label

tools

Linked to 26 items

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  15:55 toolsDiscussing together about what was going on, especially for the three years after we started, was the main thing that we were doing. And we are realising it just now. We were starting to do things, such as curating the Roma Biennale and so we were publishing something. We were doing an exhibition at PANKE and creating a digital gallery that somehow told us about our topics. But what we were really doing, and I’m seeing it just now, was trying to understand what was going on. And this is something very interesting about how we started. We had the impression that all that we were going to post online was to nourish a future neural network that we were calling AAN, DRAN, whatever. And so, we had this feeling that even posting on Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform we were using had a responsibility attached to it.

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  Noel 19:03 One of the main tools we have been using over the past years is toolsTelegram and Telegram chats, for example. That’s a tool that we have been using a lot for sure. And then all the usual tools, also many tools that we use in our corporate jobs, we try to bring them back into our creative practice if it seems meaningful to do so. One thing that we started noticing very early on when we started to work together as a collective and we were attending, for example, events like Transmediale here in Berlin, was this difference between the older generation of net artists and activists that also Aria was referencing and what our generation was doing at the time. The older, activist generation didn’t trust what we were doing.

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  27:00 For example, we didn’t talk about one of our main works, which is the one that Noel has behind him. Our research brings us to build huge walls of memes, called the detective walls, which is a spin-off of another project of ours called Meme Manifesto, and this says a lot about the tools that we use and also about publishing. We published the internet on a 20-meter wall, and we did that by using the tools that we are using already, for example, Noel mentioned Telegram, we use it to gather memes. Some of us, especially Francesca, have a passion for archiving and so we were toolsscraping Reddit and 4chan and a lot of different social media. In the end, we were publishing something, even in a very weird way, and the work was transmedia because we had many media in which we wanted to post it.

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  28:39 We published the little book with Aksioma, as a catalogue to explain the work, and there is a website supporting it. This is somehow something that we learned, as Aria was saying, from our daily jobs, the corporate jobs, because usually, web campaigns must have a landing page. These are the basic “rules” of marketing. But later on, as marketing was evolving, we also understood that the transmedia landscape was changing. The Meme Manifesto work can be an example of an experiment we wanted to make in publishing, but while doing Meme Manifesto we were in COVID lockdown. toolsWe had many workshops where we were trying to talk with people about what was going on in their personal and very alone lives on the web. We understood that even talking about that was useful for people, talking out loud about what is happening online to you and just you is something very useful. We started this process which was a therapeutical healing process. And we need that because, you know, the internet is very addicting. And work is also very addicting. And we were addicted to it.

• from: Clusterduck (chapter)

  Aria 51:32 If I can add just a little something to what Silvia was saying… which I completely agree with. I would say that another part of our reflection towards both blockchain and AI, the two major technological themes in the last years is the environmental impact of mining and the database production that involves both of these technologies. We always try to be as careful as possible regarding this theme because we all do feel a deep attachment to it. In 2019/2020, we developed a branch of Meme Propaganda, that involves memes, the climate crisis and the protests of Fridays for Future, the use of memes during the protests. toolsWe tend to have an approach that is as practical as possible to this kind of technologies. We’re glad to use them for what they represent and how they can help to build online communities and share the visibility and the rewards that come from collaborative practices, but we also try not to idolize technologies and see them in the wholeness of the picture, considering their environmental impact. I don’t know if Noel wants to add something.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 07:40 Hello everyone, it’s a big pleasure to be part of this. To briefly introduce my background: I studied Information Technologies back in Slovakia where I grew up. Parallel to my studies, I was involved in the local culture scene, mostly between art and technology, as part of the non-profit sector. printed objectsIn the late 90s, I started a small culture magazine, but then we lost the funding for printing. A friend introduced me to HTML and I realised that it could be a better solution than paper because, at that time, people already had access to the web. So it became quite exciting, and that’s how I discovered web publishing. We would redesign the first website, called referencesKoridor, every few months. digital objectsIt was so exciting to discover the ways websites could be organised and designed. We would use the word “portal” at the time. I was still living in Bratislava when I was part of this collective. The idea of setting up a new website that would document our work emerged, which then became Monoskop, two or three years after Wikipedia entered the market. toolsSuddenly, there was this exciting software where people could put stuff online without understanding programming, FTP and all the kind of nerdy things only accessible to a few. This was before content management systems, and already parallel to blogging. At the time, people still struggled to publish online, so we got quite excited. This MediaWiki installation is still there and operating.

• from: Dušan Barok (chapter)

  I was part of a larger research group, looking into how to support this process with documentation. I spent some time in museums, such as SFMOMA, Tate and other places for a few weeks, where I found out that they indeed set up Media Labs inside museums to care for this kind of art because there’s more and more of it. This expertise needs tools and frameworks where these works are being taken care of. It was interesting to find out that they would use Wikis, for example, SFMOMA would use MediaWiki to document media installations. They’re very easy, quite modular tools, they are flat so you don’t follow timelines like blogs. Instead, you have a list of things with a lot of links to go deeper and you can structure the content very differently compared to timeline-based publishing platforms. So this was maybe my contribution to the field of art conservation, as my thesis rotates around documentation practices behind museum walls. toolsInstitutions document these installations using their means, but when they started to use this content publishing — CMS content management systems, such as Media Wiki, WordPress or others — they are moving towards what others do with these publishing systems and often end up publishing documentation that represents or even presents works online. There are more and more examples of this, for instance, what Rhizome did with Net Art Anthology or LiMA in Amsterdam did with their digital canon.

• from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

  I could also talk about software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki that I also use. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. toolsThen I use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, and then being able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copy editing or even the writing for that matter just to have this as a very sort of quick process. If there are mistakes, not worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like. Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content form. So we tried to, as the name suggests, think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Minetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called Ingrid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole sort of infrastructure of the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.

• from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

  I could also talk about software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki that I also use. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. toolsThen I use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, and then being able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copy editing or even the writing for that matter just to have this as a very sort of quick process. If there are mistakes, not worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like. Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content form. So we tried to, as the name suggests, think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Minetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called Ingrid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole sort of infrastructure of the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.

• from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

  Tommaso [00:49:01] I don’t know if it’s a question or a reflection, but it’s more putting something on the table to continue the conversation. I want to bring back what Ilan was saying about the idea of federating. I think we are reflecting a lot on this from many different perspectives. You were referring more to the distribution. toolsYou’re also collaborating with Varia, with open source publishing, with different initiatives that create tools. Sometimes they’re very similar, because maybe they’re based on, Pages.js and they’re like forks of that tool in many different iterations. I feel that this is the whole idea of the politics of open source, that’s where we come from, but on the other side, sometimes it feels like reinventing the wheel every time. That’s maybe where I want to go about the sustainability of it in the long-term. I was talking with Lorenzo from Nero yesterday and he mentioned how it would be very nice to have a web-to-print tool that can print the zine that they are producing digitally and let them print home. For example, I thought about INC DevOps, like a tool that was exactly that four years ago. Then because of costs and issues, the project went down, the code is still there, but it’s not online anymore. Then I was like, there’s Pages.js, you should hire a developer and produce it yourself, but this can become very tiring after a while, especially for programmers. We’re going to talk with Gijs in a few, and I think that’s probably more a question for him.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 10:09 An example I can give is the work that we did on the Fair Kin Arts Almanac with the State of the Arts, which is a group of artists in Belgium and mostly Brussels that tries to discuss more fair art practices. Three years ago, we started the process of making a second version of an Almanac gathering contributions from members of SOTA, the organization initiating this publication. toolsWe were invited quite early on in the process, and we proposed a tool called Ethertoff that would facilitate a series of events that ran over a year where SOTA invited different groups of people to discuss questions around arts practices. What the tool specifically allowed for was to take notes in a collective editor called Etherpad and these notes were later used as material for the Almanac. So in that sense, the workflow is one of providing, thinking with the organization of the infrastructure that they are using, suggesting an alternative — an open source one — and using the tool from gathering material towards design and publishing it both in printed and online form.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 15:56 toolsIn the case of Etherport and Almanac, what these tools allow is to be reconfigured. They are often made with the assumption that people will use them together with other tools so you can export towards a file format that can be transformed further by other tools, that’s a possibility, or they may have an API that allows you to call the programs from other programs. These tools are native when it comes to publishing on the web. A lot of work has been done in weeding out all the problems there, a lot of money or funds available for developers to work on it, in the sense that the development of Firefox or Chrome is of course not free, but it’s financed in other ways. Ironically, also in the case of Firefox, often through Google. printed objectsWhen you go towards print, this part is very well developed actually, what it can do is quite astonishing. At the same time, you also always run into problems, especially if you go towards complex print objects, for example, using Pantone colours. The tools to deal with those issues are simply not available. And within proprietary software, with tools that were designed for this type of work, a lot of funds and time have been spent on dealing with those issues. And if you work with a more experimental setup like we do, you run into those issues and limited abilities, you have to try to find a way to work around them or to fix them.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 19:04 toolsI realized I forgot to mention one tool, which is quite important actually, called paged.js, which uses JavaScript to extend the functionality of the browser and to emulate support for the paged media standard of the W3C. So the W3C is the governing body for the standards that drive the web, and there is a standard that describes how browsers should deal with output towards paged media. Paged media is not used as much for browsers, so for browser vendors, for the makers of browsers, it’s not interesting to work on this functionality. What the paged.js project does is emulate this functionality and make it possible to use browsers for these complex printed objects. Through this possibility, it shows that there is a need for this functionality within existing software.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Tommaso 37:32 I completely understand, I relate with the idea that when you finish a project, especially a big project, the idea of documenting and explaining every step is a project in itself. My second question is about the idea of sustainability connected to this. Thinking of multiplicity of tools — I think we already had a conversation about this topic —, we were talking yesterday with Nero, they have a new online magazine and they were thinking about producing zines or a printed copy of the magazine. So a web-to-print tool would be the best. They were asking whether we knew any tools that could do that and how could they implement that. toolsI thought about Etherport and realised that INC developed a tool two years ago with another project that was exactly about web-to-print for online magazines, the code for which still exists. However, the server management put it down because they kept telling us that the code was not safe, they didn’t feel safe to keep it there. How do you sustain tools in the long term? And also, how do you deal with this multiplicity of tools? Some tools use Paged.js, but most of them are tailored to the specific project. A term that came up a lot in the conversation before is federation. How to federate a set of tools? Is it something that you’re thinking about?

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 51:52 That’s why, if you speak about the tools that we use, we speak about Free/Libre, open-source software, meaning that it’s not necessarily free as in freedom. So that’s why the Libre is there, and practicesif you use the cracked version of the Creative Cloud, you don’t have to pay for it. So in that sense, it’s free, but otherwise, you are reaffirming an existing ecosystem that sets the Creative Cloud as the standard, synonymous with being a professional designer or being a professional publisher — that’s where our practice tries to install an alternative. Using that alternative doesn’t make our work all of a sudden more relevant, but I think that, in our practice, it generates new possibilities for collaboration. More importantly, it creates the potential for you as a publisher, or for us as designers to shape more elements of your whole publishing pipeline. toolsWith the Almanac, both the research and editing parts are done within the same tool, but it’s also done horizontally and collaboratively. Web-to-print allows last-minute text changes quite horizontally, so you can create a platform where editors or contributors can come in, and make text changes without having to ask the designer to do it within their existing tool. Finally, if a certain functionality is not there, users can create that functionality within the tool and of course, this is not easy, it takes energy. What’s important here — and this is not entirely true because it’s a little bit romantic — is the idea that the tool is never finished, but there’s a certain assumption within proprietary software that “this is it, this is what you can do with it”. Is this thought of? Well, it’s possible that it doesn’t work for you and then you can change it, so we might not know everything from the outset.

• from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

  Gijs 1:13:03 I guess it depends on what you mean by user-friendly. toolsI think it’s important for a tool to be user-friendly, but this does not necessarily have to mean that a tool is easy. Some things are complex and those complexities cannot be abstracted away or removed by software. If they are removed by software, it means that a lot of assumptions and choices have been made in designing the tool. We ask ourselves, “What would be possible if we try things differently?” — and we find different forms of collaboration that become possible because the content is not written by individual authors on their own computer and then sent to an editor, but it’s from the start edited on a platform. Then we take the output or the content from the platform and make it directly available on the web and allow it to be printed. If there is a content change, there’s no authority structure where the editor has to ask the designer to do it, but the contributor can do it directly on the platform. sustainability of workflowsThis is not necessarily easy to install or maintain, but tools need time and energy to be understood, to be able to be used or maintained. At the same time, these tools mustn’t be hostile, in the way that they are made, but also in the community that’s behind them or the documentation that they come with. In that sense, our tools are not always welcoming, and to come back to Ethertoff, this tool can be quite hostile to a new user. At the moment, it still needs an interpreter with it, but that’s also a situation we’re trying to change.

• from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

  It’s a very important and delicate relationship. I used to be an editor for different magazines, and I’ve worked with people over email without realizing that they were much years older than I thought for example, or even that they were a different gender! And I think in the work that I do, that’s just not right. toolsWho someone is really informs the editing process, and every process is unique. So I have conversations with people in real life, if possible, but mostly over Zoom. This is still limited of course, but at least I get a bit of an idea who someone is. It also makes the process much more fun to be honest.

• from: Thomas Spies (chapter)

  Thomas 26:34 It’s cool to think about this, really. alternative publishing practicesIt’s like an interactive publishing somehow because you get instant feedback and you can also integrate this feedback in a live play. So I think toolsTwitch is a very interesting format now because you are very close to the community and the community aspects are central to the experience on Twitch. So if you play a game and say something critical, another person can respond instantly in the chat and you can have a discussion around that topic. But also it’s not just because there’s a community, it doesn’t have to be progressive. Of course, there are also right-wing or other communities as well. Although, there’s a chance to use that as a publisher. With streaming, you can reach a different audience or bigger audience. I think what’s interesting for people is to maybe be a part of it, but also why is it interesting to watch? Maybe because it somehow works when you watch someone doing a social thing. Maybe this is another medium, it could be like a reality soap or something like that. So you have the feeling something real is going on and something which is authentic and also reliable. So you are having a close connection to the person doing something, in this case, playing a game. Maybe you also know the game, so it’s like you are thinking about what would I do or what would I say? And you ask about the critical aspects when doing this. I think there are two opportunities. You can play critical games and look at what they bring up, or you can play a mainstream game and criticize it, but you have to make this your focus. I think this focus is not often present in the moment when you look at what kind of people play Fortnite or something like that for fun, which is also fine, but if you ask about critical aspects, you have to bring those into your stream.

• from: Thomas Spies (chapter)

  Lorenzo 50:22 But I’m thinking that, like, maybe video games, especially multiplayer video games, could also be perceived as a new space for traditional narratives or discourses produced in books. For example, in that case in Ljubljana, I really perceived that environment as a new space to inhabit with certain discourses. I don’t know, Thomas, what do you think? toolsMultiplayer games, especially multiplayer games, give you this common space to create new narratives and even to challenge the rules of the video game itself. So, I’m really intrigued by this aspect that it’s more difficult to find this in traditional publishing practicestraditional publishing. When I mention traditional publishing, I refer to printed books. Of course, you can have book clubs in which you find other people, you can read collectively. For video games, it looks like an expanded version of that with a lot of people. Like Travis Scott’s concert in Fortnite, all these kinds of experiences are, like, quite disruptive in a way.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  Then the second piece that’s the main focus of my energy these days is a project called Metalabel, toolswhich is a space where a project like what I’m talking about of a group of authors collectively releasing a work becomes practically very possible because of a collaborative publishing and releasing tool that we’ve built. Our tool allows people to split money at the point of purchase. So once you buy a copy of our book, every one of us gets paid a percentage out of that money and it’s just automated. We’re trying to create a space dedicated to new forms of creative output, a new model for how creative people can release and have a home for their work outside of social media.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  toolsI’m seeing more projects beginning to release work as a limited edition zip or even an open edition zip. Just expressing my piece as just a text or a blog post or whatever doesn’t feel like enough. I’m very invested in making digital work feel more tangible, more valuable, worth paying for.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  Yancey 05:27 toolsI have had four different times in the past three years where instead of publicly publishing pieces, I just leave my Google Doc open with comments left on, sharing it privately with people and saying, you can share with friends, but don’t share publicly. And those pieces were very widely read and engaged with. alternative publishing practicesThere’s an interesting thing where if information feels like you are not meant to see it, or you have to work a little harder to see it, it becomes more interesting because effectively all information online today feels like an advertisement. So if there’s something that’s not trying to be seen, that’s automatically a point of differentiation. I just keep finding a lot of success communicating that way. Some of my friends run a project called MSCHF, which does strange releases. They have a Google Doc that they title Friends and Family Discounts, and they share the Google Doc with direct links to purchase, and things will sell out from that even more than they will from a website. I think Substack is a great tool. I use Ghost for my personal website, just because I don’t want Substack to be my website because then it just looks like everything else.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  Yancey 18:59 The site has a lot of interesting ways that it’s architected. I’ll just first start with one. We wanted to make something that had an open data structure. toolsWe felt like the world was lacking a tool for creating a catalog as an artist or a creative person, a good data structure of my work with entries properly sorted by metadata and work and notions of work that could be portable around the web. So we use an underlying architecture called a decentralized identifier, which is an open protocol that Blue Sky uses, ActivityPub uses, but some of these new federated media use, and allows every piece of content to be referenced and embedded in other worlds just through using an open phone book basically. So that is what we started with instead of a blockchain, which achieves the same outcomes of universally accessible data.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  Ilan 38:55 As an academic, we have the DOI, toolsDigital Object Identifier, which is for articles. This has been only delegated to big academic journals. So you are not able to have a digital object identifier for any other type of text or research or text-based research without any academic publisher. toolsAnd now the CERN released a very democratic DOI called Zenodo, which allows you to give a DOI to anything, to a photo, to your license plates, to a ceramic. What kind of media ecosystem do you imagine when everything, every sort of media instantiation would have its own identifier? So an identifier means that it will be totally decentralized. It will be not one single organism or a set of academic publishing that will manage this, but everybody would have access to all kinds of media, photos, a bit like the interplanetary file system, but in a much easier way to operate with.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  Ilan 38:55 As an academic, we have the DOI, toolsDigital Object Identifier, which is for articles. This has been only delegated to big academic journals. So you are not able to have a digital object identifier for any other type of text or research or text-based research without any academic publisher. toolsAnd now the CERN released a very democratic DOI called Zenodo, which allows you to give a DOI to anything, to a photo, to your license plates, to a ceramic. What kind of media ecosystem do you imagine when everything, every sort of media instantiation would have its own identifier? So an identifier means that it will be totally decentralized. It will be not one single organism or a set of academic publishing that will manage this, but everybody would have access to all kinds of media, photos, a bit like the interplanetary file system, but in a much easier way to operate with.

• from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  It’d be cool if I’m cited as someone using her thing and I get to give her credit. toolsBut I think it could be a very simple citing of work, providing a level of provenance. You can hit a plus sign and start typing a title and it will auto-complete and suggest what it thinks you’re connected to. Making citations very easy, allowing you to publish on your own personal website, publish all things credited to my decentralized identifier address. Because all decentralized identifiers have cryptographic public and private keys that are invisible to you, but allows things to be locked and unlocked even offline. And so you can use your key and by authenticating it’s you just through email login. And you could say, publish the catalog of my decentralized identifier on this page. And it should be able to pull that database of exactly what’s yours and output it anywhere. That’s the dream of the DID structure and like the open directory and just the similar data models, open phone book.