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File:Image-MakeyMakey.jpeg See “Interfacial Workout,” Hackers & Designers, October 24, 2019,
https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Activities/p/Interfacial_Workout "Interfacial Workout," and “Workshop ctrl-c HFG Karlsruhe,” YouTube, May 24, 2018, https://youtu.be/T4YkgIshzVg, and “Workshop ctrl-c HFG Karlsruhe – 2,” YouTube, May 24, 2018, https://youtu.be/_rJZJrS40tc
First, Then… Repeat.
Workshop scripts in practice
Hackers & Designers (ed. Anja Groten)
Introduction
Compress your files. Pick a story. Form a circle. Find yourself a spot on the spreadsheet. Write an anecdote. Run the script. Download the zip. Continue the thread. Install the package. Go on a stroll. Follow each other. Slowly. Like a worm. Rename the repository. Return. Close your eyes. Take turns. Repeat. Come prepared. Nothing to prepare. No prior knowledge required. Be kind. Don't assume. Scoop the mud. Pick a time. Wash your hands. Watch. Swap. Strip the wires. Connect. Take your time. Rearrange. Share the link. Go to line 42. Make a copy. Be patient.
This publication draws together self-published and unpublished workshop scripts that evolved in and around the collective ecosystem of Hackers & Designers (H&D). H&D has been organizing workshops since 2013, and along the way has established social-technical affinities that are loose and stable, temporary and ongoing. We met and befriended many practitioners and sister organizations since, and got acquainted with manifold, peculiar pedagogical formats, and experimental approaches to working, learning, and being together. This publication derives from an enthusiasm for the various ways collective learning environments take shape. It grew out of a curiosity for the ways that such practices are shared across different localities, timelines, and experiences.
Situated somewhere between documentation and a call for action, the workshop scripts presented here are companions to self-organized learning situations. They articulate and materialize aspects of such practice that cannot always easily be explained through existing frameworks. Contributions to this book document and reflect on self-organized learning situations that spontaneously assemble practitioners from various domains, diffusing disciplinary boundaries and blurring distinctions between learner and teacher, user and maker, product and process, friendships and work relations. They have in common that they seek affiliations beyond predetermined domains and bring together various vocabularies and methods all at once.
Documentation is rare, always incomplete, and it is therefore difficult to reconstruct what actually happens during such temporary collective learning communities. This is a challenge that art historian Heike Roms addresses in the conversation about workshop histories and practices, which offers a wider historical scope for some of the questions addressed in this publication. In her work, Roms is interested in the history of artist initiatives that reformed art education through self-organized educational experiments in the 1960s and ‘70s in the UK, when artists and educators began to organize study-groups for teachers and students in their private homes. Such evening classes were structured around exercises, and became a kind of parallel institution. Roms suggests this was an attempt to create an equal status between the participants. Roms also points out that conducting research into such initiatives is difficult as usually they were not well documented. The emphasis of such practices was on the momentary collective experience, and not so much on what was being produced at the end, though often there were occasions where work was publicly shared. With some luck, there might be some leftover notes or printed materials, such as announcements, flyers, posters, and pamphlets that hint at the character and content of the activity. But few notes remain from the exercises. On occasion Roms found a prompt, a class outline, or a score. However, the ways in which such prompts were perceived, enacted, and iterated on is difficult to reconstruct.
This publication addresses this challenge by drawing together workshop-based practices as a form of inquiry and by paying attention to the practice of (re)writing, (re)activating, documenting, and reflecting on “workshop scripts.” This is an attempt to discuss and show how workshops and workshop scripts shape—and in turn, are shaped by—the various environments they pass through. As a collection that holds various relational and iterative documents, it therefore cannot be considered a product or example of one specific kind of practice. The practices it draws together are site, context, and time specific, never complete, always ongoing, as are their various forms of expression.
Moving through manifold contexts—from institutional to grassroots informal—H&D as a collective is constantly in the making. Along the way, we are developing “terms of transition”—socio-technical conducts that help us to navigate and “stay in touch” in uncertain times. Workshop scripts are traces of such an attempt. They are ephemeral documents that may be written by hand or take shape in open-source spreadsheets and notepads, Git repositories, Wikis, and mailing lists. These documents are brought into conversation and circulation and as such reveal something about the ways collective practices weave together a range of places, legacies, objects, and people across practices and disciplines, timelines and geographies. They are pragmatic as well as imaginative, capturing approaches, techniques, and atmospheres that evolve from within specific communities and practices, while holding together the chaosmos of collective self-organization.
For instance, the workshop script “ChattyPub,” gives instructions on how to “run” ChattyPub as a workshop and as a platform for discussion and as a publishing tool that explores a decentralized process of designing a publication and as an organizational open-source collaboration software. The script does not solely document an instantaneous workshop situation but rather explores the intersections between workshop/tool/platform/documentation/distribution. The script is pragmatic and invites others to take it on and run with it, while accounting for its entanglements within a specific socio-technical context.
As situation-specific and context-sensitive artifacts, workshop scripts take manifold shapes and roles in this publication. Some derived from the immediate or wider context of H&D and its members, some are historical examples, and some are works of fiction. They are accompanied by—or enmeshed in—anecdotes, essays, graphic novels, speculative how-tos, and reflexive conversations that both activate and situate them within the respective communities and practices. This eclectic collection of workshop scripts reflects the continued effort of building collective ties through documentation, the practice of sharing with each other, and paying attention to the details. You won’t find a precise definition of what a workshop script is. Instead you will encounter different ways that workshop scripts are understood, materialized, and put into practice across various contexts. A workshop script may be concise or expansive; it may include instructions and install manuals, code snippets, timetables, and readmes. It may also include context-specific, personal and narrative aspects.
This publication attempts to approach these scripts and the practices they involve not as products of linear or reproducible processes but as resulting from and implied in particular socio-economic, socio-technical conditions. As such, the publication resists a generalized approach to the reproduction of these scripts. When possible, the initial appearance of the scripts, their format, and layout are left intact, forgoing the impression of a blueprint. Thus, the contributions may require some commitment, some attunement, and “getting into.”
The idea for publishing these situated documents and their stories derived from both the frustration and joy of working and being together while negotiating unstable times and conditions, and paying critical attention to the fleeting nature of formats of encounter, as well as the continuous effort of staying in touch with those who we encounter. The scripts are never finished, they always require more work. In some ways this publication can be considered a scriptothek—a script collection that continues collecting. The script + othek contains bibliotheek. In the German and Dutch languages, the Bibliothek/bibliotheek is a place of careful collecting, deciphering, making available, and preserving the documents it holds and handles. Often, it is through the work and personal investment of a Bibliothekar*in that such a place and the documents it holds are activated and brought into circulation.
My approach as an editor is inspired by that of the Bibliothekar*in. Similarly, it is also through personal and to some extent subjective affinities that I collect, decipher, preserve, and circulate the stories intertwined with the documents this Scriptothek holds. It is rooted in—and energized by—a sort of distributed locality. For instance the workshop script “A Case of Mistaken Identity” by the graphic design collective Åbäke has been sitting in a pile of pedagogical documents since I received it as a workshop participant in 2010. It has been activated throughout the years, in implicit and explicit ways, and informed my personal appreciation for collective work in and outside art and design education. As you will read in the email conversation with Åbäke, my request to republish the document in this context unraveled an array of exchanges, tasks, and prompts.
Thus, besides representing or giving visibility to specific documents and practices, publishing this eclectic collection in and of itself became a generative, ongoing, and to some extent uncontrollable collective praxis. The scripts included in this collection are time stamped. They had (or will have) a moment, a place, and a people that activate them. Simultaneously, by entering this collection they also create new correlations and future outlooks. The featured documents and practices are iterative and ongoing yet not “off-the shelf,” not to be executed and re-used in any context; they each come with their own terms of transition.
Each contribution negotiated specific terms in order to enter this book—terms of activation, contextualization, adjustment, reconsideration, be it through specific licenses that were added or even by being taken out of the public domain entirely. For instance, I invited the makers of the Not For ANY licensing toolkit to contribute some of their exercises to this publication. The Not For ANY toolkit invited “collective engagement with open licenses from a (techno)feminist perspective in a playful and embodied way [...]” and included “a series of exercises to do this with.” And yet my invitation prompted the makers to take the toolkit offline. Instead, the initial page now serves as a redirect to other groups and practices who have been more intensively continuing and complicating the conversation around open licensing. Thus the editorial process set into motion new considerations about the conditions for further sharing (or not).
Clustering
To assist the reader, the contributions are organized into five clusters: Setting Conditions, Prompts, How-tos, Distributed Curricula, and Active Bibliographies. While the contributions are organized according to these clusters and appear in a linear order, they are also intertwined in multiple ways, and resist a linear narrative (forward-moving progressing, improving, innovating). Thus, readers are invited to be on the look out for other, multiple, and parallel connections and navigate the contributions idiosyncratically, non-linearly, in a zigzag, from back to front.
The cluster Setting Conditions pays attention to the specificity of self-organized collective learning environments, their site and context specific vocabularies, and social-technical conduct. The aforementioned conversation between Anja Groten and Heike Roms sketches a larger (historical) context and sets the scene for the contributions that follow. The contribution “Open-Source Parenting” by Naomi Walker and Erin Gatz of Prototype Pittsburgh, takes a “first things first” approach and attends to the conditions that need to be in place before being able to create or engage in any form of learning community. In their conversation, Erin and Naomi reflect on how Black women in Pittsburgh are creating a better future for themselves and how allies can support them in this work. The “Platframe Postscript” compiled by Anja Groten and Karl Moubarak reflects on the collective process of building an online workshop environment that converges various tools and practices in a manner that sustains their “contours.” Throughout the process of imagining, building, and activating this digital infrastructure the edgy term “platframe” reminded the collaborators that this online environment they are building together consists of many parts, which do not necessarily blend together nor are they experienced as seamless.
Angela Jerardi discusses consensus-decision making models and practices, contextualizes them historically and in relation to contemporary activist communities. The project “WIN WIN” by James Bryan Graves and Nienke Huitenga-Broeren concretely and imaginatively explores conditions in which less polarized online debate is possible by proposing a consensus-based algorithm that mediates controversial discussion and collective decision making.
In “Re-, and Undefinining Tools,” the Feminist Search Tools (FST) workgroup reflects on the slow collective process of building, narrating, and testing an ongoing and evolving library search tool through various workshops, and meetups in various contexts and constellations. This non-conclusive process creates a condition in which various context-specific definitions of tools can be expressed, as well as criteria for the usefulness or usability of such tools. In the following contribution, Qianxun Chen sets new conditions for the FST conversation. The generative textual system “Mycelines” brings to the fore recurring terminology and formulations that evolved from this collective reflection on a tool-building process. In “fileSHA as a Protocol” André Fincato and Karl Moubarak set the conditions for an asynchronous game by repurposing mailing list software.
Within the cluster Prompts inhabit concise propositions and calls for action. Prompts can be playful provocations, invitations to reconsider, to change direction; a proposal to approach something familiar differently. The contribution “Across Distance and Difference” takes into consideration the changing economic and material realities of Mio Koijma and Hanna Müller, who formulate small assignments for each other as an attempt to structure and sustain their collaboration in times and conditions that seem to work against their efforts. Sandy Richter reflects on her experience of participating in a workshop during the H&D Summer Academy (HDSA) 2021, during which it was not immediately evident what the prompt was, who the host was, and who was the participant, or observer/listener. Through her reflection, the prompt of the workshop host Gabriel Fontana, is slowly unraveling.
The prompts of the “Relearning Food” script challenge participants to pay attention to the routes our produce takes to reach supermarkets and eventually our plates. Their prompt is to reconsider grocery habits according to our geographies and localities. In her essay “Untitling”, Siwar Kraytem substitutes short anecdotes on the subject and practice of naming with prompts to trigger a discussion on the politics of naming.
The prompts of the “Spreadsheet Routines” by Anja Groten and Karl Moubarak as well as the “Etherpad roleplay” by Juliette Lizotte both utilize playful open-source collaborative writing and editing tools, which serve as workshop sites, which weave together prompt, method, and execution into an evolving collective techno-social narrative. Susan Ploets' LARP (Live Action Roleplay) script, “Skinship,” prompts participants to explore the condition of being a collective body that inhabits, shapes and is shaped by an environment through sensory information.
The contributions collected within the cluster How-to explore the tension between the pragmatism of workshop scripts on the one hand, and the imaginative, fictional aspects at work in such documents on the other. The contribution by Julia Bee and Gerko Egert offers a generous and comprehensive backdrop to the format and role of the how-to as it is explored in art, art education, and activism. They draw on several concrete examples of how-tos such as “The perfect robbery” by Juli Reinartz and Tea Tupajic, “Give and Take” by the Social Muscle Club, “Conceptual Speed Dating” by Brian Massumi, and “Bodystrike” by the Feminist Health Care Research Group. These prompts derive from a compendium of how-tos, the publication Experimente Lernen, Techniken Tauschen edited by Julia Bee and Gerko Egert, and the accompanying platform Nocturne. According to Julia and Gerko, “the logic of speculative pragmatism allows us to think of techniques not as something one needs to earn, or learn to master, but as a way to put into practice speculation in the midst of an actual situation.”
Similarly, contributions such as Mz* Baltazar's “Mud-batteries” and Juliette Lizotte’s “The Button Saga” are also rooted in actual situations, imbuing their reflexive stories with practical instruction. Juliette Lizotte recounts the eventful story of creating a seemingly straightforward interactive installation. The saga includes misunderstandings, pitfalls, and detours of working collaboratively, and negotiating diverging expectations and techno-social dependencies. Stefanie Wuschitz's graphic novel tells the history of the magazine Api Kartini that evolved from the Indonesian Women's movement GERWANI. The Api Kartini zines focussed on publishing and disseminating practical knowledge for Indonesian women in the 1950s and ‘60s around health, repair, fashion, self-defense, and negotiating better work conditions, but also contain elements of storytelling and poetry, and imagine alternative futures for women in Indonesia at that time.
In “Display(ing)” the fanfare collective discusses the way a workshop script can be induced in an object. Through its material affordances, the modular display system designed by Freja Kir and Lotte van de Hoef carries its own script and has been enmeshed in the ongoing and morphing collective practice of fanfare, who have been traveling with the display since 2014.
The scripts and accompanying reflections collected in the cluster Distributed Curricula address aspects of time and duration, be it through timed exercises, through expressing a certain intentionality for continuation and longer-term engagement, or by paying attention to and taking as a starting point what is already there, the prevailing collective condition. Giselle Jhunjhnuwala reflects on the workshop Phylomon that catered to making and playing a cooperative game informed by local ecosystems. It addresses questions of longevity through the cooperative game mechanisms as well as the subject of building sustainable collective ecosystems, and durable ways of co-existing on planet Earth. The conversations “Interfacial Workhout” with designer, coder, and cook Sarah Garcin takes as a starting point one particular workshop instance and its residual effects within manifold workshop situations that followed. The text and accompanying scripts in “Scripting Workshops” further contextualize the notion of the “workshop script” in the context of the collective practice of H&D and reflect on our long-term commitment to organizing short-term learning situations.
The contribution “Am I a hacker now?” by Loes Bogers and Pernilla Manjula Philip about their intergenerational Solarpunk workshop reflects on an ongoing exchange and multi-local process of developing workshop scripts in collaboration with two sister organizations Mz* Balthazar's lab and Prototype Pittsburgh. While departing from the shared goal of developing intergenerational learning formats about and around sustainable technologies, the evolving workshop scripts took shape and were reshaped according to their respective local communities.
The publishing tool “ChattyPub” evolved from and fed back into various workshop situations, of which the first one was hosted by Xin Xin and Lark VCR at the HDSA. The goal of the workshop, designing and building experimental chatrooms, sparked the idea among H&D to develop ChattyPub—a platform and tool for co-designing a publication that utilizes a chat environment. In autumn of 2021, H&D self-published the book Network Imaginaries, which was designed with ChattyPub. Among others, contributors included Lark VCR and XinXin, who wrote a contribution about their “Experimental Chat Room” workshop, featuring the various chatrooms that were built during their workshop. For this publication we reconnected with XinXin to continue our conversation about their practice as educator, artist, and activist, taking as a starting point the “Critical Coding Cookbook,” which they recently published together with Katherine Moriwaki. (See cluster 'Active Bibliographies')
The ====== wiki reflections ====== by Yasmin Khan and Jessica Wexler look to the past and toward the future, exploring the ways a janky platform—the Workshop Project Wiki (WPW) developed by H&D (André Fincato and Anja Groten)—can shape a learning community for design educators. The very condition of the platform and its unfamiliar syntax transformed the intergenerational group of workshop participants into peers. After several iterations of the FREE educators workshop, the Wiki remains the key location for publishing prompts, documenting outcomes, editing a growing glossary, and planning future workshop iterations.
Contributions gathered under the cluster Active Bibliographies put forward careful selections of resources, generous catalogs, narrated reference lists, tips and tricks. They are active bibliographies because they are rooted in a sense of urgency and propose a shift. In “Critical Coding Cookbook,” Katherine and XinXin generously share their considerations and tactics of exploring their critical coding practices in parallel, local communities—informal educational environments that are multi-generational and non-hierarchical. Drawing on several “recipes” from the “Critical Coding Cookbook” they demonstrate multiple pathways to intersectional computing. Both contributions, “ChattyPub” and “Critical Coding Cookbook,” are exemplary of the inventive ways that collective practices initiate experimental and critical learning environments outside of or in parallel to institutional environments. And furthermore, they show how such conglomerates of critical makers and educators manage to create and sustain networks of like-minded practitioners—for instance through reusing code and methods, riffing off each other, co-organizing workshops, publishing and circulating their methods, and developing tools.
Petra Eros reflects on her experience of participating in the workshop + Rad I O by Mz* Baltazar’s Lab, which was further developed and hosted during the in 2021. She connects her workshop experience and the curiosities it sparked to various other initiatives with a stake in radio-making, and took her contribution as an opportunity to strike up an exchange with Good Times Bad Times community radio, which is published as part of her contribution. The contribution by Åbäke takes as starting point an assignment of a workshop hosted by Åbäke in 2010. In their email conversation Maki Suzuki and Anja Groten re-collect their workshop experience and reflect on their evolving pedagogical practices since.
Loes Bogers curated, edited, and commented on an array of resources that take as a starting point the question: How can we resist compliance with the unsustainable status quo of digital computing and electronics? The resources she draws together are accompanied by short personal reviews followed by short prompts that translate some of the concepts proposed into simple, practical exercises. This resourceful and active list evolved along with the Solarpunk workshop development trajectory.
Lastly, the conversation between Gabriel Fontana and Anja Groten took place while sifting through a pile of workshop scripts. Encountering these workshop scripts together and explaining what they meant to unravelled reflection on the various considerations that went into the specific workshops and their scripts, their different moments of activation, as well as their iterations.
Setting conditions
Workshop Histories and Practices
In conversation with Heike Roms
Anja Groten: In May 2021 I participated in an online conference titled “The Workshop as Artistic-Political Format,” organized by Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. The conference drew together practitioners from various fields of interests, including choreographers, dancers, theater makers, artists, scholars, musicians, and activists who reflected on “workshop” as a format, site, and phenomenon from their own perspectives. Heike, you gave the presentation "The Changing Fate of the Workshop and the Emergence of Live Art,” which particularly resonated with me.
Heike Roms: I came to the topic of workshops because in my work I look at the emergence of performance art in the sixties and seventies. I became interested in particular in the emergence of performance art within art educational contexts, in a conceptualization of a pedagogy of performance. I've read your chapter on “Workshop Production,” which I really enjoyed. Some of the research you've done is helpful to me because I too have found that there's actually very little written about the workshop as a practice. That is, people have written about specific workshops so you can find material on workshops given by a particular artist. But there is little reflection on the workshop as a format, as a genre, as a site, as whatever we might call it. That surprised me, given that it's sort of ubiquitous in practice. There are books on performance laboratories, for example, and there is a connected history between the workshop and labs, the studio space, and rehearsals as a format. But there is very little on the workshop, certainly within performance studies or art history discourse, so I became intrigued by this ubiquitous form that remains largely unexamined. It's great that through the work of Kai van Eikels and the 2021 conference he co-organized there's a new kind of attention being paid to it, through your work as well. But there is not enough available about the history of the workshop to help us understand at what point this flip occurred from considering the workshop as an actual physical site to approaching the workshop as an event format. You write about this as well. The two meanings, of course, continued to exist in parallel, particularly in the context of art schools. But at what point did the workshop become an event, a time-based learning experience, as well as a site of making—a Werkstatt? I don't know how and when that occurred. My suspicion is that it was sometime around the fifties and sixties.
AG: There is the The Journal of Educational Sociology that was published in 1951 and refers to the first organized professional education activity under the name of a workshop. It took place at Ohio State University in 1936. I remember you were talking about the relation between the occurrence of workshops and the emergence of a certain resistance toward the steady structures of art schools in the fifties and sixties in the UK—a resistance to legitimized knowledge practices and skills. Art students wanted to rid themselves of a certain authority of disciplines or disciplined learning and instead wanted to take things into their own hands.
HR: In the specific history I looked at, which is that of Cardiff College of Art, I found that there is a confluence between the workshop and two emancipatory movements. First was the move toward the workshop as a learning format through the impetus of the Bauhaus, which in the 1960s developed a huge impact on art schools across the UK. Traditionally people weren’t really talking about workshops as sites of making in the context of art schools; the workshop was the place of the plumber or the blacksmith, while artists worked in ateliers or studios. I think that the idea of the workshop as a place of making was introduced to the art school through the Bauhaus philosophy, which was a vehicle for the emancipation of art education. All of a sudden art was being approached in the same way as other practices of making were being approached. No longer did we have the sculpture atelier or the drawing room. Now there were ceramics workshops, metal workshops, printmaking workshops but also painting workshops and sculpture workshops (or ‘2D’ and ‘3D’ workshops as they were often called at the time). This move introduced a different kind of art making.
This change that occurred in art schools in the UK in the sixties through a new approach to art education known as ‘Basic Design’ was very much driven by the reception of the Bauhaus approach and in particular Joseph Itten’s Vorkurs (preliminary course). Workshop production was seen as a new, more emancipatory form of art making. It came out of the experiences of the Second World War and the desire to give art students a different sort of experience—one that connected them to the contemporary world rather than traditional skills training and that aimed to overcome the distinction between art, craft and design.
The second shift is where performance comes in in the 1960s. Teachers and students saying: We don't want all of that material making in the workshop. We want to make something that's ephemeral and that's collective and that's participatory. We don't want to be hammering away all day in the workshop. Instead we do this other thing where we get together and we make something that’s not actually about producing any objects, and we'll call that a workshop as well. That's the event-based rather than space-based concept of the workshop.
In dance, people were already talking about workshops as events in the fifties. I don't know when the shift occurred from the workshop as a site toward the more ephemeral understanding of the workshop as event, how that happened, but it's interesting because what motivated the artists in the sixties that I have been looking at—and they explicitly say so in their notes—was that this move toward the ephemeral was about searching for more equitable relationships that do away with the teacher-student division. That division had been further cemented by the remains of the Bauhaus philosophy and its celebration of mastery. I think that was one of the key shifts toward this more ephemeral meaning of the workshop. It was no longer about a master passing on knowledge to their students. It became about collective making. And everybody took collective charge and responsibility for that making. The educators on whom I've done research actually say that they wanted to get away from producing objects toward collective action. But, as you say, the workshop can very easily be co-opted like so much of the sixties was. Was that the last hurrah of collectivism? Or was it actually what lay the groundwork for the entry of neoliberalism into education as we now know it?
AG: I myself am wondering whether organizing workshops can generally be considered an emancipatory practice at all? Perhaps there cannot or should not be a general answer to this question. At the school where I work as an educator, some argue the educational system builds upon rather precarious labor conditions, where everyone works as a self-employed freelancer. Simultaneously, more and more workshops are being organized, which at times can clutter the education. Students are supposed to self-initiate and self-organize as well. They often resort to organizing workshops for each other. In my view, such conditions sometimes also show the limits of what can be accomplished with workshops. I think it's important to have more discussions about the workshop as a format and its implications for the learning economy. How to speak about and practice workshops in a way that still allows us to do the things we want to do, whilst also paying critical attention to the undesirable conditions it is intermingled with.
How was it for you? Did the invitation to the conference lead you to take a deeper look at the phenomenon of the workshop? Or were you already busy with it?
HR: Yes, it would be fair to say it led to a deeper engagement with the notion of the workshop. I had been working on this material before and I've written about it too. But I had never really paid attention to the frequency of the word ‘workshop’ in the material I had researched until the invitation came to speak at the conference. It was then that I realized that the workshop is a really productive format to be talking about.
I wrote a paper on this before in which I talked about the idea that artists and performance educators in the sixties and seventies in the UK were creating events as a kind of parallel institution. These events aimed to serve the function of an art school without replicating its hierarchical structures. This was the case in Cardiff, but also in other places in the UK such as Leeds College of Art. I was grateful that I was invited to think more about this by the conference. I looked at my examples, and it is specifically “the workshop as event” that emerged as a kind of parallel institution at the time. It wasn't really the performances these teachers and students went on to make together, but the workshop as a learning format that I think they clustered all their ideas around.
AG: I stumbled upon the conference last minute and wasn't aware of this whole community of performance artists and live arts who consider the workshop as an artistic medium. It's also interesting that the workshop, because of its ambiguity, manages to converge all these different worlds and unveil commonalities between them. For instance a policeman speaking about their conflict resolution workshops, and the activist who learns about tying themselves to a tree and how to negotiate with the police while doing so . Both speaking about the same sort of thing at the same conference from an entirely different vantage point.
You emphasized that a lot of the artists you researched were also educators. It was great to hear that engaged with in such an explicit manner. I don’t often hear about how the practices of artists and designers continue to evolve within particular educational environments, after they have completed their studies too. I find that many great artists and designers are also teachers and I personally don’t draw a harsh distinction between being an educator and being a designer. The practices go hand in hand. But I found that there are not many records of the teaching practices of artists and designers. Another thing from your talk that really stayed with me was your re-enactment of a workshop. You showed some pictures and I found them so interesting and also funny. In your re-enactment, you imagined through physical exercises what the workshop might have looked like. You referred to one specific artist educator, whose name I don’t recall.
HR: His name is John Gingell, and he is not particularly well known. I never met him in person, as he had already passed away by the time I became interested in his work. He had a sculptural practice, and a few of his public artworks are still on view in Cardiff, and some of this work has been exhibited in London. But really he was an educator. That was his main practice. He formed and shaped generations of art students. He was not the type of person to write manifestos, or write a lot in general, but I've been very fortunate because his family has allowed me to look at all of his materials, which are now kept in the attic of one of his daughters. He didn't leave a written philosophy of teaching or anything like that, just really random notes or little statements that he put together for the art school in order to justify what he was doing, or presentation outlines and things like that.
I didn't re-enact any of his workshops because they were very sketchily documented. He was not somebody who kept a particularly developed documentation or scoring practice. If I think about my own teaching, I don't either. When I enter a classroom, I often just jot down some notes on the exercises I want to do. They're just little prompts, which aren’t accompanied with much explanation. In years to come, if somebody were to look at my teaching notes, they too wouldn’t be able to make much sense of what I was doing in the classroom. I don't think that's unusual. Anyway, I have contact with one of Gingell’s students from the late 1960s, the artist John Danvers, who also taught at the art school for a number of years in the seventies. He was very influenced by John Cage, so his own artistic practice was already very score-based. When he became a teacher his teaching practice was very well documented. He documented the exercises alongside photos of the students doing the exercises. He has quite substantive documentation on the courses he taught at Cardiff.
Interestingly, one of his regular classes in the early 1970s for Cardiff College of Art was a workshop about the use of sounds and words, which was unusual for an art school context. I invited him in 2013 to re-enact the workshop as part of the Experimentica Festival in Cardiff. Anybody could attend, but it was mainly my friends who came [laughs]. A lot of the people who attended were theatre people, and their feedback was that Danvers’ exercises and the approach that he took spoke very much of a visual arts kind of sensibility. Even though he was working with words and sounds—which have a theatrical dimension—their purpose was much less about what theatre workshops tend to focus on, such as the interpretation of words or meaning-making. Instead, Danvers’ workshop was much more about the visual qualities of words and sounds. There was much more concern about spatiality and the sculptural qualities of words. Danvers approached his teaching practice very much as a conceptual practice, and so it was fairly easy to reconstruct what he did in his workshops. I've always been intrigued by this hidden history of pedagogy within the emergence of experimental art. We read a lot about John Cage and his teaching at the New School in New York, but I often think, what did they actually do in his classes? There are some accounts of his students about the improvisations they did with Cage, but very little. I'm intrigued to learn more. Beuys too was a teacher as well as an artist, who considered teaching his ‘greatest work of art’ and a key part of his practice. There are others, too, like Suzanne Lacy and Allan Kaprow, who both taught at CalArts. In fact, a lot of the canonical performance artists were also often teachers. Some of them, Kaprow, for instance, also wrote about education.
AG: I was also wondering about how you document workshops. As you said yourself, even though you come up with the initial class or workshop, it is to a large extent shaped in the actual encounter with the people, materials, and space itself. It is obviously not so interesting nor meaningful to just take pictures of people having a great time. So what are ways of documenting that afford a continuation of whatever is happening in these short workshop encounters, and which allow for retrospective discussion and reflection of these workshop practices? The way I document workshops is usually very messy. Our workshop archive is scattered in different places, online and as well as offline.
I was wondering, sometimes we compare workshop scripts with protocols and orchestrate physical re-enactments of what a computer would do, translating something that happens in your machine into a physical space. I am not very familiar with scoring practice but what I do know makes me think of protocols or algorithms. It's not a recording or a replica of a situation, but it sort of anticipates it, sets conditions. I wonder if it could help us think about documentation as something that is not only about looking back, but in fact geared toward continuation and activation in the future.
HR: From the sixties onwards, through Happenings and Fluxus, practices of scoring actions have become a common device in visual arts. And in performance art and dance, very extensive scoring practices have emerged. The indeterminacy of the score or instruction is partly what interests artists. You give somebody a score, and it could be interpreted in a hundred different ways. That's why it is interesting to consider where the artwork is located in these practices. Is the score the artwork? Is it the realization of the score the artwork? A Fluxus score, for instance, wouldn't even tell you how many people have to carry it out. Such a score could be about the very indeterminacy of an action.
Traditionally, we think of the author of the score as the author of the work, such as in musical compositions, for example. But more recently, we are seeing much more experimentation with scoring practices, and with the relationship between the score and the event or action that it might anticipate or generate. A few years ago Hans Ulrich Obrist did a large-scale curatorial project called “do it,” which invited artists who don't normally have a scoring practice to write their own scores or instructions. People were invited to enact these score and then upload documentation of the enactment online so that you could see the score, as well as a multitude of different kinds of documentation of the different kinds of outcomes produced by their enactments.
AG: I am trying to think through the question of how to publish something like a workshop or a workshop script. In my view it can be an interesting graphic design object because it's very unresolved, very spontaneous, it's actually not a precious object, and it’s never up to date. These criteria are significant for it to function. But how do we publish something like that in a meaningful way? For instance, pictures of workshop situations can help to contextualize something like a score or workshop script. You cannot just give the score to someone and expect them to know what they have to do and how to be excited about it. You need that activation moment and know-how too. But including snapshots of people doing things is not necessarily interesting to print in a book.
HR: It brings us back to the fact that there are different kinds of workshops and different kinds of scores. There are those that are meant to be indeterminate and generate lots of different kinds of responses. Every response is justified and equally valid. Sometimes visual documentation can therefore be too prescriptive. If you see a score and somebody enacting it, you might think, well, that's the only way to do it. It takes a little bit of your agency away. Unless you do it like the DIY “Do It” project, where you provide the documentation of multiple enactments so you encourage people to try their own response by showing them five different versions. But then there are also scores where which are much more prescriptive, and people want them to be enacted in a particular kind of way, particularly often in pedagogical contexts. Do you want the exercise to land in a particular way, because you want the students to have a particular kind of learning experience? There are different scoring practices, different ways to shape an instruction, and similarly there are different kinds of documentation practices that might be suitable. Yet, I would say that it's the “doing,” the activation and interpretation of a score, that's interesting. It's all about the finding process and the kind of rationalization and reflexivity that you go through in this process that I find exciting. It’s often just as interesting to look at how a person struggled through finding a response to a a score or instruction than the response itself.
AG: You also teach workshops for children. What are they about?
HR: I have been involved in some performance work with children through my collaboration with the artist Sibylle Peters, who runs a theater for children in Hamburg, the FundusTheater/ Forschungstheater. Sibylle calls it a “theatre of research”. The philosophy is that research is something that brings artists, children and scholars together, as it's something that artists do, it's something that children do, and it's something that scholars do. She devises projects around different themes which are of particular interest to the children she researches with and are often driven by their desires, such as ‘I want to be rich’, which led to an examination of the nature of money and the founding of a children’s bank with its own micro-currency in Hamburg. I did several projects with Sabine, where I was invited for my knowledge of performance art history. The last project we did was, Kaputt – The Academy of Destruction at Tate Modern in 2017. Destruction is a really big subject for children, because they're often told they are destructive or have destructive behavior.
We worked with children who were diagnosed with behavioral issues, who showed what was deemed destructive behavior in class, or who were really interested in watching cartoons where things get destroyed. Kids see and hear about destruction all the time, for example the destruction of the environment. When we were doing the project in London, seventy-two people had recently died in the Grenfell Tower fire as a result of negligence. It was close to where the children we worked with came from, and it was very present in their minds. But there's no real outlet for children to explore their fears about destruction, but also their interests and pleasures in destructiveness and their destructive fantasies. We worked with the children on the notion of destruction for a week. We were all considered equal experts on the subject, and we all shared our expertise. The kids gave talks, for example about destruction in comics and animation. I gave a talk on destruction and art. Sybille has done lots of these kinds of projects, which I occasionally get invited to participate in and work on issues that overlap with the histories of art. Inspired by our work together, I have recently begun to research the participation of children in the history of avant-garde art, especially in the performance practices of Happenings and Fluxus.
What is important to Sibylle as well is this idea of the workshop as a space for equitable relationships. She takes seriously what the kids bring to the discussion. And it's always about rethinking and reshaping the adult-kid relationships. We will be working together again in September 2022 on the occasion of the opening of a new building for the Fundus Theater in Hamburg. For that event I am currently working on some research that looks at child activism in the sixties, especially the involvement of children in the American Civil Rights movement, and how that intersected with children's participation in experimental art projects at the time. How children were trained for their participation in protest or art with the help of workshops will be a major aspect of this research too.
Heike Roms is Professor in Theater and Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research is interested in the history and historiography of performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the context of the UK. She is currently working on a project on performance art’s pedagogical histories and the development of performance in the context of British art schools.
The workshop and conceptual framework of 'open-source parenting' was developed as part of 'Solarpunk—Who owns the Web?'—a collaborative exploration resulting in a series of intergenerational online and offline workshop formats. Partner organizations were Hackers & Designers in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna (Austria) and Prototype PGH in Pittsburgh (USA). Along with the development of a series of solar punk workshops, the aim was to engage in an active peer exchange and support each other in the process of developing context-sensitive learning formats.
Open-source Parenting
Naomi Chambers and Erin Gatz
Solarpunks Intergenerational Workshops—Pittsburgh edition
In the summer of 2022, longtime friends Naomi Chambers and Erin Gatz decided to partner on a summer workshop series in our home of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Naomi was organizing a soccer program series focused on moms and aunties with a focus on Black women. Erin was in conversation with the founders of H&D in Amsterdam as well as Mz* Baltazar’s Lab in Vienna about a workshop series they were organizing around the theme of Solarpunk. The solarpunk movement can mean different things to different people but to us it meant exploring open-source technologies, providing learning opportunities to the people who are most marginalized in U.S. society, and working toward gender equity and racial justice through our community organizing projects.
We, Naomi and Erin, have been friends for the past ten years but we also have vague memories of attending the same elementary school program for “gifted” children. Once a week, these “gifted” elementary school children from across the city of Pittsburgh would get on buses and be transported to Woolslair Elementary where we would spend the day experimenting with very few rules, a lot of encouragement, and seemingly endless resources and supplies. It might have been here that we first met as eight-year-old girls from different neighborhoods, different racial backgrounds, and a common love for learning. As adults, we reunited at Woolslair Elementary completely by chance when we became robotics teachers in the afterschool program. We were instantly drawn to one another and had an incredible time teaching elementary school students the basics of computer coding, robotics assembly, and circuitry design.
Over the next few years, we partnered on several projects together including City as Our Makerspace, which was a series of workshops designed to engage Black women in conversations about healing from the effects of intergenerational poverty and trauma; financial planning; makerspace equipment training; and the basics of entrepreneurship. The vision was to equip and empower Black women with the needed skills to become their own advocates, pursue their dreams, and do so with the help of mutual aid. Around the same time as this project, we both became mothers and we currently have five children between the two of us. Our current interests center on community organizing for social justice, supporting parents and children, arts education, and open-source technology integration in learning spaces. We are committed to imagining a better future for ourselves, our kids, and future generations where sexism and racism are challenged and systemically eliminated.
Toward this vision, we decided to incorporate Naomi’s soccer workshops into the solarpunk work being done in Amsterdam and Vienna, to create an international conversation about how Black women in Pittsburgh are creating a better future for themselves and how allies can support them in this work. The need for Naomi’s soccer series arose from the fact that Pittsburgh is one of the most unlivable cities for Black women in the United States. For example, Black Pittsburgh women have higher percentages of unemployment than Black women in ninety-seven percent of other peer cities (Pittsburgh Gender Equity Commission Report, 2020). According to the same report, Pittsburgh refers more Black girls to police than is true for ninety-nine percent of similar cities. The sexism and racism that Black women in Pittsburgh experience on a daily basis is unparalleled compared to most other U.S. cities. This is the context in which we find ourselves and we wanted to change the narrative. About the soccer workshop series, Naomi says:
“It started as a need for me to get active and reclaim my physical strength and stamina. I was also in dire need of sisterhood with other Black mothers who I feel I shared a unique experience with and wanted to play with my friends and other community members that I felt could benefit as well.”
The main purpose of the soccer workshops was to have fun, examine how our bodies and minds felt while we played, to build goals together, and care for each other. Held over the course of several Sundays at a local soccer field in Pittsburgh, dozens of Black mothers and aunties came together under Naomi’s coaching and went through a series of exercises before playing a soccer game together. As part of the warm-up routine, Naomi had each woman write their goals in permanent marker on their soccer balls and then take turns kicking their goals into the net. It was a powerful exercise that helped women to identify their goals, work together to make them happen, and celebrate one another along the way.
As part of the soccer series, we created soccer jerseys in vector design software, cut the designs on a computer numerically controlled (CNC) vinyl cutter, and then adhered the vinyl sticker stencils onto screens for screen-printing. This DIY approach to screen printing is much more affordable and accessible than traditional screen printing that requires access to a dark room and photo emulsion chemicals. Together we screen printed several soccer jerseys for the moms to wear as well as several for the aunties to wear. The idea is that everybody wins because we are all supporting one another.
During our conversations with organizers in Amsterdam and Vienna, we talked about pod mapping, an exercise where individuals identify the people in their lives who they can rely on for mutual aid. About the pod mapping exercise, Naomi says:
“I literally heard of pod mapping from the solarpunk meetings and it had a profound impact on me. It's something we all do in one way or another, but I never thought to formally do it on paper and take account of who/what is my support system and how do I make it count more and stand for others in a more meaningful way.”
As part of the soccer series, we challenged ourselves to connect the theme of supporting Black moms and aunties in Pittsburgh to solar punks in Amsterdam and Vienna. In other words we, Naomi and Erin, were frequently in conversation with one another about how parenting should be a community effort and how the soccer games actually serve as an approach to open-source parenting, where moms and aunties are invited to hack our social systems. By playing and discovering together, we find ways to show up for one another, discuss our dreams, and align our goals. As part of this ongoing conversation about how allies can support Black women in Pittsburgh, we decided that providing childcare during the soccer workshops would be an important part of making sure that the workshops were accessible. Erin worked with another white organizer to provide games, snacks, and activities for the children of the soccer moms during the workshops.
Providing childcare in any workshop setting is an important part of working toward gender and racial equity. It is also important for allies to show up and help out in whatever way makes sense for them to—whether it is with logistics, communication, or providing food. In the U.S., we live in a society where racism and sexism are entrenched in our social systems and communities. How can Black women and white women work together in ways that disrupt this harmful power dynamic? By reducing the logistical stress of creating events, allies can play an often overlooked but important role in community organizing. The next generation’s future depends on us collaborating across gender, race, and geography to make our society more justice-oriented.
Naomi Chambers (Pittsburgh, 1987) is a painter and assemblage sculptor. Growing up in the 90s she enjoyed many free arts programs in the city, which, unbeknownst to her, had an immense effect on her creative growth and critical thinking across all aspects of her life. In 2018, she had her first solo exhibition, Communal Futures, at August Wilson Center: African American Cultural Center. “I want my work to fill people with love, hope, and wonder like my favorite artists do for me. It’s about the creation of possibilities... new worlds we create for ourselves not solely the one we were born to.”
Erin Gatz (New York City, 1987) is a community organizer, researcher, and non-profit founder dedicated to building gender and racial equity through technology education. She has lived and studied in Canada and the Netherlands and is currently a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies the possibilities and limitations of learning ecosystems such as the Remake Learning network and makerspaces such as Prototype PGH in creating more justice-oriented societies.
The “catalog of formats for digital discomfort” was catalogued by Jara Rocha, edited by: Seda Gürses and Jara Rocha. Accompaniment by: Femke Snelting, Helen Nissenbaum, Caspar Chorus, Ero Balsa. The first booklet version of this catalog was co-produced by the
Obfuscation event series organizing committee, Digital Life Initiative at
Cornell Tech,
BEHAVE’s ERC-Consolidation Grant and the Department of Multi Actor Systems (MAS) at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at
TU Delft, in February 2021. In collaboration with the
Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), the Catalog is transforming into an editable MediaWiki form. Copyleft with a difference note to whoever encounters A catalog of formats for digital discomfort... and other ways to resist totalitarian zoomification: this is work-in-progress, please join the editing tasks! You are also invited to copy, distribute, and modify this work under the terms of the Collective Conditions for (re-)use
(CC4r) license, 2020. It implies a straightforward recognition of this Catalog’s collective roots and is an invitation for multiple and diverse after lifes of the document:
Downloadable pdf and
wiki version [8] of this catalog. Referenced projects and materials, each hold their own license.
Platframe Postscript
Anja Groten and Karl Moubarak
Introduction
Platframe refers to a website that was developed for the “3rd workshop on obfuscation.” It converges and “frames” pre-existing tools to facilitate online encounters and collaborative content production. It is called a plat-frame rather than a plat-form because it attempts to make coherent boundaries and relationships between the many different tools, softwares, services, frameworks, and practices it combines. This postscript is a continuation of a collaboratively written ReadMe file and evolves from the conventional format of a step-by-step manual toward a more reflective document. It reflects on how the website came into being, its different “life cycles,” our expectations for it, and the conversations it facilitated.
How to preserve a platframe?
A platframe is an assemblage of pre-existing tools, which, when arranged in a different order, creates new sets of relations and dependencies, meaning that it never reaches a singular final form. Our platframe grew, broke, and matured, sometimes in unexpected ways. This document grapples with the challenges we encountered from documenting something that is in constant flux. We chose to structure this document by its different “life cycles.” Screenshots will help to contextualize the way the website facilitated different encounters and how it challenged those who engaged with it.
Life cycles
Our platframe has undergone various stages and states of being. Since its inception, the platframe’s configuration, features, and appearance has undergone considerable change. We refer to the different states as life cycles. Each life cycle enabled different types of encounters and demanded different intensities of interaction from those who participated in building the website. We also referred to the process of designing the platform as “choreography,” due to its spatial characteristics and dynamism, as well as its temporality.
Life cycle 0: Development
In December 2020, H&D was invited to work with the organizers of the "3rd Workshop on Obfuscation”—Jara Rocha, Seda Gürses, Ero Balsa—to conceptualize, design, and develop a digital platform that would facilitate an online workshop. Principles that were important to address were:
- F/OSS: The extensibility and adaptability of tools and code we would use and develop.
- Privacy and data security: Care for privacy and security of user data.
- eSafe and welcoming online encounters: Writing a code of conduct and paying attention to chat moderation to create and sustain a safe(r) online environment that would be welcoming to all participants.
- Collaboration across disciplines: Engaging in a collaborative and reflective making process across disciplinary boundaries and different knowledge domains that transgresses solution-driven approaches toward software development.
- Digital Discomfort: The platframe challenged us more than the (now) habitual experience of meeting on Zoom, Teams, or Google Hangouts. As the Workshop on Obfuscation raised questions about inner workings, ethics, and socio-technological entanglements, the platframe challenged some of the conventions put forward by big tech, but also asked for more patience and endurance from participants than they were used to. In that context, Jara Rocha curated an anti-solutionist collection of formats for digital discomfort.
Map / Navigation
We worked with the concept of a large canvas, which extended in every direction and could be navigated similarly to a map. The canvas was divided into so-called regions, which were called, for example, “reception,” “study room,” “resource library,” and “exhibition space.” Different regions facilitated different content and functionalities and varied in relevancy as the platframe passed through its different life cycles.
Chat
One of the platframe’s most distinctive functionalities was the “spatially” distributed chat, which allowed participants to leave messages anywhere on the canvas. As a result, the platframe became a “living” space; all participants could mark their presence with their messages and the traces of their cursors on the canvas.
The discussion around obfuscation demanded a close inspection and consideration of networked privacy practices. Messages dropped on the platframe were assigned a duration by their authors, which would vanish once completed. As the message approached its expiration, the visibility of the message decreased, until it was deleted.
The moderator’s role was another important feature of the chat. To create an environment that was safe(r) and free of hostility we created a moderator login, which allowed a select group of trusted participants to erase or block access to the platframe if needed.
Cookies
Technically the platframe did not use cookies. However, data submitted by participants—such as display name, position, cursor color, and messages—was sent to the H&D server and other participants. The server assigned a unique identifier (UID) to their browsers and stored it in the browser’s local storage, appearing as: “uid”: “266f429f2d4.” When a participant accessed the platframe, the server authenticated their UID against its store of users.
We explored alternative methods that rely purely on peer-to-peer authentication without servers involved (see CRDTs), but this method could not guarantee that participants blocked by moderators would be permanently blocked from accessing the website again. It was always possible for participants to delete their own user profiles from the server.
Front and back: VueJS and Strapi
This platframe was built with two open-source web development frameworks: Strapi for the “back-end” and VueJS for the “front-end.”
Strapi is a content management system that we installed and configured on the H&D server to manage all the static content on the website. It produces a framework agnostic public API that enabled us to define the so-called regions, write texts using a draft/publish system, manage the schedule, receive glossary submissions, and host the videos presented in the exhibition area.
VueJS is a front-end Javascript framework with a template-oriented approach. It enabled us to design reusable (yet customizable) HTML templates to wrap the data produced in Strapi. The API created by the back-end on the server is “consumed” by the web pages created by the front-end in the browser.
Lifecycle 1: Preparation
In this life cycle, the platframe mainly facilitated the work of the study group that collected, discussed, and prepared the workshop and populated the glossary and library. The group also provided us with a moment to test and collect feedback on the platframe.
A crucial moment during this process was receiving the generous feedback of artist and researcher Ren Loren Britton, who screened the platframe for accessibility. While we scheduled this feedback moment rather late in the process, we were able to implement some changes to the styling of the website, which allowed visitors to “deobfuscate” the platframe, making it easier to read and navigate.
Ren furthermore provided us with many helpful resources about designing for accessibility online. We have listed a few of those here, also to serve as a reminder to ourselves that accessibility should not come as an afterthought, but hand in hand with any web development project:
- The importance of multiple points of access: https://www.mapping-access.com/ (working with description and redundancy.)
- The work of scholar Aimi Hamraie addresses how accessibility shifts and is different for every person. What are ways to present, describe, and make accessible different parts of a website, for example by providing an alt-text and descriptions of what the website looks like? https://aimihamraie.wordpress.com/
- Something we weren’t able to address in the short amount of time was the possibility to tab through and hit enter on the chat component of the platframe. The rest of the website is navigable with only the tab and enter buttons.
- When implementing the live stream, we could have considered live captioning or providing a transcript after the talks.
- While we enjoyed exploring “obfuscation” in the website design via the use of textures and the noise font (a font chosen because it is illegible to machines, specifically Optical Character Recognition software), we realized that certain conceptual and aesthetic choices made it difficult for people with low vision to access the content. To make the website more legible we implemented an option for users to increase contrast and to “strip” the CSS according to their needs. A great reference for implementing different CSS options, such as font choices to allow different points of access, is queer art collective Coven Berlin: https://www.covenberlin.com/contact/
- For similar reasons we decided to add the option to reduce the colors to black and white to make the chat more legible.
- We were not able to sufficiently test the site with screen readers. For instance, it would have been important to see how the spatially distributed chat could have been displayed and read to make it more screen reader friendly.
- Finally, we created a guided tour of the platframe, which consisted of a step-by-step tutorial with instructions on navigation and interaction: https://3rd.obfuscationworkshop.org/readme/tour
Tools for collective organization: Ethercalc, Etherpad, Jitsi, Freenode
Much of the preparatory and organizational work for the third Workshop on Obfuscation took place online, but was not hosted by the platframe. Instead, we used other tools for internal communication, budgeting, and responsibility management. For instance, we used Jitsi to meet, discuss, and keep tabs on the different ongoing processes. Etherpad hosted on the H&D and Constant servers, was used for taking notes and drafting documents, while spreadsheets created in Ethercalc were used to coordinate and keep track of task division schedules for moderators and technical bug reports. Finally, we used Freenode (IRC) as a temporary communication back channel for the conference days.
Lifecycle 2: The Vernissage—first public encounter with platframe
At the Vernissage on May 4, 2021, the platframe had its first public encounter, with visitors able to populate the platframe’s distributed chat. In the “exhibition space,” platframe visitors watched videos by the contributors, which were interlinked with elements from the timetable and the contributors list. The video-making process was guided by Jara Rocha and Lucie de Bréchard; Lucie also led the video concept, design, and editing process.
It was important that visitors could reach other regions easily and additional information related to the respective videos.
The distributed chat and cursor visibility created a feeling of aliveness and togetherness. Visitors left messages close to the videos and engaged in conversations with each other about the content.
During the Vernissage, BigBlueButton (BBB) links were distributed, allowing participants to speak face to face. In retrospect, it might have been livelier on the platframe had we had opted for only one form of interaction, instead of adding more possibilities and scattering the program across many different spaces.
We initially arranged for thirteen videos to be exhibited in this region. However, throughout the process of developing the conference the number increased. Additionally, the idea to upload and exhibit “conference posters” was introduced last minute. The exhibition as a region thus expanded quite drastically and took over an unexpectedly large portion of the overall canvas.
The choice to include introductory videos and explanatory posters by workshop contributors allowed participants to familiarize themselves with the conference materials. The materials didn’t have to be viewed simultaneously, but could accommodate the different time zones and availability of participants. The main incentives for this decision were to reduce time spent on video calls and to protect both the participants and servers from “liveness fatigue.”
The platframe, including tools such as Etherpad and Ethercalc were hosted on a VPS provided by Greenhost in Amsterdam, which ran on wind power. Other measures taken to reduce the ecological footprint of the platframe were the shrinking of media such as videos, PDFs, and images into smaller, web-compatible files, as well as the implementation of load-balancing strategies on the server and in the browser to intentionally slow down live-communication processes when traffic increased. Nonetheless, the platframe was CPU-intensive and therefore not as accessible with lower bandwidth.
During the Vernissage, the platframe’s capacity to host a high number of participants was put into question. A few days before the workshop, we proceeded to develop testBot—a script intended to choreograph a fluctuating number of visitors arriving on the platframe, interacting with it, and then leaving. Although testBot looked like a single participant on the platframe, it represented 100, 200, or even 500 active visitors. It enabled us to stress test the platframe’s performance and gauge the number of upgrades we needed to install on the server in preparation for the workshop. TestBot remained on the platframe for the entire duration of the conference for hardware performance-logging reasons.
Lifecycle 3: The workshop
The platforme’s most active moment was the day of the workshop on May 7, 2021, when around 200 participants interacted with it. The platframe served as a central source of information on the third Workshop on Obfuscation. It contained the resource library, the directory of contributors and artworks, as well as a place for participants to converse. Yet the workshop actually took place on the BBB hosted by TU Delft. Our goal was not to try to recreate features of BBB, but to embed it within the convergence of tools. The platframe was designed to function as a springboard from which participants could navigate their way to workshop sessions or take part in informal hangouts.
During the course of developing the platframe, Tobias Fiebig, the maintainer of the BBB instance hosted by TU Delft, worked on extending their installation of BBB with an option to live-stream conference calls via publicly accessible RTMP streams. This extension enabled us to give access to the workshops outside of BBB and display them in real time to a larger group of viewers on the platframe.
During this life cycle the platframe was at its most active. Participants spent time in between sessions gathering their cursors around posters and videos in the exhibition, discussing, and mingling. The platframe’s management, moderation, and maintenance was similar to that of a physical conference, with dedicated hosts and moderators guiding participants around the canvas, continuously documenting the sessions and taking care of the space.
Life cycle 4: The archive
New and changing requirements throughout the making process confronted us with the question of “scalability” and “adaptability” of this tool convergence. While we started off with the idea that this website would become something that served other contexts and be used by different communities for their own events, the platframe became too tailored and specific to the context of the third workshop on obfuscation.
With regards to documenting and archiving this project, we are keen to develop the platframe so that it functions within other contexts as well. The full repository— as well as instructions on setting it up, hosting, and converging the different tools and layers—is available here: https://github.com/hackersanddesigners/obfuscation
Please take note of the license: https://github.com/hackersanddesigners/obfuscation/blob/master/LICENSE
At some point, the chat will be turned off and the videos in the exhibition taken offline, marking the platframe’s final life cycle—at least in the context of the third workshop on obfuscation. The contributions have been collected and organized in a manner that makes them accessible for future reference. A workshop report—the postscript of which a previous version of this document is part of— was already published and distributed among workshop contributors and participants. Some of the platframe regions may stay accessible in a different form, such as the resources collected in the library; the glossary, the references of the different sessions; notes the ReadMe; and of course, the code repository.
First published in “The 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation Post-Script”
Karl Moubarak is a designer, tool-builder and amateur software developer. He joined Hackers & Designers in 2020 after collaborating with H&D as an intern during his bachelor studies.
Anja Groten is a designer, educator and community organiser. In June 2013 Anja co-founded the initiative Hackers & Designers together with James Bryan Graves and Selby Gildemacher. Anja furthermore runs the Design Master course at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, Master of the Rietveld Academie.
A basic diagram for doing consensus
On consensus, in two parts
Angela Jerardi
The following material was originally collected and delivered as a talk, in an effort to do two things: 1) To tell the story of one of the origins of consensus and its role in decision-making through a situated approach, and 2) To share some practical nuts and bolts learnings on how consensus can be put into practice.
Part I: A short and partial history of one genealogy of consensus
“We are so accustomed to majority rule as a necessary part of democracy that it is difficult to imagine any democratic system working without it. It is true that it is better to count heads than to break them… but the party system has proved very far from providing the ideal democracies of people’s dreams.”
This quote takes us slightly astray from where I want to go, but it gets us thinking along a helpful track. For one, why is it so challenging to imagine democracy without majority rule? For many of us, the image of democracy is limited to its representational forms—someone else acting on our behalf, our direct role relegated to that of a voter, and the often entrenched non-action, bickering, and corruption endemic within systems built on political parties and coalition governments. The aim of this text is to think democracy otherwise, proposing consensus as a means for doing democracy. Consensus is understood primarily as a method for decision-making, but I want to argue that it also offers a way of organizing methods of thinking and processing in groups that can create infrastructure to develop non-hierarchical collaborations, build community, identify conflict, and gestate shared values and intentions. As community-organizer and facilitator George Lakey puts it, “Consensus is a structural attempt to get equality to happen in decision making.”
Surely many people in many places at many times throughout history have been concerned about how to make decisions in a way that feels equal and fair for all involved. It goes without saying that there are likely many genealogies of consensus; methods for collective decision-making must have many histories. One particular history of consensus that I was first exposed to in my late teenage years can be traced through a Christian religious community called Quakers. Founded in the 1650s by George Fox, the core philosophy of Quakerism lies in a devotion to peace and nonviolence, coupled with the belief that God is present in everyone, as a sacred light within each of us, thus nullifying the need for clergy to interpret God's will. This democratic belief in equal access to the divine led to a disavowal of formal ministry and set forms of worship, as well as a rejection of many prevailing Christian hierarchies. For example, even at its founding in the 17th century, women were understood to have equal access to God and could therefore minister to the public and have leadership roles in the community.
As it relates to our focus here, this also deeply influenced how communities of Quakers organized themselves. In the tradition of Quaker worship, community members sit together silently until one feels moved to share an insight or message with the congregation. Quakers still use this philosophy for organizational functions too, for business meetings, and social or political initiatives. Similar to a meeting for worship, participants take turns expressing ideas, not necessarily responding directly to one another. Discussion continues until there is a sense that all participants feel agreement about what is to be done, or once all participants can at least accept the direction the decision has taken. Though this is often time consuming, Quakers are invested in consensus because within the origin of its practice is the notion that each of us contains the presence of the divine. As historian A. Paul Hare writes,
“For over 300 years, the members of the Society of Friends have been making group decisions without voting. Their method is to find a sense of the meeting, which represents a consensus of those involved. Ideally, this consensus is not simply unanimity or an opinion on which all members happen to agree, but an actual unity, a higher truth which grows from the consideration of divergent opinions and unites them all.”
Because of this long-standing practice, those raised within the Quaker faith were intimately familiar with this method of decision-making and increasingly brought these methods into other spheres of their lived realities. Without knowing this history, it may come as a shock that the use of consensus decision-making in most radical and leftist organizations in the U.S. and Europe today—from Occupy Wall Street to Extinction Rebellion—has roots in the beliefs and practices of the Quakers.
As mentioned above, a core tenet of Quakerism is peace, not solely passive in the sense of not engaging in violence and war, but also through actively working to engender non-violence, in a similar vein, perhaps, as other religious groups give alms or engage in community service projects. The post-war period in America was mired in violence and struggle both at home and abroad. The after-effects of the atomic bomb and the rise of nuclear power, the Vietnam War and other US imperialist incursions into East Asia, and the struggle for civil rights, Black power, and the women’s liberation movement saw a concomitant rise in televised and broadcasted violence (and its normalization) within public life in 1960s America. It was in this context that in 1966 a group of activist Quakers founded A Radical Quaker Action Group. Focused primarily on creative, direct, nonviolent campaigns, as a way of making public examples and methodologies for making peace and protesting violence, one of A Radical Quaker Action Group’s key methods was using sailing boats and the distinct legal territory and status of the ocean as a means for sharing aid. In one such action, they sent antimalarial and antibacterial drugs and bandages to Hiroshima, and in a later action they sailed with similar supplies to Vietnam. The idea behind this was to identify means of doing direct nonviolence, not symbolic actions or protests in hopes of changing state policy. For A Radical Quaker Action Group, war was viewed as an inherent aspect of the system of capitalism, and social inequality was understood as a form of violence maintained by the threat of state violence. To work for peace and equality, to abide by the Quaker testimony of peace, one must engage in social change. This was not to say, however, that they did not have creative ideas about how to enact social change. One of their key tenets was the notion of “image defeat.” In addition to the hoped-for impact of direct action, they aimed to create attention-grabbing, imaginative stories and images that would garner outsized media attention, overshadowing or even replacing news coverage sympathetic to the state and state violence. For example, when their boat the Phoenix sailed to Vietnam, it appeared on the front cover of many newspapers, supplanting the image of the U.S. making war with an image of a small group of radical Quakers sailing to Vietnam with food and supplies.
A Radical Quaker Action Group eventually disbanded, but their impact reverberated both within Quaker activist circles and more broadly amongst organizations tied to the New Left. Some people involved with these earlier activities were then involved in the formation of another group, Movement for a New Society (MNS). Self-identified as a feminist, radical, non-violent organization, Movement for a New Society was active from 1971 to 1988. With chapters in about a dozen cities across the U.S. and a hub in Philadelphia, the ideas they developed connected with many other activist struggles at the time, such as feminist liberation, environmental organizing, and anti-nuke activism. At its core, the group’s ethos was about sharing knowledge with one another and connecting the internal workings of community organizing with the external goals of these campaigns, through trainings and typical activist organizing, but also by practicing unlearning and doing self-work. This manifested as an ongoing commitment to doing anti-oppression training among them and a study format they termed “macro-analysis” seminars. The purpose of these seminars was to ensure they committed to and made time for study and inquiry, not just goal-oriented aims. Through this community study structure, they could practice recognizing and undoing their own internalized racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. The macro-analysis seminars and study groups were modeled on extant popular education efforts of the time, especially from the civil rights movement, feminist consciousness-raising, and the ideas of critical pedagogue Paulo Freire.
In its first pamphlet, MNS positioned its distinct understanding of community-organizing, and declared its opposition to,
“Traditional forms of organization, from [the multinational corporation] ITT to the PTA [Parent-Teacher Association]…for they exhibit the sexism and authoritarianism we seek to supplant. Our goals must be incorporated into the way we organize. Thus the movement we build must be egalitarian and non-centralized.”
At its core, MNS was concerned with creating different social relations, and saw its own community as a place to practice these ideas in the here and now, while working for these changes within society as a whole. This led MNS to integrate the seemingly external efforts of political organizing with the internal growth of becoming more socially aware and empathetically attuned, as a way of living closer to and more in accord with the world they wanted to see. Practically speaking, MNS built infrastructure to facilitate livelihoods, such as housing co-ops, food co-ops, a publisher, reading rooms, and “counter-institutions” as they termed them, but this philosophy also deeply influenced how they did process, leading to the development of infrastructures for organizing people, dialogue, and decision-making. From this came structures such as affinity groups, macro-analysis seminars and spokes-councils. These developments and the way of thinking that fueled them exemplify the concept of “prefigurative politics,” as coined by sociologist Wini Breines, who identified a central tenet of the work of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as the effort to “create and sustain within the lived practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that ‘prefigured’ and embodied the desired society.”
MNS had the opportunity to promulgate many of these practices more widely because of their involvement in organizing with the Clamshell Alliance to protest the proposed Seabrook Nuclear power plant in 1977. Due to the collective organizing efforts, 1400 people were peaceably arrested, collectively refused bail, and were then able to use the time held for two weeks in large armory buildings to collectively study, organize, and train themselves, testing many of the methods MNS had elaborated. Since then (and via other routes), techniques of horizontal organizing and consensus decision-making have spread and morphed across various social movements, and more broadly through universities, socially-engaged artistic practices, and many other activist adjacent fields.
While it might feel commonplace to say, “let’s work in a horizontal way,” “let’s decide this through consensus,” or “let’s create affinity groups for organizing a multi-part project,” it feels important to trace these genealogies and the histories and contexts that brought us here. In one context, consensus is fetishized as a goal in and of itself, while in another, it is demonized due to the tepid, watered-down decisions it leads to in lieu of complete political deadlock. In analyzing the development of direct democratic structures such as Occupy and other recent social movements, commentators David Graeber and Cindy Milstein have both suggested that “[c]onsensus is both our ends and our means of struggle.” I am sympathetic to this notion, and I too want to be part of a society that is participatory, egalitarian, and self-organizing. But I think we need to understand consensus as multifaceted and complex, with both histories and contexts tied to these methodologies, worthy of attention and study, not a catch-all phrase and simple concept that can magically make direct democracy possible in and of itself.
Part II: Some ideas for doing consensus together
What is consensus?
Consensus is a collective creative problem-solving process, created through:
- receptive, perceptive, and empathic listening
- digestion and connecting—finding commonalities and threads between ideas and concerns (and noting differences and dissonance)
- synthesizing and translating—voicing propositions that bring together divergent ideas, concerns, and approaches
What is consensus good for?
Movement for a New Society members saw at least three key benefits to the consensus process:
- it helps to empower more reserved and less experienced participants, creating a more even field for all
- it keeps in check the sometimes-competing egos in an organization or group
- the deeply considered discussion aspect of consensus is useful in a group’s early state when it is “searching” for new ideas and building unity in the group
Some conditions needed for consensus:
The group needs to share a clear common desire or goal(s), and be willing to work together toward this. It needs to be clear what needs to be decided upon collectively and what can be left to individuals. Discuss together what our goals are and how we will get there. When conflict and differences inevitably arise, return to the common goal(s) to refocus the conversation.
- Nurturing trust, accountability and openness
We need to be able to trust that each of us arrives with the intention of working together. We also need to nurture spaces where all voices are heard and valued. Sometimes there is much to do, long before decisions get made, just to get to a point wherein a community or group of people is ready and able to speak together in that way. This isn’t an effort that can be skipped. George Lakey uses the metaphor of a container,
“I call the kind of social order that supports safety, a ‘container.’ The metaphor of container suggests that it might be thin or thick, weak or robust. A strong container has walls thick enough to hold a group doing even turbulent work, with individuals willing to be vulnerable in order to learn.”
Part of accountability is also accountability to ourselves, to listen internally and openly express our desires (what we’d like to see happen), and our needs (what we must have happen in order to be able to support a decision). If everyone is able to talk openly then the group will have the information it requires to take everyone’s positions into account and come up with a solution that everyone can support. Consensus will inevitably fail if needs aren’t shared publicly or if they are ignored when voiced.
- Commitment to practicing consensus together
Everyone needs to be willing to be present in all senses of the word. This means being deeply honest about what it is you want or don’t want, and listening empathetically to what others have to say. Everyone must be willing to shift their positions and opinions, and to notice assumptions they may have been leaning on. Further, we need to be open to alternative and unexpected solutions, and accept the “good enough.”
Consensus takes effort, so it’s not wise to use it for decisions that don’t warrant such energy. Learning to work together with others in this way builds over time, but each scenario or decision deserves consideration and attention. Rushing a process is like shooting it in the foot; inevitably needs or crucial information will be missed or ignored and thus decisions taken will require reworking and revision later. Cultivate circumstances that make it feasible for your group to have time and capacity for this work. Be realistic about what’s possible with the time you all can collectively give, determine limits ahead of time, and make sure this is clearly shared with everyone. Think of concerns and needs that will pull people away from this process and collectively arrange for these needs ahead of time, such as food, rest breaks, suitable space, childcare, etc.
It’s a necessity to have a clear (and accountable) process for making decisions and to do everything possible to ensure that all those present have a shared understanding of how the process works. If specific methods, hand signals, etc. will be used, this needs to be outlined and made clear for everyone. A clear statement or outline of what is aimed for (see “Shared desires”), and information and planning for the meeting (see “Enough time and capacity”) should be voiced from the outset. Honoring the process means listening to where it takes you collectively even when it leads you to an unexpected conclusion. It also means collectively agreeing to take care of the conversation, noticing when things stray off-topic and holding collective responsibility toward guiding the process, while being mindful of the limits and capacity of all involved.
In consensus we all need to actively participate. We need to listen intently to what everyone has to say, while also voicing our thoughts and feelings about the matter. The process should hold space for all involved. This is possible by being present as a listener but also by being open and vulnerable to share and to speak. Being present asks that each of us proactively imagines and seeks solutions that look out for everyone involved.
https://drop.hackersanddesigners.nl/17-04-2021-intro-presentation.mp4
Angela Jerardi is a writer and curator, arboreal feminist (killjoy) and art school permaculturalist.
Flowchart of the discussion process
WINWIN
James Bryan Graves and Nienke Huitenga-Broeren
WINWIN is an interactive debate platform and immersive experience that was initiated by James Bryan Graves and Nienke Huitenga-Broeren. It’s an algorithm that builds on consensus principles and guides participants through a conversation about a polarizing societal issue. WINWIN embraces consensus over adversity, and aims to facilitate and find common ground among its participants.
The concept of WINWIN was inspired by digital consensus algorithms. Participants are installed temporarily as “nodes” into a “consensus-zone-data center” where an “immersive” hood and soundscape preserve attention as well as the anonymity of a person-node.
Image from a WINWIN performance. Participants wearing heads that gives them privacy while responding to the questions on their phones. On the projection behind them the process of the discussion is visible to the audience
Participants operate individually in a group experience, in a bubble while connected. A person-node always knows the general “state of the system” (the course and status of the conversation) without knowing the details about how many other person-nodes are also participating in the system. Together—yet apart—participants dive into the nuances of their opinions. The course of the conversation evolves as a tree-branch-narrative. Participants encounter the responses of their fellow participants one by one on their mobile phones. Every time consensus is reached, WINWIN moves the participant up the branch and back to where unresolved statements await calibration.
We’re fascinated by disruptive governing interventions and movements like the Occupy movement. Often, fuelled by idealism, groups get waylaid in their denouncement of the issues they collectively oppose. As such, such groups—due to the emotional investment of their participants—fail to succeed in agreeing internally on how things should be different, and how to move forward. Such groups often collapse just before their moment of breakthrough.
WINWIN came into being during a conversation between Nienke and James about how algorithms might play a role in moving forward together as a society, while also being respectful of people’s differences and diverging realities. WINWIN was also conceived of as a “tool” for overcoming the dysfunctional and toxic debate styles that prevail on the Internet today. It is likely that you will never agree with a “flat Earther” on the belief that the Earth is indeed flat. But you might find a common ground in questioning the manner in which scientific information is shared or revealed to the public. On that point of agreement you could then act together and initiate a new conversation. The intention of WINWIN is to help participants dive deeper and craft the most constructive conversation possible on a strongly polarizing topic.
Screenshot of a discussion and the decision tree of WinWin
Image from a WINWIN performance. Participants wearing heads that gives them privacy while responding to the questions on their phones. On the projection behind them the process of the discussion is visible to the audience]]
Statements discussed by WINWIN participants during the H&D meetup on Algorithmic Consensus:
- “Consensus decision making is a more inclusive way of reaching agreement between all members of a group, than for instance majority models”.
- “Consensus decision making processes can help to create a less polarized online discourse”.
- “Consensus decision making is an inefficient way to come to an agreement in a group”.
There were three moments of consensus on the platform. Everyone agreed on:
- “One might say all online discourse has established it is polarization. Consensus might carry potential to create more nuance.”
- “Homogeneous groups have an easier time agreeing on issues"
- “A homogeneous group doesn't necessarily reach consensus, and a heterogeneous group doesn't necessarily have to be at odds.”
James Bryan Graves is a software engineer, computer scientist, lecturer, and community organizer. James moved to the Netherlands in 2009 from the United States of America. He founded Hackers & Founders Amsterdam in 2011, a community of entrepreneurs and programmers which later additionally opened a non-profit community organized co-working space in the Herengracht in Amsterdam in 2014. In 2013 James furthermore started Hackers & Designers together with Anja Groten and Selby Gildemacher.
Nienke Huitenga-Broeren is an immersive designer and strategist. In her work she blends media strategy, digital concepts and immersive experiences. She is a co-founder of Hackastory, a startup fostering innovation in journalism. In 2019 she finished her first virtual reality production ROZSYPNE, an interactive VR-story about an old lady trying to persevere daily life in the Eastern-Ukrainian warzone, with the MH17-crash at her doorstep. She co-directed it with Lisa Weeda and produced it with Studio ZZZAP. In 2019 she also participated in the last Sandberg@Mediapark talent incubator where she created together with hacker James Bryan Graves WINWIN, a consensus algorithm and immersive discussion experience—for finding consensus in dealing with the tough questions we currently face worldwide.
The “Unbound Libraries” folder arrived in 2020 at the H&D studio in Amsterdam. It was sent to us by Elodie, Martino and An of Constant Association for Arts and Media in Brussels in preparation for a one week work session. The work session “Unbound Libraries” took place online due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The folder contained preparatory reading materials related to the session. It had a navigation system stapled to its front cover—an overview of the materials and a suggestion on how to approach them. It was not a fixated, bound reader but a loose collection—a repository of materials that can grow and changes over time.
Re- and Un- Defining Tools
Feminist Search Tools working group
Exploring intersectional approaches to digital search tools in library catalogs
The Feminist Search Tools (FST) is an ongoing artistic research project that explores different ways of engaging with digital library catalogs. The FST project studies the power structures that library search engines reproduce, and views (computational) search mechanisms through an intersectional lens to inquire how marginalized voices within libraries and archives can become more easily accessible and searchable. While the initial FST study process began within the context of the Utrecht University library, the project soon shifted to focus on the catalog of IHLIA LGBTI Heritage Collection in Amsterdam.
The following texts are conversations between members of the FST project. The first conversation focuses on the different motivations that informed the FST project, and includes reflections on the different modes of working together. The follow-up conversation zooms in on the “tool aspect” of the Feminist Search Tools project, its situatedness and processual nature, and the different (mis)understandings of the term “tool.”
'Tools' refers to a digital search interface in different iterations that allows for textual search queries within digital catalogs of libraries and archives. During the collaboration, the various tool versions have taken different shapes and forms, but have never really solidified in a way that made them easily applicable to contexts other than those they were developed within. Instead, we have attended to the tool-making or tool-imagining process itself, which expanded our understanding of tools (digital and otherwise) and the implications they had on specific contexts.
The composition of the FST working group has changed shape throughout its duration. While Sven Engels, Anja Groten, Annette Krauss, and Laura Pardo initiated an early iteration of the FST project, others–including Angeliki Diakrousi, Alice Strete, and Ola Hassanain–joined the process at a later stage, after we had started a new iteration of the tool the so-called “visualization tool,” during the Digital Methods summer school in 2019. Throughout the project, the group met sporadically and consulted with librarians, information specialists and other artists and researchers working with and around subjects related to libraries and librarianship.
The following conversation took place after the second iteration of the visualization tool was presented in a public setting and a funding cycle for this iteration was completed.
Tools as “digital study objects”
Anja Groten: Considering that we all had very different encounters and experiences with the tools created throughout the project, I propose to start our conversation with an open question: What were everyone's initial expectations towards working on a digital tool, and how have these expectations been met, or perhaps changed over time?
Annette Krauss: I still remember how some of us in the Read-in became interested in the term ‘“tool,” and more specifically a “digital tool” through the question of scale. During our previous project titled Bookshelf Research, we spent time in small (grass-root) libraries studying the way the publications were categorized. For me, the Bookshelf Research was already a tool. By literally passing every single item of the library through our hands, one after the other, we got acquainted with the library and tried to understand the different categories—such as publishers, languages, gender of authors, materiality—as well as the book contents. For instance, we looked at the Grand Domestic Revolution Library of Casco Art Institute, which holds around 300 books. The digital dimension of the tool became more clear when we shifted our attention to the Utrecht University library. As the library holds three million books, a contextualization counting exercise in the physical space was not possible in the same way. What has remained throughout the process is our desire to challenge the coloniality of modern knowledge production that we attempted to address with the question “Why are the authors of the books I read so white, so male, so eurocentric?”
AG: You earlier referred to the Bookshelf Research as a tool. What do you mean by that? Do you regard a “tool"" as a synonym for method?
AK: I’d rather see “tool” here as a “mode of address,” or a set of search mechanisms, or maybe even principles. I think it has to do with my disbelief in the possibility of transferring methods from one context to another without causing much harm. A mode of address proposes something that a method has difficulties in attending to, namely being situated and context-specific.
Sven Engels: I think for me at some point I started equating tools with “digital tools”; in my head. This created a disconnect for me, because I felt I wasn't easily able to access what those tools actually do. At the same time, the notion of the tool as a "digital object";—an interface—also came with the question of the tool’s usability, which also brings up the question of "use for what"; and for "whom"? For instance, the expectation that a tool should also produce some form of result was put into question. Thinking about the tool as a digital study object creates room to explore these and other questions about what the tool actually does.
AG: The idea of a tool as an enhancement, that it’s supposed to make our processes easier, might have caused some confusion around the project, don't you think? Interesting and important confusions, not to mention expectations.
Laura Pardo: When we started talking about tools rather than “the tool,” my perception and expectations toward the project changed. From the beginning, when we were talking about the FST project, for instance during our first conversation with ATRIA, we had questions like: “Is the tool going to work?” There had indeed been a certain expectation for the tool to produce a result, or a solution to a problem. The fact that we decided to make a digital tool made me especially cautious. To my understanding, digital tools tend to be binary, it’s either this or that. Everything in between gets lost. Realizing that there is not just one tool but a kind of ongoing tool-making process that includes different modes and materializations through which you can ask questions about tools—was a very important part of the process.
SE: When you talk about the things getting lost do you refer to the decisions made that factor into how a tool is made or are you referring to the conversations that are part of the tool-making process that are no longer visible?
LP: It’s both. In moments like this our conversations are so valuable and important. When you have a product—a finished search interface for example—those conversational elements can get lost. I think it is great that we bring all the conversations, pieces of audio, and images together on our project website. But when making a tool you also need to come up with solutions to problems, right?
Angeliki Diakrousi: Listening to your thoughts, I want to relate back to how the question of scale played a role for you in the beginning. When a database becomes so big that we can’t relate to it anymore as a human, it exceeds our understanding and therefore challenges our capacity to trust. I also like the idea of the conversational tool because it means the tool can be scaled down and become part of the conversation, and that it doesn't have to give a solution to a problem. In conversation with the tool we can address issues that we otherwise don't know how to solve. If we can’t solve something, how would a tool solve it? The tool is our medium in a way. I am interested in finding more of these bridges to make the tool a conversational tool.
AK: I have grappled with the role of scaling throughout the process, and have been both attracted and appalled by it. This is what I tried to point to earlier with the modes of address. The work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing could be interesting to think about here, when she refers to scaling as a rigid abstraction process. Tsing criticizes science and modern knowledge production for its obsession with scalability. She describes scalability as the desire to change scale—for instance, by expanding a particular mode of research or production without being sensitive to the different contexts in which they are being applied. This has provoked much colonial violence because scalability avoids contextualization and situatedness in order to function smoothly, and therefore upholds an extractivist logic. I believe that through our conversations we are attempting to contextualize and situate the subject. Conversations ground us.
LP: Isn't our struggle with addressing gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability in our first prototype an example in this direction? We are working with a big database and have to find solutions for certain questions, and by choosing a specific solution many other modes are not chosen, which we know can lead to misrepresentation.
Alice Strete: I remember that we were looking for the gender of the authors at the beginning of the project, and approaching it by looking at the data set of Wiki Data. I think I was expecting that the information would be readily available, and that we just had to find it and figure out how to use it. But then I realized I had to adapt my expectations about how to extract insights from the database, which was not obvious to me from the beginning.
SE: The biggest clash in that regard was when we tried the Gender API. It attributes a gender category on the basis of the frequency a name is used for a particular gender online. Not only does this lead to faulty results, but it’s a harmful way to use it when self-identification is so central to gender identification. This definitely forced us to rethink how gender could be identified in different ways and with tools that also take self-identification into consideration.
Ola Hassanain: When I joined the project, I asked questions that stemmed from my concern about the classifications we would be using and how the tool would filter certain searches. My concern was that the tool would transfer from one type of classification to another. When you look for “knowledge”—at least from my perspective—there is a degree of caution that you have to take. These general classifications are out there and even if you do not adhere to them or abide by them they are still there. I had a brief conversation with Annette about the tool having to be adjustable in a way that it could meet steadily changing requirements. To make a point, I used an example of the architectural catalog Neufert, which has become an international standardization guideline for architectural measurements. So basically, whatever you produce as an architect or designer must comply with a set of pre-defined measurements. Anyway, my question was whether the process of tool-building is eventually perpetuating the same categories and classifications that the libraries are using. The interesting thing about the Neufert catalog is that it gets updated regularly, and it is continuously regenerating. So how can a search tool respond to something that is constantly changing?
AK: I understood the Neufert catalog more as a standardization tool, with normative rules comparable to the library classifications developed by the Library of Congress. Here however, you actually stress its flexibility.
OH: The tool has to cater to the changing times. My suspicion was about whether we can have more diverse or inclusive ways of using or sourcing references and books, and what informs such a process. If we have something like the Neufert catalog already set up in the libraries, how would the tool respond to that, and how does it regenerate?
AG: When you refer to changeability and the challenge of correcting categorization systems, I have to think of the text “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction” by Emily Drabinski, which Eva Weinmeyr and Lucie Kolb's research project on “Teaching the Radical Catalog” was inspired by. Drabinski discusses practices of knowledge organization from a queer perspective and problematizes the notion that classification can ever be finally corrected. According to Drabinski there needs to be a sustained critical awareness, and ways of teaching catalogs as complex and biased texts. I remember the Unbound Library Session, organized by Constant in 2020, during which Anita and Martino—who are self-taught librarians working at the Rietveld and Sandberg library—presented their library search tool which allowed the users of the library catalog to suggest new categories. Thus, someone searching in the library catalog can make suggestions for modifying the system itself. The librarians would then review and apply or reject the suggestions. Their idea was to organize discussions and workshops with students and teaching staff around such suggestions. It is quite exciting to think about the changeable catalog becoming dialogic in that way.
AS: There is a big difference between using an existing search tool—into which you have less insight—and making something from scratch, so to speak, that integrates conversation at every step. I appreciate the possibility of paying attention to the decisions being made at different phases of the process.
SE: I wonder to what extent the idea to build something from scratch is even possible or desirable? I often feel that projects are trying to come up with something new and innovative, instead of acknowledging the work done by others before them, and embracing the practice of building on and complexifying what already exists. It's definitely a trap we've been conscious of ourselves, and that we’ve attempted to focus on, while making room for different perspectives and questions.
AK: I understand Alice’s comment more in terms of a search interface as black box. And indeed, we have built upon so many existing tools—like the Atria Women’s Thesaurus, the Homosaurus of IHLIA, and all the references mentioned by Anja. There are loads of tools, or experiments of tooling, that we have struggled with, like the first prototype, the “Feminist Search Assistant,” the paper prototypes, and the Visualization Tools (Digital Methods summer school; FST Meet-ups; IHLIA).
Where does the agency lie within the tool?
LP: When it comes to the user interface, we are so used to having smooth interface designs that feel just like “magic” like the experience of filling in the search window in Google, for instance It shows you the result, but we never know what is happening in the backend. I always hoped that we would do the opposite of this.
There is a lack of agency with digital tools that I don’t have with analogue tools. Like, I have a hammer; I know how it works. I am somehow much more frustrated as a user of digital tools, and I don't know how to break the distance between myself and the tool. I think we were trying to close that gap but it still felt unattainable at times.
AG: This reminds me of a subsection in a previous conversation that I wanted to elaborate on further. It’s the section “Understanding one's own tools,” which is about, among other things, the implication of ownership over a tool. Even though it’s subtle, don’t our tools in a way own us too? Furthermore, when we think about tools, like software for instance,we often think about them as separate from us. There is an alleged separation between the tool builder, the tool, and the tool user. I found it so interesting how in our process—despite the friction it caused—it became clear that tools are actually not so separate from us after all. Every conversation was informed by the tool, which in turn shaped how we developed the tool. But we, as a group, were also shaped by its becoming, and we were constantly confronted by our expectations of the tool and our relationship to it.
AD: I wonder how the code could also become part of this conversation. For instance, the ways we categorized the material in the code. Thinking about the code and realizing that creating intersectional axes practically meant that we had to move the catalog entries from their separate categories toward the same place in the dataset. Everything had to become part of one script.
To create the different axes we connected the different terms in that script. The way we categorized the code, the file, and the scripts should also be part of that conversation. Because the code is also built on binaries and structures and is written in ways that make it difficult to complexify, it’s actually difficult to find possibilities to separate catalog items from one another. We are not professional software developers. We just happen to know a bit of coding and we are learning through this process. I am sure the tool can be much more innovative in how it is structured. It also needs a deep knowledge of the initial library tool. But yeah, it was an interesting process. I would actually like to see this conversation and our learning process reflected more visibly in the tool.
AK: Which brings us back to the “conversation tool.” All these conversations and encounters are so necessary because the digital tool itself makes them so invisible in a way.
AG: But how could they become more visible? These conversations indeed became a useful “tool” for our process as they offered us committed moments of collective reflection. On the project website, the conversation became quite important as a narration of the website as well as a navigation. But what happens after the conversation? The idea of releasing the digital tool still seems to be a difficult subject for us. The way we go about the release is by making the process available and hyper-contextualizing it. There have always been specific people and specific organizations that we engaged with, and to a certain extent we also depend on these people to move forward. Don’t you think there is a danger that these conversations become too self-referential? To some extent, we do publish and release the tools through these conversations and through other forms of activation such as the meet-ups, but how do we make sure that the Feminist Search Tools contribute to or feed back into the communities they were inspired by?
SE: The conversations are perhaps more in the background of the digital tool itself. If we think, for instance, of the website and the project itself, we try to bring the conversations to the foreground. It's good to keep in mind how central these questions are to the project itself.
Exploring intersectional search as a way to move beyond identity politics
AG: In the previous conversation we clarified that we understood feminism as intersectional, that different forms of discrimination cannot be seen as separate but should be always seen in relation to each other, “avoiding the tendency to separate the axes of difference that shape society, institutions, and ourselves.” With the last iteration of the tool, we tried to literally intersect groups and axes of categorization, but at the same time also created new kinds of distinctions in order to make certain things legible, and others not. How are those separations, in fact feminist separations? And in what ways did the tool share our understanding of feminism?
SE: Annette and I had a conversation with Lieke Hettinga, whom we had asked for input to further explore how the x-axis terms of the visualization tool related to disability, due to their expertise in disability and trans studies. Lieke questioned to what extent—when using the clusters of gender, race, sexuality, etc.—we were just reinforcing identity categories, and to what extent we were able to move beyond these categories altogether. By looking at categories individually but also trying to find connections between them, I was reminded of the underlying tension of this project, which pertained to us feeling the need to name different categories relating to identity in our question: "Why are the books I read so white, so male, so Eurocentric?,” while also desiring to move beyond them. These conversations and tensions have been an important part of the process but aren't necessarily visible in the tool as it currently exists. How can we show and make such tensions accessible to people engaging with the tool, and also have them be part of the conversation about it?
AD: I think it is important to consider the people this tool refers to in the process, involve them, but maybe not so intensively. Perhaps people don't have to understand it completely, either. It’s good that it's clear that when we say “tool” we aren’t speaking about a tool that gives solutions to problems. For me, it's important that people understand the conversational process, and that we want them to be part of it, and that they will also affect the outcome of the tool. How can a reflection on this process be opened up? How can we engage more people in this process? Maybe through workshops, or small conversations, or a broadcast?
To me this relates to feminist practice, that the tool is applied in different layers. Not only in how you make the actual tool but also in how you communicate about it, how you do things, and take care of the technical but also the social aspects.
Use value and usability
SE: I had to think of the metaphor that Ola brought up in our first conversation: the tool being a disruptive mechanism, like “throwing stones into a wheel,” which translates to how the tool exists within power structures. But at the same time I do have to admit I have a desire for the tool to actually function, which for me stems from wanting to find more queer literature. I find it very frustrating that I still cannot do so within mainstream media outlets or libraries. So, I think we should not do away with our hopes and desires for the use value of the FST. We can of course be critical about the efficiency of a tool. But at the same time, we need to understand our motivations for making it work—It’s OK that we want the tool to function and release it so that other people can engage with it as well.
OH: The desire to actually find an item in the library catalog cannot be separated from the rest of our commentary in terms of its efficiency. When a search tool is used, it creates issues while it is being used. This expectation of a useful tool and being critical of its problematics are not isolated issues. That's may be not hard to imagine, but maybe hard to articulate.
Alice: Ola, would this be an argument against the usability of such a tool?
OH: No, this is not an argument against usability but against the fact that we think it's not; that it is something separate. We shouldn’t look at its usability as something that is sort of neutral and separate, that is part of the problem. It creates and perpetuates the same issue because the tool is already something that gives analytics to the bigger body of the library. Through that patterns are formed, and the interface responds to it. So, we are caught in an enclosure of this desire that is already informed by how the knowledge is institutionalized or how that knowledge is classified. I think there has to be an awareness of that.
AD: The way that I envision it, is that it's not going to be a “beautiful” interface that is easy-going. It will show the fragments of learning that went into it.
AG: Yes, the tool also demands a certain level of care and commitment. Perhaps it should not be thought of as something that can be finished, that stands on its own, rather as something that is never resolved and needs continuous engagement, like a practice.
AK: For me it links back to a certain attitude towards tools. I don't believe that a complete understanding of a library search tool and its implications is possible. But perhaps it is possible to strive for a certain kind of literacy that supports both a questioning attitude towards tool-use, and is informed by a quest for social justice. Perhaps this way the complicities of a tool-users in the modern project of education that libraries are also embedded in can be addressed?
Members of the Feminist Search Tools working group include: Read-in (Sven Engels, Annette Krauss, Laura Pardo; and Ying Que who was involved in certain parts of the project), Hackers & Designers (Anja Groten, André Fincato, Heerko van der Kooij, and former member James Bryan Graves), Ola Hassanain, Angeliki Diakrousi, and Alice Strete.
Mycelines: A Sympoetic Imagination
Qianxun Chen
A Myceline (a neologism made up of ‘mycelium’ and ‘line') is a “line” of text that grows like a mycelium. Mycelines can be generated based on a word-in-context analysis of one piece or multiple pieces of text. A shared word between two sentences has the potential to become a “node,” enabling new mycelines to grow from it. It breaks the linear, one-directional flow of the written language and demonstrates how interconnected our language is with new visual representations and evolving textual behaviors.
In Staying with the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway introduced the term sympoiesis based on autopoiesis, Sympoiesis means “making-with”, or “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” By contrast, autopoietic systems are “self-producing” autonomous units “with self defined spatial or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable.”
If we apply this way of thinking to words and text, to think about autopoietic as auto-poetics, auto-poetic can then be used to describe generative textual systems with centrally defined generative rules, while sym-poetic are for texts that are collectively produced among various dynamic components. Mycelines are created with sympoetic in mind. Here, words decide how they organize themselves spatially based on the flow of each sentence instead of following one predefined direction, allowing concepts and thoughts interact and merge in a process akin to anastomosis in fungal networks.
The Code below shows the process of word in context analysis of the text “Re-, Un-, Defining Tools” by the Feminist Search Tools working group. We can see that words such as “tool”, “think”, “conversation” and “process” are mentioned the most, which make them important nodes in the generated myceline network.
- Qianxun Chen is a media artist, programmer and researcher. She works at the intersection of art, technology and language, with a focus on generative poetics, the aesthetics of algorithm and digital textuality. Her works tend to bring up artistic and non-human perspectives of the world through alternative usage of technology.
Concorder = class
conversationText = FileAttachment {
- name: "conversation.txt"
- mimeType: "text/plain"
- <prototype>: FileAttachment {}
}
ct = await conversationText.text()
concordance = new Concorder(text, {
- ignoreCase: true,
- ignoreStopWords: true,
- ignorePunctuation: true,
- isSentenceLevel : true
});
cAnalysis = getAnalysis(concordance)
cAnalysis = Object {
- tool: Array(67)
- think: Array(18)
- tools: Array(15)
- conversation: Array(18)
- something: Array(16)
- process: Array(16)
- library: Array(10)
- digital: Array(14)
- project: Array(13)
- way: Array(12)
- different: Array(9)
- make: Array(11)
- gender: Array(8)
- part: Array(10)
- through: Array(8)
- search: Array(9)
- find: Array(7)
- catalog: Array(8)
- question: Array(8)
- … more
}
fileSHA as protocol
André Fincato and Karl Moubarak
Why fileSHA
!/bin/bash
- init: remove existing data and initialize new game-session
- create file to keep track of chosen members
if [ ! -e ./.members ]; then
- touch ./.members
else
- rm ./.members && touch ./.members
fi
- create moderation folder where to move emails
- from `<mlmmj>/<list>/moderation
if [ ! -d ./moderation ]; then
- mkdir ./moderation
else
- rm -rf ./moderation && mkdir ./moderation
fi
delete .game-over mark
rm -rf ./.game-over
← Caption: init. instructions to kick-off the game.
fileSHA is an email, “turn-based” game that uses mailing list software as its main playground–think of a chat program but it's happening over an email exchange. You send a message to the list’s email address and the message is automatically distributed to everyone on the list. The core activity of the game is file sharing. A random participant receives a prompt via email to share a file however they want. The next randomly selected participant receives that file (sometimes by coordinating with the previous user) and then decides how to use it as an input source for the file they have chosen to share. At this point, no one else in the list knows what’s occurring except the two randomly chosen participants.
The project was born of our shared curiosity and fascination with mailing lists and the role they play in bringing communities together. We were guided by an all-too-common frustration that many will have related to in recent years, that is the sudden and abrupt disappearance of online spaces that were supposed to host communities, and especially the “data” produced by their users over time. Be that a group of people gathered around a shared love for a musical genre, a team collaborating on the development of a coding framework, or a discussion board on space exploration, it’s not uncommon to see communities hosted on Mastodon or Discord being closed unilaterally by their moderators, or having no way to export the “sociality” (collective memory) that’s being produced by users interaction into a data format that can be re-purposed or imported into another web service. This prompted us to ask the question:
What are other ways of communicating and navigating digital infrastructure that we might have overlooked or forgotten about?
Another inspiration for the game stems from André’s endless fascination for a piece of software called git. git propelled the Linux project to become a viable, Internet-based, multiplayer effort. git uses emails as the main format for collaborating on a project, which means: mailing lists.
Looking up examples of old mailing lists on the www we found, for instance, the cryptography archives. The mailing list dates back to 1970 (a Linux bug? There was no PGP software at the time, nor widespread email usage). Would an ongoing conversation thread be imaginable today, with the emergence of softwares such as Discord, an expressly community-oriented instant messaging platform? Does our frustration with online softwares have to do with these kinds of programs, or is to do with the composition and evolution of the HTTP protocol?
We dreamt of working with email protocols and mailing lists, instead of the web and the HTTP protocol. What’s the UI offered by a mailing list? How easy is it to join one? What types of interactions can be designed in this space and what “social etiquettes” can be established, stretched, or ignored?
We decided to pick file sharing as the key activity in an email-based game as it aligns with another interest of ours: peer2peer computing. Most p2p file-sharing software demands users to be online and at their computers at the same time, which adds an interesting requirement in the context of a non real-time technique like email: manual, human coordination. File sharing, to us, is an activity of making accessible files while simultaneously archiving them (by keeping a local copy of them on our computers). We are interested in exploring alternative methods and techniques to cloud-based file sharing or streaming software, where files continuously live online. As much as emails are easily copyable, shareable, and archivable, file sharing provides similar capabilities.
Protocol of the game
Here we have described the game in a protocolary format. While the game was originally played within email exchanges, we have tried to distill and extract most of the game’s components in such a way that it can also be played in a different format.
The original code repository with instructions can be accessed on the H&D Github page.
The game is chain-based. The more people that join, the better. Five to six players is the preferred minimum.
fileSHA is an “exquisite-corpse” game, which means that the next player cannot see how the previous player altered the file being shared. A classic example of an exquisite corpse is a collective drawing game where the next player receives a sheet of paper folded by the previous person, so they cannot see what’s already been drawn on the sheet.
Furthermore we added two more elements:
- Semi-randomness of selecting the next player
- “Secrecy” between the two players exchanging the outcome
The object of the game is file sharing, meaning that each player receives the file(s) from the previous player and morphs it with one or more files of their choosing. Each player can decide how to use the previous file(s), for instance by compacting them into one file in the form of an archive (e.g., a ZIP file), or by deleting everything and sending a new, entirely different file. Nonetheless, the code we wrote keeps a record of what each participant shares, so that the process can still be revisited during and after the game finishes. So when we use the expression “file sharing technique”, we refer to the action of a player to decide how to share their file with the next player — for instance by attaching the file to the email, or using a p2p software — as well as by including a set of instructions in the email so that the next randomly chosen player can retrieve the file and keep the game going.
!/bin/bash
LIST=$1
- TODO add check in case $LIST is empty string or not being passed
- save to variable list of address from specified mlmmj-list
- double trick:
- the stdout result from the mlmmj command is flattened from a multiline print
- to a one line of values divided by empty space *when* saved to a variable
- we can wrap this value directly inside an array `R=()`, and let bash array
- to split the string by empty space
ORIGINLIST=($(sudo /usr/bin/mlmmj-list -L /var/spool/mlmmj/$LIST))
- loop over full member-list and create a new array with members
- not found in ./members; those have been randomly chosen already
- fairly dumb approach but works fine
CHOSEN=$(<./.members)
LISTADDRESS=()
for member in "${ORIGINLIST[@]}"; do
- check if current member is NOT present in $CHOSEN (use `!`)
- see <https://stackoverflow.com/a/231298>
- if ! $CHOSEN =~ $member ; then
- LISTADDRESS+=($member)
- fi
:done
- pick a random member from the list
- and append it do .members
- -gt => greater than; see <https://askubuntu.com/a/1042664>
- SIZE=${#LISTADDRESS[@]}
- if [ $SIZE -gt 0 ]; then
- IDX=$((RANDOM % $SIZE))
- echo ${LISTADDRESS[$IDX]} >> ./.members
- echo ${LISTADDRESS[$IDX]}
else
- echo "$SIZE"
- fi
← Caption: pick-random-address. instructions to pick the next random player from the subscription list.
We also specifically tried to come up with activities during the game that would introduce extra degrees of “complexity”. For instance, the game ticks at every seventy-two hours hours, and a new player is semi-randomly selected from the list. Sometimes a new player would be selected by choosing. Another example of adding complexity was to choose a file-sharing technique that required real-time coordination between participants (e.g. being online at the computer at the same time or through a certain period of time).
The two technologies that we chose for the game are partly or completely asynchronous (file sharing and emails), which helps to create friction within its linear-time framework (e.g., that the game is chain-based and moves from one player to the next).
These are the rules of the game:
Set up the game so that people who are interested in playing can join
In our case, the list remained open while the game was in play, meaning that someone could join mid-game and extend its duration by being semi-randomly chosen to be one of the next participants.
Set up a system to randomly pick the next player
We did this using computer software with a semi-random function (see the code snippet above the caption pick-random-address). Further rules can be added, for instance whether a participant joins early or later on in the process.
Set up a timer and game duration
We opted for seventy-two hours in a software asynchronous setting, which turned out to be too little time for the player to perform their tasks, these being: receive the file; add, remove and/or extend it; pick a file sharing method; share it with the next player.
Pick a way for the two selected players to exchange information privately
We did not use the main benefit of using mailing list software, which is to send to everyone in the list the same message. We also exploited email software by re-writing the email address of the new sender before manually sending the email to the next randomly chosen player, therefore breaking continuity.
Choose an exchange activity to complete during the game
The fact that file sharing can be interpreted quite widely contributed to unforeseen elements, which we thought could improve the overall strict linear-time experience (e.g., by having to deal with human-coordination between players, disk-space availability, etc.).
Kick off the game as the host
Start the chain of “exchange-activity” by setting an interesting example, e.g., pick a file and a method of sharing it that stirs up engagement.
Send updates to participants
If the time interval is longer than a few hours of gameplay, it might be a good idea to keep participants posted about what is going on while they are not actively playing. Of course, if the game takes place in one room, then this is probably not necessary.
Provide ways to ask for “help“ or to access the rules of the game at any time
One happy, unintended effect of using a mailing list software was the ability to use the feature of asking for “help/info” about the list: e.g., how to unsubscribe, or how to access previous messages. We used the info text to provide the basic rules of the game, and made status updates on which files had been shared so far. The “help” screen of a video game was the main source of inspiration for this feature.
!/bin/bash
LIST_PATH=$1
LIST_NAME=$(basename $LIST_PATH)
LIST_SENDER=$(<./.list-sender)
LIST_PREFIX=$(<$LIST_PATH/control/prefix)
- read moderator email list from file and break multiline text into one line
- (this is how `mailx` receives multiple recipients
MODERATORS=$(tr '\n' ' ' < "$LIST_PATH/control/owner")
- GAME_OVER="game over! all subscribers have been chosen as list contributors!
- "ERROR_CHAIN="An error happened; the chain order broke probably due to a mismatch in the .member list; please check!"
- ERROR_NOPOST="No email has been received yet, run parse-email after a message has been posted to the list"
- check if there's any email held in /moderation
- we could check if $EMAIL_FN is an empty string
- but it seems like eagerly asking for more troubles
MOD_N=$(ls "$LIST_PATH/moderation" | wc -l)
if [ "$MOD_N" == "0" ]; then
- echo "no email held in moderation, checking subscribers list..."
- CHOSEN_SIZE=$(./check-member $LIST_NAME)
if [ "$CHOSEN_SIZE" == "0" ]; then
- check if game-over email was sent already
- if [ -e ./.game-over ]; then
exit 1
- else
touch ./.game-over
echo "$GAME_OVER"
- echo "$GAME_OVER" | mailx -a "From: $LIST_SENDER" -s "$LIST_PREFIX Game Over"
$MODERATORS
- fi
else
- something might have happen, eg contributor did not send email within
- x-time, or other things...
- move on with the next contributor, if any is left
- check latest email received, which we moved to ./moderation/
- send message to next chosen contributor, and pray the gods
EMAIL_FN=$(ls -t "./moderation" | head -n1)
if [ -z "$EMAIL_FN" ]; then
- echo "$ERROR_NOPOST"
- echo "$ERROR_NOPOST" | mailx -a "From: $LIST_SENDER" -s "$LIST_PREFIX Error: no post" $MODERATORS
exit 1
else
- EMAIL_PATH="./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
- MEMBERS_LAST=$(tail -n1 .members)
- pick next contributor
CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT=$(./pick-random-address $LIST_NAME)
echo "Next contributor (1) => $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT"
- `-o` is the OR operator
if [ "$CHOSEN_SIZE" == "0" -o -z "$CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT" ]; then
echo "$ERROR_CHAIN"
- send email error
echo "$ERROR_CHAIN" | mailx -a "From: $LIST_SENDER" -s "$LIST_PREFIX Error"
$MODERATORS
- else
- replace `To:` address
- sed -i "s/^To: .*$/To: $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT/" $EMAIL_PATH
- and send email to this address
- /usr/sbin/sendmail -t $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT < $EMAIL_PATH
- fi
fi
fi
else
- at least one message is present in `<mlmmj>/<list>/moderation`
- fetch latest submitted email filename
- <https://stackoverflow.com/a/1015687>
EMAIL_FN=$(ls -t "$LIST_PATH/moderation" | head -n1)
EMAIL_PATH="$LIST_PATH/moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
MEMBERS_LAST=$(tail -n1 .members)
FROM=$(sed -n 's/^From:.*<\(.*\)>$/\1/p' $EMAIL_PATH)
SENDER=$(<"$LIST_PATH/control/listaddress")
- check if $MEMBERS_LAST is empty string (eg no contributor has been chosen yet)
if [ -z "$MEMBERS_LAST" ]; then
- check if it is the first message in the chain
by checking list of chosen members
- CHOSEN=$(<./.members)
- CHOSEN_SIZE=${#CHOSEN[@]}
echo "CHOSEN => $CHOSEN"
echo "CHOSEN_SIZE => $CHOSEN_SIZE"
- check if list of chosen members equals to 1
if [ $CHOSEN_SIZE -eq 1 ]; then
- mv file out of /moderation to current dir
mv $EMAIL_PATH ./moderation/.
- add address from first received email to chosen list
- echo "$FROM" >> ./.members
- update list of file-sharing methods shared so far
./get-subject-line $LIST_PATH
- pick next contributor
- CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT=$(./pick-random-address $LIST_NAME)
echo "Next contributor (2) => $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT"
- replace `From:` and `To:` addresses
- sed -i "s/^From: .*$/From: <$SENDER>/" "./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
- sed -i "s/^To: .*$/To: $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT/" "./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
- and send email to this address
- /usr/sbin/sendmail -t $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT < "./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
else
- echo "something went particularly wrong, exit"
- exit 1
fi
elif [ "$MEMBERS_LAST" == "$FROM" ]; then
- pick next contributor
CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT=$(./pick-random-address $LIST_NAME)
- `-o` is the OR operator
if [ -z "$CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT" ]; then
- echo "An error happened; the chain order broke probably due to a mismatch in the .member list; please check!"
- elif [ "$CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT" == "0" ]; then
check if game-over email was sent already
- if [ -e ./.game-over ]; then
exit 1
- else
touch ./.game-over
echo "$GAME_OVER"
- echo "$GAME_OVER" | mailx -a "From: $LIST_SENDER" -s "$LIST_PREFIX Game
Over" $MODERATORS
- fi
else
- echo "Next contributor (3) => $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT"
- mv file out of /moderation to current dir
mv $EMAIL_PATH ./moderation/.
- update list of file-sharing methods shared so far
./get-subject-line $LIST_PATH
- replace `From:` and `To:` addresses
- sed -i "s/^From: .*$/From: <$SENDER>/" "./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
- sed -i "s/^To: .*$/To: $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT/" "./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
- and send email to this address
/usr/sbin/sendmail -t $CONTRIBUTOR_NEXT < "./moderation/$EMAIL_FN"
- fi
else
- ERROR_MISMATCH="$MEMBERS_LAST differs from $FROM. This means the user who sent the email does not match with the latest email being added to .members."
- echo "$ERROR_MISMATCH"
echo "$ERROR_MISMATCH" | mailx -a "From: $LIST_SENDER" -s "$LIST_PREFIX Error"
$MODERATORS
- fi
fi
← Caption: parse-email. instructions to read an incoming email held in moderation.
Closing
We finish with a closing remark on the often critiqued set of hydraulic metaphors—for instance: “pull,” “drain,” “consume,” “push,” “dump” a stream (of data), all the way to the extreme of “the cloud,”—which is used in computer programming by “engineers”, to talk about software that recontextualizes the domain specific language:
“Geologists have uncovered one such mechanism: rivers acting as veritable hydraulic computers (or at least, sorting machines). Rivers transport rocky materials from their point of origin (a previously created mountain subject to erosion or weathering) to the place in the ocean where these materials will accumulate. In this process, pebbles of variable size, weight and shape tend to react differently to the water transporting them. […] Once the raw materials have been sorted out into more or less homogenous groupings deposited at the bottom of the sea (that is, once they have become sedimented), a second operation is necessary to transform these loose collections of pebbles into an entity of a higher scale: a sedimentary rock. This operation consists in cementing the sorted components together into a new entity with emergent properties of its own, that is, properties such as overall strength and permeability that cannot be ascribed to the sum of the individual pebbles.”
Designing fileSHA with mailing list software gave us the space to explore the process of file sharing. Furthermore, we realized that this game has the potential to be played for an infinite amount of time. Software architectures like those of a mailing list allow for “necroposting,” We believe there is no shame in resurrecting conversations that are six months or ten years old, because at best it’s experienced as a collective sedimentation process that belongs as much to you as it does to those who wrote about it months to a decade earlier. Computers as rivers!
Karl Moubarak's bio.
André Fincato is a designer turned programmer. André joined the coop in 2017 after taking part in HDSA 2016 and then working on the H&D wiki re-organization by building a new website. His main areas of interest are: usership, p2p systems, software production, labor politics.