to go through for almost a century. It's tragic, difficult but absolutely necessary for anyone born or living in Europe.

☆ Ren Loren Britton Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars ☆

Very telling work from a person I admire greatly. Points out the real lived reality of the 'borderlands' of living trans. Really resonates with me in the sense of not erasing the names and identities that we were build on.

★ Kaloyan Kolev Yugoslavia’s Digital Twin ★

Fantastic read on a part of Balkan/Yugoslav history I was not aware of. It's of course not just interesting in that context. It looks at the broader history of how internet domains are given to nation states. What Kalo describes as 'baking borders into the internet'. It also addresses the problematics that may arise when a domain name ending outlives a county, such as with the example of .su (soviet union), but also offers an alternative, how these names could be a kind of place to preserve digital memory of countries and times long gone. (Part of an online heritage) [12]

Referencing:
Kolev, K. (2023) "Yugoslavia's Digital Twin", The Dial, Issue 9: Weapons. Available at: https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-9/yugolsav-wars-yu-domain-history-icann. (Accessed: 21 October 2024)

★ Carmen Maria Machado Dream House ★

So far, this has been nothing short from a mind-blowing book on queer trauma and abuse. The structure that Carmen decided on is taking every chapter, titling it "Dream House as..." and giving a genre, or writing approach to explore while portraying the grueling history of abuse. "Dream House as Haunted Mansion", "Dream House as Gothic Novel", "Dream House as Fantasy".. Many stories have footnotes that explain what motif or phenomena/type they build on from the Motif-Index of Folk Literature. I found this to be a fascinating way of the author sharing what tools and methods she is using. Exposing the seams of a written text, while not undoing the writing itself.

Referencing:
Machado, C. M. (2018) In the Dream House. London: Serpent's Tail.

★ Radisav (Rade) Stijovic Between Anxiety and Hope ★

An essay my friend wrote that thinks about the notion of care and betraying traditional bonds to create new meaningful ones. The godparent institution is very powerful where we come from, and he speaks about how his grandmother had many 'non-official' godmothers she mad through their friendships, and how this practice was more meaningful that the tradition. A very inspiring part of the essay is also the double scrolling technique in which the footnotes follow the scrolling of the text and 'travel with the main text'.

★ Dubravka Ugrešić The Confiscation of Memory ★

Recommended by Kaloyan. An essay I was silently looking for while writing Momentary Lapse in Memory. It focuses on the context of memory in the 'former East' with Yugoslavia as the main backdrop, but addresses far more than just this region. It really situates trauma in memory in these regions that have had a very different and difficult history. It addresses the meanings of being born in one country, growing up in another and living in a third while never changing location (I was born in the Yugoslav federation, raised in Serbia and Montenegro, and left just Serbia). I'll leave a particular quote that stuck with me before rambling on about this work:

Things with a past, particularly a shared one, are not as simple as they might first appear from the perspective of the collector. In this ‘post-communist’ age it seems that ‘Easterners’ are most sensitive to two things: communality and the past. Everyone will first maintain that his post-communism is different, implying at the same time his conviction that life in his post-communism is closer to that of the Western democracies than that of the other (post-communist) countries. The ‘Easterner’ is reluctant to admit his post-communist trauma in public, nor does he have the will to try to articulate it. He has had enough communist traumas (he holds the copyright on them, too), but they have worn out, aged, and don’t seem to hurt any more. The cursed ‘homo duplex’, mentally trained to separate his private life from the collective, weary of the constant ideological pressure to live facing towards the future, exhausted by the excessive amount of ‘history’ he has experienced, frightened by memories that keep popping up from somewhere, at this moment the ‘Easterner’ would most like to sink into the compliant and indifferent present, at least that’s how it seems. It is only the younger and more honest of them, like the (former) East German playwright Thomas Oberlender, who will exclaim out loud, ‘Why, I have two lives and one biography...!’

I'm deeply saddened Dubravka died last year.

Referencing:
Ugrešić, Dubravka. (1996) “The Confiscation of Memory”. New Left Review 218, pp. 26-39. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth.

★ CJ the X What Is To Be Done?: A Manifesto To Return To Web 1.5 ★

An online artist whose work I often go back to and this essay turned out to be so thoroughly connected to the topics of our semester, and ideas I've been fermenting in for a while. As much as I'm not the biggest fan of the idea of paying for using the internet, I can agree that CJ has a bit of a point here and it would cause us to stray away from the advertising model of funding. I'm all for Webrings, digital bulleting boards and newsletters and some of these are already things I incorporate in my practice. But a more intentional wearing is something I need to include (note to self). [13]

⛆ Platformer Toolkit ⛆

Very interesting reference Thijs shared with me that presents features and possibilities in game design in an extremely didactic, hands-on learning approach. I especially enjoyed the element of comparing how you designed the characters jump, running speed, camera with existing settings from well know games like Super Mario. Here's the link to the game: [14]

☆ bagenzo and fotocopiadora A Circle of Charity ☆

This game is a quite linear and heavy story if you are gender non-conforming in any way. I enjoyed how it uses different screens to tell a story of perspective, as well as this conceptualization of angels as virtues of dependencies (angels names are charity, patience, temperance). Each angel is flawed, deeply broken, and stuck in a specific circle of violence and trying to provide help for others where they cannot help themselves.

The game is structured by chronological files that were edited by an unknown force (possibly god), and you navigate through the visual novel purely by clicking through the dialogue, yet the immersion is great. The regurgitated sound bites of pixelized conversation along with the music, change of colour and perspective images offer more immersion than one could expect.
Link to the game: [15]

Questions

The thru line of what I've been researching now is in an intersection, a busy road shared between these questions:

• How do we share space (for learning and making) in a non-hierarchical way, that offers support to each participant? (This is a question I've been exploring for ages in the reading clubs I organize)
• How can games help us seek alternatives (to the cloud)? Or be a medium that helps with learning? (And how can such games facilitate an interaction between the online and offline space?) ---- Note to self: Look into the serious games Thijs mentioned
• Another avenue of research has been largely concerned with disability and providing access, both in an online and offline context. How to not leave who join online behind? (This is also partially connected to ideas of public and private, how to protest and resist when chronically ill, how one hosts when chronically ill..)

Special Issue 3

☆ Ruben Pater Caps Lock ☆

Deep dive into graphic design relation to capitalism and how it could possible escape this abuse relationship and history. A lot of good references to be found here and the connection is deeper than I could have imagined in some instances.

☽ Renate Lorenz Queer Art: A Freak Theory ☽

Synopsis: A book which reads into visual art through the lens of queer theory, post-colonial theory and (dis-)ability studies. It proposes three terms radical drag, transtemporal drag, and abstract drag.

Why is it important to me: Because queer theory has allowed me to live a life of radical acceptance. I am interested in how topics highlighted in queer theory could have real life consequences on currents of activism and daily life. (As well as how they could ripple or be represented in work, Since theory (even the queer kind) is often not accessible to most people). Especially the paraphrazation of Muñoz about "drag propos[ing] images in which the future can be lived" sound like it connects deeply to my practice regarding fictioning as a way to bring about new realities into the future.

If “I,” as Judith Butler has written (2004: 15), am always constituted through norms that I myself have not produced, then drag is a way to understand how this constitution occurs, and to reconstruct it on one’s own body. But at the same time, drag is a way to organize a set of effective, laborious, partially friendly, and partially aggressive methods to produce distance to these norms, for instance to the two-gender system, to being-white, to being-able, and to heteronormativity. In so (un)doing, drag proposes images in which the future can be lived. Drag, then, is fabricated by sets of bodily characteristics and actions. While it may indeed take on and thematize norms, it is nonetheless not restricted by them. The combination of fiction and documentary, of lies and claims, of reenactments and inventive experiments, and of conspicuously different bodily characteristics and artistic parts produces bodies that do not match up any dichotomies between “true” or “false” and “normal” and “other.” I would like to understand drag as an artistic work that, as Kathrin Sieg writes (2002: 2), “denounces that which dominant ideology presents as natural, normal, and inescapable, without always offering another truth.” The work of taking up distance is thus also a kind of sexual labor3 of desubjectification – a process that I see as central to practices of denormalization, and thus to queer politics.

Referencing:
Lorenz, R. (2012) Queer Art: A Freak Theory.

▵How technology produces gender (from the airport check to the...) ▵

• at the airport they decide who i am by clicking a button, as a result of the texture of the fabric I wear, my hair style that day and how aggressively i claim my private space by spreading my arms around me. i've been checked by both male and female security, and the only thing i can say is, men are perceived as a bigger threat. more thoroughly searched.
  
• the technology of each language builds gender anew. in english, i am etheral and genderless, in a slavic language i am whichever binary option i choose that day confusing both the people that love me and hate me for it.
  
• the technology of fabric does not build gender but builds how we perceive it. reinforces stereotypes of what we expect the gender of the wearer to be, and those, oh well, those can always be played around with.
  
• in some cases, although not my own yet, gender is produced by the technology of medication, HRT (hormone replacement therapy). in which trans and cis folk receive treatment in which ever direction of gender they want to head in. this process is admittedly way easier for cis folk. the moment a woman has three hairs on her chin and higher testosterone she is offered a way to "fix all of that", while trans folk wait for months, years, lifetimes.
  

☆ Ursula K. le Guin Left Hand of Darkness ☆

Still reading, but so far a very interesting look into a society that has an entirely different perspective of gender, reproduction and appearance.
Compared to some other writings of Ursula, I find this book more difficult to get into fully. As much as it is skillfully written, the language of this fictional world is pompous in an archaic way, and I guess my preference lies with fiction that uses vernacular conversation but is somehow still uncanny, just slightly off.

☽ Blast Theory Rider Spoke ☽

Rider Spoke invites you to cycle through the streets of the city alone with a smartphone on your handlebars and a voice in your ear. You're asked questions about your life, searching for a place to hide your answer to each one. As you cycle, you get to choose - answer another question, or look for the hiding places of others and hear what strangers have to say?

A very nice gamified way of an alternative mapping of a city, as well as a more intimate way of exploring and getting lost in it.

“As soon as it was over, I wanted more. We are truly fortunate in this century, in the wired and anonymous city, to have rediscovered aboriginal notions of songlines and dreamtime, to explore with the aid of mobile technology a new form of strangely low-tech play. Rider Spoke was magical…” William Wiles

Link: [16]

☽ Blast Theory Can You See Me Now? ☽

Can You See Me Now? is one of the first location based games. Online players navigate a 3D map of a city-centre game area, whilst Blast Theory runners are on the streets for real. Runners chase after online players, using mobile devices to follow their location live, whilst runners' positions are tracked by satellite and updated in real time on the 3D game area. With up to 100 people playing online at a time, players use text chat to exchange tactics and send messages to the runners. An audio stream from the runners' walkie talkies allows players to eavesdrop on their pursuers: getting lost, cold and out of breath on the streets of the city.

Very inspiring example of games that depend on interaction from online and offline players. It was interesting to see how reality "cut into" the fabric of the game at times, causing players to jump in and out of the reality of the game. A good example of this is when one of the online players who trying to escape being caught by the onsite one suddenly worried that the onsite player got hit by a reversing truck while running.

Link: [17]

☽ Anastasia Kubrak & Sander Manse Luxury & Paranoia, Access & Exclusion On Capital and Public Space ☽

About:

• vertical zoning and people having access to different privileges despite their physical location
• No-Pokémon Go-Zones due to the misuse of forbidden areas, national parks and similar
• zones that avoid GPS, no fly-zones, gated urban enclaves
• how based on the income of the zone, people get targeted different adds, or suggested different prices for Uber
• smart or ubiquitous cities

it also discussed alternatives to this dystopian future, such as:

• Google Urbanism: "proposes a model which makes the added platform value, produced by – in this case – Google, flow back into the public space where the value is ‘mined’. This happens through exclusive licenses sold by the municipalities that allow companies to extract data from certain locations, forcing them to reinvest part of their profits in the maintenance of public space."
• city-scale local currencies that try to change how capital is being redistributed in the city
• WhatsApp neighbourhood watch groups

In a place devised for economic activity and designed to generate capital, its inhabitants might be assessed on their added value to the city. This brand new city of the future, in a box, won’t be for everyone. Local low-wage workers may not become the zone’s citizens to a full extent: high priced real estate expels them, turning them into migrants. When new Zones are created as clean slates, tech companies quickly move in to develop the city’s infrastructure, introducing hardware and software that circumstantially pushes certain people out and helps to enforce the borders.

☽ Apoorva Tadepalli Dream City ☽

An article discussing cities, the Situationist movement, derive or drift, intimacy in a city and between strangers living in anonimity, "fixed points", neutral zones and ghost spaces, not advocating for more leisure time compared to more work time, but a third: more free time, which include neither of those. It explains how the Situationist's methods were used to go through the city, and the urban planning which designates spaces for either work or leisure, wanting to completely topple these categories and go through the city with the notion of free time.

Louki embodies the Situationists' need to create a new, more honest map of the city; one that reflects experience and memory rather than a unified plan.

I have always loved the saying about not airing your dirty laundry in the public: causing discomfort by mixing your "private" and "public" affairs. But it makes you wonder what we mean when we talk about dirty laundry. Can there be anything resembling intimacy without it?

Why is it important to me:
Offers a different way of navigating through the city and talk about free time, or time not designated to be spent doing something, whether it be working or resting. This closely connects to the concept of bleja in Serbian, which was the quintessential mode of hanging out in public/third spaces/liminal places where I grew up. No hosts, no activities to be done and no obligations to meet, there were known spots to meet and an insistence of spending time together and allowing for the passage of time without being anyhow productive. The Situationist's notion of free time is quite similar in some respects, yet it focuses on movement and discovery.

Link: [18]

☽ Estraven Lupino-Smith Morality Cuts: Uncovering Queer Urban Ecologies ☽

An article about wild spaces (or spaces less used by people) and the meddling of nations and government bodies to redefine what 'wild' is from untamed and frightening to untouched and tranquil, in an effort to build national myth. The execution and building of this myth in an urban context has been termed morality cuts by Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau. They cut down trees and bushes to prevent “perverts and alcoholics” from using the park. The piece talk about how these "wild" spaces are often used as cruising sports for queer people, and are being perceived as frightening for a heteronormative crowd.

I have come to realize that some of the places where urban coyotes can thrive without detection and queer folks can hook up are the same. We share these spaces because they both need the wild within the city. It’s a wild that exists in the places and spaces that are liminal, nestled in-between the order of the developed urban landscape.

Through this conception, the woodlots, brownfields, and the public park are an extension of settlement, not the absence of it. They are defined as wild because of the colonial notions about space. Leisure and the way nature is to be interacted with is designed, with particular ideas about what the outcome should be. The public park is also a place of powerful imaginaries about land and nation. Canada as a nation markets parks and the great outdoors as part of its identity. The very establishment of space as a park is a part stripping the wild from it. When the peaks of mountains are a place to ski and enjoy vistas, the wild is tamed into something that is mobilized for a settler imaginary.

When it comes to wild spaces, settler notions place one of two uses: site of exploitation for the production of wealth, or site of leisure that is groomed and maintained.

Why is it important to me:
Examines the disappearance of wilderness. I've grown up in a post-industrial zone next to the largest forest in the city, abandoned factories, and the nature reclaiming all of that concrete were the norm. These spaces were later taken up by groups that exist on the margins of society.

Link: [19]

☆ Barbara Visser Alreadymade ☆

A film about how the Fountain (the ready-made art that marked the trajectory of art in the 20th century) by Duchamp was actually made by Elsa von Fretyag, who was entirely forgotten. The documentary covers the search of trying to find information about her life and work, and through-out the work they try to 'bring her back' through performance, a body suit and 3D modeling and texturing. Absolutely amazing work, really inspiring in terms of how to deal with hidden histories with technology.

• 

  Still from Visser Barbara's film Alreadymade

• 

  Still from Visser Barbara's film Alreadymade

Referencing:
Alreadymade. (2023). [Mp4]. Directed by Barbara Visser. The Netherlands: Tomtit Film and VPRO.

☆ Ivana Keser Battista Places, non-places, spaces ☆

Conceptualizes the identity of public space in Eastern Europe and the Balkans as inherently liminal, since the identity of the region (at least the Balkans) was prescribed by the cultural hegemony of the West as oriental. Notes in the this pad, just scroll down to them [20]

• public space is political space and it is not a given but an accomplishment (Saskia Sassen)

Referencing:
Keser Battista, I. (2023) 'Places, non-places, spaces', Zbornik radova Akademije umetnosti, (11), pp. 48-61. doi:10.5937/ZbAkU2311048B.

☆ Boris Groys Migration as Universalism ☆

Groys talks about migration as really the most important and only universal political topic that the arts should be dealing with. Considering current proposed Dutch anti immigration policies, I couldn't agree more.

Not so long ago the internet served as the main symbol and medium of globalization. Today, one is regularly reminded that the corporations and organizations that operate the internet have real, physical, off-line addresses in territories that are controlled by certain states. As such, they are increasingly used as instruments of surveillance, propaganda, and fake news. Instead of constituting a virtual space beyond state borders, the internet is increasingly understood as a scene of struggle for interstate information wars.

And in general, without political engagement, art ceases to be contemporary because being contemporary means being involved in the politics of one’s own time.

But there is one aspect of the contemporary political situation that immediately concerns and involves contemporary art. It is the problem of migration.

Migration is the one truly universal, international phenomenon of our time.

The main presupposition of the ideology of these parties is this: every cultural identity has to have its own territory on which it can and should flourish—undisturbed by influences from other cultural identities.

In other words: today the New Right uses the language of identity politics that was developed by the New Left in the 1960s–80s.

Link to the essay, in a version slightly different from the one I read [21]

★ Nat Pyper This girl likes to write/ride ★

Really well written zine about the girls, I can't even explain what it is about but it is an Experience.
One of the stories are about the girls getting arrested at the customs because of the books they're reading.

ADD QUOTES 

★ Ursula K. le Guin When to bend, When to break ★

A short essay/article from Ursula on when to work with and when to break and stray from the three notorious rules of writing:

• Show, don’t tell — her critique on students now being afraid of describing anything from the world they're writing about and having merely dialogue heavy works. (She gives the first chapter of The Return of the Native as an antidote to this attitude)
• Write about what you know — she humourously points to how she does this actually as a fiction writer talking about alien universes.
• Always have a sympathetic character for the reader to relate to — points to the nuance that should exist in this rule. What is a sympathetic character really? And what about fables, who don't have characters to relate to?
  

Read here: [22]

★ Low-tech Magazine on solar websites, carbon emission in web design ★

Notes about what they've embrace to make a light-weight website:

• static website
• dithered images
• Svgs are conditionally okay - inline svgs that can be styled with CSS elements
• Images sprites
• default fonts + no logo - the default font of a browser can be customised and changed. Less for weights makes it more lightweight.
• self hosted server - with IT no need for trafficking and cookies because you can see all of that already
• Pelican a static site generator
• Native Java script, not leaving external libraries like jQuery
• Java is loaded just on the pages it is necessary to
• They have a web to print version to enable people to print when the web is not actually the most sustainable. They use the maximum amount of the page resourcefully
  

Link to article [23]

A friend who did not want to sacrifice font choices and colour in web design but still wanted a carbon-neutral website, made a hosting agreement with a farmer that uses pig shit as a renewable source of energy to power the small data centre. It's more expensive hosting but it's also less environmentally damaging.

★ All Tomorrows Parties ★

A text adventure game that doesn't really offer multiple streams of though or directions. In terms of topic, it deals with being trans or figuring that out, it's written in a very vulnerable and intimate way. It's really frank and open about the questioning element of identity within the format of the text-adventure game. But it ends on a link to another game that the person made, which is not related to the topic (i think). I found that bit a tad confusing.

Link to the game [24]

★ 2.22 am ★

A screenshot from the game 2.22am

A game recommended to me through this video essay on liminal spaces called The Art of The In-Between: An Analysis of Liminal Spaces [25] by Cresendex. It's an absolutely dreamy mix of randomized scenes and crackly playable moments. You are sort of jerked in and out of this dreamscape, feeling a bit out of control.
In the first play, I ended on a very long fuzzy broken screen. As I was staring into the screen for some 7 minutes or so I felt absolute comfort in just melting into the screen without a single thought in my mind. Like watching popcorn pop in a microwave.
It really managed well to evoke the feelings of liberation you get in liminal spaces. The atmosphere of 'not being anyone important', 'without being perceived' and being allowed to 'just exist' without the pressures of having a recognizable identity you must adhere to like a script. Liminal spaces afford you to not think about the consistency you have to provide to people, and this game carved that space out in the editing perfectly.

Link to game [26]

Referencing:
2.22am. (?) PC [Game]. itch.io: umbrella-isle.

★ Cresendex Liminal spaces—The Fear of Forgetting ★

tba: good connection to memory and approximation
Link: [27]

Graduation Year

★ Sophie Lewis Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation ★

Interesting manifesto I haven't made up my mind about. It talks about how in current politics, care has been outsourced to the nuclear family, in order for there to be less investment and focus on institutional structures that can provide care. It advocated for moving away from the family as a structure altogether, instead of just finding an alternative mode of a family (not nuclear, heteronormative, cis, patriarchal), because these alternatives still operate within the system in which the normative family is prioritized.

☽ Octavia Butler Kindred ☽

This work was Steve's suggestion, based on some fiction I was writing at the time. I was glued to this story, finding ways to be alone to get a chance to read more of it. It is, to my knowledge the piece that brought fiction authors to think about time travel from a racial perspective. The main character, Dana involuntarily time travels and meets her ancestors, a plantation owner and a slave. The book poses many questions about how survival is possible for marginalized people, and how trauma might be embedded in the body, or the history of this violence live on in the present and take people back. To anyone interested in fiction, a must read. (Thank you Steve)

Referencing:
Butler, O. E. (1979) Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press.

★ Annie Ernaux The Years ★

Haven't finished reading this one BUT so far a very interesting way to weave in different narratives of collective and individual post-war memories. Generally a wild and ambitious endeavour of a skilled writer who doesn't miss a chance to also analyse the intricate social rituals at play. ( Eg the analysis of sending the staged photos of the newborn to family and friends) There's a lot to take her in terms of mode of address, and weaving.

Referencing:
Ernaux, A. (2022) The Years. London:Fitzcarraldo Editions.

☽ Bojan Bilić & Aleksa Milanović (editors) Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture ☽

Quite a lot of information here. This journal was gifted to me by my friends Nemanja and Rade, i immediately told them that this might be my go-to for the thesis. It's structured in 3 different sections: life, activism and culture.
So far I've read 6 essays in a non-linear ping pong way and the one that stuck with me the most was discussing the art, cultural impact and techniques by the sevdah singer Božo Vrećo. Božo, although visibly and admittedly queer, is widely accepted in the Balkans as a singer with an angelic voice, a singer which was sent from God and transcends. This is super curious because not a lot of gender-nonconforming singers in the Balkans have such a reputation. The thing is, Božo never uses the western words to express what their identity means. Even my use of they/them pronouns is questionable. They always just say I am both man and woman, I live bit lives.
Aside from this, Božo sings sevdah, which is known as traditional Bosnian music, he merges the past with a vision of the future that includes people like him. And equally makes sense of the difficult past of the region (eg. through a song in which he sings about how his friend died during the civil war). So, in a lot of ways Božo connects to the context and history of this region to express queerness in a way that people understand better than what has been 'copy pasted' from the West.
This just brought a lot of interesting thoughts about language and cultural associations of them in the region.

Works read so far:

• Uvod: U postjugoslovenskim trans svetovima (by Bojan Bilić & Aleksa Milanović)

I Životi

• Protiv rodne binarnosti: Trans osobe i mentalno zdravlje u Srbiji (by Jelena Vidić & Bojan Bilić)
• Putem od žute cigle... Trans kvir život u Jugoslaviji i kasnije (by Milan Agata Đurić)

II Aktivizmi

• Od borbe za opstanak do aktivizma: Istorija transrodnosti na Kosovu sedamdesetih godina naovamo (by Lura Limani)
• (Post)socijalističke nevolje s rodom: Transfobija u srpspskom levom aktivizmu (by Bojan Bilić)
• Trans-feminističke koalicije na postjugoslovenskom prostoru: Ka radikalnoj feminističkoj solidarnosti (by Maja Pan)

III Kulture

• Trans aktivizam na postjugoslovenskom prostoru: Strategije otpora i inkluzije (by Aleksa Milanović)
• Ka nebelom trans feminizmu: Intervju sa Anom Jovanović (by Matea Stefanović)
• Ka ne/zajedničkoj budućnosti: Kritička istorija beogradske dreg scene (by Andrea Filipović)
• Istina je ono što je u telu: Intervju sa Aleksom Zainom (by Slađana Branković)
• Sevdah na kvir način: Rodni nekonformizam u tradicionalnoj muzici Bosne i Hercegovine (by Tea Hadžiristić)

Referencing:
Overall:
Bilić, B. & Milanović A (ur). (2022)Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb.
Essays:
Bilić, B. & Milanović A. (2022) "Uvod: U postjugoslovenskim trans svetovima".Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 12–31.
Ulićević, J. & Brković, Č. (2022) "Trans otpornost u Crnoj Gori: Medijski narativi o životima trans ljudi". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 34–53.
Bilić, B. & Vidić J. (2022) "Protiv rodne binarnosti: Trans osobe i mentalno zdravlje u Srbiji". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 54–90.
Đurić, A. M. (2022) "Putem od žute cigle... Trans kvir život u Jugoslaviji i kasnije". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 112–121.
Žegura, I. (2022) "Trans saveznica: Autoetnografija jedne kliničke psihologinje iz Hrvatske". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 122–149.
Limani, L. (2022) "Od borbe za opstanak do aktivizma: Istorija transrodnosti na Kosovu sedamdesetih godina naovamo". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 152–189.
Gramc, M. (2022) "Vijugave staze trans budućnosti: Trans pokret u Sloveniji". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 190–215.
Hodžić, A. Poštić, J. & Kajtezović A. (2022) "(Ne)vidljivo T: Trans aktivizam u Hrtvatskoj (2004.-2019.)". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 216–239.
Bilić, B. (2022) "(Post)socijalističke nevolje s rodom: Transfobija u srpspskom levom aktivizmu". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 240–265.
Pan, M. (2022) "Trans-feminističke koalicije na postjugoslovenskom prostoru: Ka radikalnoj feminističkoj solidarnosti". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 266–289.
Kolektiv Talas TIRV (2022) "Kako smo ustalasali trans aktivizam u Srbiji". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 290–295.
Milanović, A. (2022) "Trans aktivizam na postjugoslovenskom prostoru: Strategije otpora i inkluzije". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 298–317.
Filipović, A. (2022) "Ka ne/zajedničkoj budućnosti: Kritička istorija beogradske dreg scene". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 318–347.
Stefanović, M. (2022) "Ka nebelom trans feminizmu: Intervju sa Anom Jovanović". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 348–353.
Branković, S. (2022) "Istina je ono što je u telu: Intervju sa Aleksom Zainom". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 354–365.
Hadžiristić, T. (2022) "Sevdah na kvir način: Rodni nekonformizam u tradicionalnoj muzici Bosne i Hercegovine". Postjugoslo/avenski TRANS: životi aktivizmi kulture. Multimedijalni institut: Zagreb. pp. 366–387.

☽ Srdjan Yugosplaining the World ☽

[28] Interesting conference and collections of texts. Collective memory, migrant politics, visibility... This source was recommended to me by Ana Milić.

At the time, the Yugoslav wars and their extreme violence were viewed by the West as idiosyncratic, isolated events, unrelated to broader process of political and economic transformation in the world – the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of communism. Indeed, they were just outright inconvenient for the world that celebrated the end of history. Yugoslavia, once deeply entangled with both the East and the West and even more so with the Global South, was all of a sudden isolated from history – including its own.

☽ The work of Jelena Savić ☽

The website and work of an eastern European Roma activist: https://thejelenasavic.wordpress.com/

☽ Yugoslawomen+ Collective The tale of ‘good’ migrants and ‘dangerous’ refugees ☽

[29] This source was recommended to me by Ana Milić, and it's really valuable in terms of understanding the conditionality of the 'good migrant' trope in terms of a Balkan or more largely eastern European immigrant.

In this new, bended narrative, we observe that people on the move are not looked at, problematized, or empathised with because of their sheer human subjectivity. Rather, whether they have the potential and the capacity to become a good investment in our multicultural, democratic, and Christian-secular societies is openly questioned. In this new gaze, the migrant is inadvertently asked to cast aside the reasons that brought her to our gates, and instead entertain the Western imagination of her worth to Western society. This change of narrative and politics is not entirely new. It was partly there already during the Yugoslav refugee crises when the EU countries ‘offered’ only temporary protection and precarious legal statuses to many fleeing the violence. The story of how hospitable the Western countries are towards refugees is retroactively invented in the present.

The ‘good post-Yugoslav migrant’, however, is also part of the racialized hierarchy in the Global North. Our ‘whiteness’ has oftentimes been conditional on our performance as a ‘good migrant’. Being part of the intellectual elite, although more often economically precarious than the citizens, and expected to perform a gratitude utterance to the countries where we migrated is part of that conditionality.

Also reminded me of a talk I was hearing from Dubravka Ugrešić in which she, 10 years ago addressed how Wilders talked about the threat of eastern Europeans stealing the jobs of Dutch natives [30]

Add timestamps that we're important, like when she says: 'They don't plant flowers. Gardening is believing in the future.'

Referencing:
The Yugoslawomen+ Collective. (2020) "The tale of ‘good’ migrants and ‘dangerous’ refugees." Yugosplaining the World. Available at: https://thedisorderofthings.com/2020/07/19/17977/. (Accessed: 21 October 2024)

☽ Milica Bakic Hayden Nesting Orientalism ☽

This source was recommended to me by Ana Milić, a researcher currently doing work on queer migrant stories of the post-yugo region.
Extremely interesting piece, hits the nail on the head in terms of elaborating on the complexities of how the post-yugoslav region is perceived, and how this image of the east (eastern Europe has been coined through the idea of essences of a people, I'm this case Slavic, and more specifically Balkan people). It also critically engages with the many layers of othering that happen in this region, and how with each new effort to seem more 'european' another group is othered and proclaimed more 'backwards'

Thus, eastern Europe has been commonly associated with "backwardness," the Balkans with "violence," India with "idealism" or "mysticism," while the west has identified itself consistently with the "civilized world." But "backwardness," as Larry Wolff shows, has not just been a benign metaphor confined to the first travel diaries of the westerners into the area that the Enlightenment mapped as eastern Europe; it has also been a constitutive metaphor in the social-scientific language of influential philosophers and writers of the time, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau.

It has been suggested recently by Maria Todorova that "Balkanism" can be posited as an independent and specific rhetorical paradigm, not ''merely a sub-species of orientalism," for the part of Europe that was under Ottoman rule.'5 Todorova shows that balkanism independently developed a rhetorical arsenal of its own via its specific geo-political, religious and cultural position, best epitomized in a travelogue of the late 1920s as a "'wavering form', a composite of Easterner and Westerner... no longer Orientals nor yet Europeans." 16 This particular, often derogatory perception of a region and its peoples blurs the categories of "East" and "West," and calls for an approach that addresses the specific issues that stem from such a liminal position.'7

Indeed, former Yugoslavia offers a disquieting example of the implications of the redeployment of old dividing lines and the construction of new political identities. Yugoslav peoples have not only questioned their common-identity-through-common-communist-state but, led by their political and intellectual elites, have also embarked on restoring "original" identities that predated the common state.25 Essences embedded in the division of Europe predating the constitution of the Yugoslav state in 1918 have thus resurfaced, becoming an integral part of public discourse which has taken place against the background of the prospective unification of Europe. One striking characteristic of this national self-examination and inter-ethnic reexamination has been total disregard for the diachronic dimension of past events. That is, the whole of history of these peoples, whether common or individual, has become simultaneous and idealized. To paraphrase Bakhtin,26

Referencing:
Bakić-Hayden, M. (1995) "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia". Slavic Review, Vol. 54, No. 4. pp. 917–931. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2501399 (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

☽ Ana Miljački Once Upon a Time in Yugoslavia ☽

Very interesting work that brought me closer to some other references I want to check out, such as 'E baš Vam hvala'.
I also find insightful the distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia.
Link to piece > [31]

Although they come without an explicit explanation, they are most interesting to contemplate indeed as “portals” to contemporary forms of neglect and destruction, both of the architecture they present and of the project of Yugoslavia that those architectures in part materialized. To the historical “super” Yugoslavia on display around them, Jeck’s photographs serve as the gray, dilapidated, post-transition “now”—Mirko’s and our own

But the last, devastating article of the show’s catalog by Andrew Herscher urges readers not to succumb to the inertia of common imagining that the project of socialist Yugoslavia failed somehow naturally, because it had to fail. On the contrary, Herscher asks us to contemplate the difference between “failure of a political project and the destruction of a political project,” which in his mind requires “attention to both the narration of that project’s past and assays of its potential futures.”

Vidojković insists that his novel is not about Yugonostalgia “because those who helped destroy the country are still amongst us.”38 And though I admit to experiencing pangs of my own nostalgia in confronting this material and to detecting it in various guises throughout the show, I want to suggest that the most important way to see this exhibition is not, or not only as, a “historical show” but also as a contemporary reenactment: as a reconstitution of that emancipatory and unifying project of Yugoslavia by a group of young researchers across the old Yugoslavian territory.39 This would indeed align it with Buden’s retro-utopian objects and acts, which “do not simply document the truth of our past as much as they document the truth of our relationship with that past, which is simultaneously also a truth about a very specific belief in a better future.”4

For the former inhabitants of Yugoslavia, twenty-five years after its collapse, the show, and the elements of everyday life it presents, frame a confrontation with an important historical feeling: nostalgia.37 But many elements of life in socialist Yugoslavia and of its violent breakup make it impossible for this audience’s nostalgia to be restorative. In the late Svetlana Boym’s brilliant definition, nostalgia is not simply a personal feeling but a historical and collective one. She insists on a typological distinction between two nostalgias. Restorative nostalgia is deadly serious, resting on symbols and aiming for absolute truths. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, has the capacity to operate sideways, through humor and irony, allowing for multiple and contradictory narratives to coexist. It also has the capacity to look forward. Reflective nostalgia is worth cultivating in the population of ex-Yugoslavians and their children—who would hardly recognize the outlines of their parents’ former country, or fully understand the complexity of its successes or its breakup—because looking forward together is the most necessary for the region’s economic and political future.

Referencing:
Milački, A. (2018) Once Upon a Time in Yugoslavia. The Avery Review 35. Available at: https://www.averyreview.com/issues/35/once-upon-a-time (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

☽ Vladimir Kulić Orientalizing Socialism: Architecture, Media, and the Representations of Eastern Europe ☽

Link to work > [32]
Article about what the recent representation of socialist architecture does to a history of a region.

Skaters skating over the Jasenovac monument because it looks 'alien'...

Referencing:
Kulić, V. (2018) "Orientalizing Socialism: Architecture, Media, and the Representations of Eastern Europe". Architectural Histories, 6(1), p.7. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.273

☽ Mia Melvær A Reparative Approach to Publishing ☽

Michael's recommendation, definitely touches upon a lot of my concerns. It also build from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work Link to piece > [33]

Now, published material can also be editable. An example that highlights this modifiable and shape-shifting nature can be found on one of Wikipedia’s more heavily edited articles: the page that defines the word Femicide/Feminicide. The page is in constant flux, ebbing and flowing between different communities, some of whom want it to represent the gendered nature of the majority of murders of women, and others who do not want the page to exist at all or prefer it to automatically “redirect” to a gender-neutral page such as Gendercide. Since Wikipedia has a log for every version of each article, the reader can look up and compare the multitude of ways this topic has been “defined.” Which version is currently served to Wikipedia’s numerous daily users depends very much upon which community has most recently rewritten the article and how they would tell the story. This is, of course, an editing example full of conflict and completely devoid of trust, but it illustrates how the editable written word is, in some cases, moving closer to the dynamics of oral history.

It might even be advantageous if we let oral history traditions remind us that the written word, too, is temporary and, in essence, about keeping something fleeting alive in our collective memory. The two traditions might just be working at a slightly different pace. Where oral histories have long been anchored in practices of repetition, versioning, and ignoring fantasies about singular authorship, systems of publishing are still learning to trust and fully incorporate these dynamics, finding room for changes that are not based in the singular but in the collective – spongy and networked. We are supporting a publishing practice that can let go of illusions of singular genius, copyright, and permanence while nurturing trust, which means that we need to find tools and tactics for versioned and community-driven publication practices.

Referencing:
Melvær, M. (2022) "A Reparative Approach to Publishing". MARCH. Available at: https://march.international/a-reparative-approach-to-publishing/ (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (2002) “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press.

☽ Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart Now It's Personal: On Abusive Game Design ☽

By arguing that game designers are first and foremost advocates for the player, contemporary game design theory has implicitly established that games-mediated play consists of the relation between a player and a system. The designer becomes the odd one- out, pressured to efface their own presence in order to ensure that the game is optimally tailored to the player. Not all game design practices need fit this model. In fact, we believe that the most provocative game design possibilities are found where this relation is disrupted. We are interested in what happens when players engage in a dialogue with the designer – when play becomes personal.

Kind of abusive game design tactics: Physical Abuse, Unfair Design, Lying to the Player, Aesthetic Abuse, Synergies of Abuse

In the logic of conservative game design, the designer advocates for the player by creating a tool for predicted pleasures. That is, players engage with the game system, and are encouraged to instrumentalize their play by means of system procedures that reinforce the intended experience. In this view, the power structure is between a player and a system, with the designer vanishing into the background. The lusory attitude is interpreted as an instrumental good, a measure of the success of a design in terms of a player’s engagement with a system. Abusive game design operates in a different manner: it uses the productive capacities of play as a power relation to override the instrumental perspectives that deem the game system as central to the play experience, and instead encourages players to focus on the human designer. The game system, rather than take on a generative position within the network, simply mediates the interactions between players and designers. Abusive game design is designed to break the “toolness” of conventional game systems and, instead, create instruments that support a personal relation between designer and player. The game object becomes a means for a dialogue, rather than an isolated tool for play.

For our purposes, the most relevant facet of Dunne’s theory of the post-optimal object is his notion of “user-unfriendliness.” Dunne argues that post-optimal objects can act as poetic breaches in the conventionalisms of de-ideologized design: “[…] design is always ideological. User-friendliness helps conceal this fact” [14, p. 22]. Dunne continues that design, at least as commonly theorized, “holds back the potential of electronics to provide new aesthetic meanings” [14, p. 30]. As a reaction against this conventionalism, Dunne proposes that we push design practices towards the userunfriendly, “a form of gentle provocation [that] could characterize the post-optimal object” [14, p. xviii]. This viewpoint shifts the focus from the user to the object, to “providing aesthetic experiences through the electronic objects themselves” [14, p. 35].

Referencing:
Wilson D. & Sicart M. (2008) Now It’s Personal: On Abusive Game Design. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen, Center for Computer Games Research.

☽ dys4oria ☽

Thijs recommended me this game, and I ate it up. It's a colourful Flash pixel game, which gives you the option to go through the life experience of the trans woman that made it. The controls center around the arrow keys, and provide small interactions that uncover the experience, or make sense of it. It's heartfelt and difficult, as the journeys often are. Link to it [34]

Referencing:
dys4ia. (2023) PC [Flash Game]. itch.io: anna anthropy.

☽ Brin Žvan & Mathias Schifter There is no Abusive Game Design: A typology of Counter Game Design ☽

A sort of academic response to "Now It’s Personal: On Abusive Game Design" which considers how games have evolved since the proposition of abusive game design as a concept. It lays out a typology of what kind of abuse can exist in game design: Social Engineering (social/rule), Rule Based Encouragement of Bleed (social/rule), Transgression of Taboos (social), Emotional Abuse (social), Game Platform Abuse (social/rule), Abuse of Touch (sensory), Abuse of Smell (sensory), Abuse of Hearing(sensory), Abuse of Sight(sensory), Hidden Visual Information(sensory/rule), Attrition Abuse (rule), Intentionally Frustrating Controls (rule), Unfriendly Difficulty (rule). But ultimately concludes that there is no abusive game design only counter game design, since the culture surrounding games has evolved so much that users often seek extreme difficulty.

add quotes

Referencing:
Zvan B. & Schifter M. (2022) There is no Abusive Game Design: A typology of Counter Game Design. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen.

☽ Jelisaveta Blagojević and Olga Dimitrijević (ur) Među nama: Neispričane priče gej i lezbejskih života ☽

This seems to be the first academic journal about gay and lesbian histories and lives in the former Yugoslav region. It goes deep into everything from life in the middle ages before the rule of the Ottoman empire to current representation in pop-culture media.
At the time of writing this, I was mostly diving into the first section of the journal which has a deep historical look. It's a bit hard to read, not in terms of language, so much as knowing the influence and repression christianity imposed on queer people then. How much they needed to pay for their 'sins' and how much confessing was accentuated. Oddly, unlike in many other places, lesbians were not excluded from the oppression, although they suffered less severe consequences.
The introduction is especially valuable, in parts where they address other possible titles for the book, such as 'И ам коминг оут' which is just a transliterated version of 'I am coming out'. This title was one they considered because of how so much queer discourse and perception is skewed based on an ill fitting translation from a western-context. They also addressed that the book is not just about Serbia, since it was part of so many other countries, unions, histories, but they could also not claim that the journal was about the whole of the ex-yu region as it as it had a Serbian focus.

Referencing:
Overall:
Blagojević J. & Dimitrijević O. (2014) Među nama: Neispričane priče gej i lezbejskih života. Beograd: Hartefakt Fond.
Essays:
Blagojević J. & Dimitrijević O. (2014) "Još uvek nismo kvir: tragovi prošlosti i ili osmišljavanje budućnosti". Među nama: Neispričane priče gej i lezbejskih života. Beograd: Hartefakt Fond. pp. 9–16
Stolić, A. (2014) "Od muželoštva i ženske malakije do protivpravnog bluda i patologije – Neki aspekti istorije homoseksualnosti u Srbiji od srednjeg veka do kraja Drugog svetskog rata". Među nama: Neispričane priče gej i lezbejskih života. Beograd: Hartefakt Fond. pp. 17–21
Bojanin, S. (2014) "Homoseksualnost u srednjovekovnoj Srbiji". Među nama: Neispričane priče gej i lezbejskih života. Beograd: Hartefakt Fond. pp. 22–39

☽ Izokvireni ☽

So this is a podcast where the host talks to queer people from former Yugoslavia who have emigrated because of being queer. Most of the episodes are with people who now reside in the West, with the exception of the first episode with a Nenad who is in China. This episode in particular affirmed my suspicion that Balkan queers do not need to go to the root of progress but they just need to move away from the epicenter of pain (their country of origin).
Like many other references on this list, this was recommended by Ana Milić.

Referencing:
?. (2022) Izokvireni. [Podcast]. Available at: Spotify. (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

★ Tampon Zona Autovanje, odrastanje i podrška roditelja: Milan Nikolic i Vedrana Mirković ★

An outstanding podcast episode on coming out, growing up queer and parental support. It really touches the core of some of the predicaments of queer people in the Balkans, such as waiting to be financially stable, getting a bachelors, master, and phd until you 'come out' to your family. They talk about this need to be seen as good, outstanding even, so that this perception will dampen any disappointment caused by being queer.
They also talk about the fact that parents of queer people in the Balkans experience a particular kind of loneliness since they often are not surrounded by parents who are experiencing the same thing.
I was really drawn in by the way Milan Nikolic narrated his childhood and growing up, the things people said that punctured him, and the habit of some parents of a 'certain generation' to call being gay 'it'. 'Are you it?' (Јеси ли ти то/оно?). Somewhere in the back of my mind the words of his father in regards to him coming out will stay with me 'Исћефи то, па се врати' meaning 'Enjoy that life a bit, but then try to get back'.
Additionally, when the hostess asked what needs to happen for the life of queers to be better here, I am so happy Vedrana said that the class and gender status first has to get to a better position for that to follow. I found it to be a quite insightful and intersectional answer.

Referencing:
Parađanin Lilić, I. (2024) 'Autovanje, odrastanje i podrška roditelja: Milan Nikolic i Vedrana Mirković', Tampon Zona. [Podcast]. Available at: Youtube. (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

★ bell hooks marginality as a site of resistance ★

bell hooks here regards how there's so much knowledge production that happens in marginal space which is not regarded as knowledge until it is adapted to the language of white academia. hooks really advocated for not doing this assimilation work and trying to resist by regarding the margin as a site of radical possibility.

Referencing:
hooks, b. (1990) "marginality as a site of resistance". pp. 341–343.

★ Johanna Hedva Get Well Soon ★

A text that was published in the same publication as Sick Woman Theory. Hedva talks about how time is different for the chronically ill and how it expands the present moment in a similar way that protest and revolution do, even though it seems like it's polar opposite. They end on a reassuring note about how both the word caregiver and caretaker mean essentially the same thing. (And they mention something that I find comforting, which is that a revolution is also your friend bringing you groceries if you're ill, considering the state of care infrastructures).

Referencing:
Hedva, J. (2020) "Get Well Soon". caring structures. caring structures. Hildesheim: Kunstverein Hildesheim, pp. 51-53. Available at: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.kunstverein-hildesheim.de/assets/04ac220f66/caring-structures_Heft-booklet-v2.pdf (Accessed: 21 October 2024).

★ Franko Dota PUNISHING HOMOSEXUALS IN THE YUGOSLAV ANTI-FASCIST RESISTANCE ARMY ★

[tba]

• Sandžak Partisan.
• Josip Mardešić.

Referencing:
Dota, F. (2018) “PUNISHING HOMOSEXUALS IN THE YUGOSLAV ANTI-FASCIST RESISTANCE ARMY”. QUEER IN EUROPE DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR. Council of Europe Publishing. pp. 129–143.

★ Miriam Rasch A Vade Mecum of Urgent Editing ★

[tba]
An essay on urgent editing written using Twine, the free software for making choose-your-own-adventures and non=linear writing.
Link to reference > [35]

Referencing:
Rasch, M. (2021) A Vade Mecum of Urgent Editing. APRIA: ArtEZ Platform for Research Interventions of the Arts. DOI:10.37198/APRIA.03.03.a2. https://apria.artez.nl/a-vade-mecum-of-urgent-editing. Accessed on December 12 2024.

★ fairly intelligent ★

[tba]
Survey format. Plays with expectations. You try to write what you want but it only allows you to write the things you don't want to. Comments on the tech landscape and race.

Link to reference > [36]

★ Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk What kind of archivist are you? ★

[tba]
Link to source > [37]

★ Reading Rhythms Club Wormholes, Time-warps, and Unruly Tides: On queer time and space ★

[tba notes and photos to add]

★ Sophie Marie Niang in defence of what’s there: notes on scavenging as methodology ★

[tba]
Referencing:
Niang, S. M. (2024). in defence of what’s there: notes on scavenging as methodology. Feminist Review, 136(1). pp. 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789231222606

★ Pawel Leszkowicz Contemporary Art and Alternative Queer Archival Strategies in Central and Eastern Europe ★

[tba]
Talks about art as a reconstructive archival practice.
Link to reference> [38]
Referencing:
Leszkowicz, P. (2017) Contemporary Art and Alternative Queer Archival Strategies in Central and Eastern Europe. Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan/Poland and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki/Finland.

★ GayEcho - Istorija: LGBT prava u SFRJ ★

[tba]
Mentions the notion of queerness being perceived as Western.
Link to reference > [39]