label
space
Linked to 50 items
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
05:50 But I do think we can reflect on the double notion of ‘time and space’. Space was a prominent element in our research. In a hybrid event, as we saw it, you have spacethe physical space, and many online spaces or people joining online from their own house. In the livecasting group, we built ‘Emoji Proxies & Ghost Messengers’, a tool that could make the online audience more present on-site during an event. Using commands in the livestream chat, online audiences can influence something in the space, like triggering an on-site objectlight or scenta scent diffuser in a spacespace. We aimed to make the relationship between offline and on-site audiences a bit more equal. This is difficult to achieve, especially when there is a main stage, which is the objectphysical stage. As long as we think of on-site programming as primary, it’s very difficult to give online audiences a more equal type of agency. So we tried to decenter the main stage. the virtual space is merging in the background, can it be considered non-real space? For instance, we tested the scent diffuser during an event that was focused on audioaudio. alexa this is not FaceTime app how did I get here So there was a main stage, but there were no visuals on a beamer. It was a listening event. Ultra hyper-focus on the present moment, years of preparation and research leading up to the current moment, with weeks of post-production dealing with the now. How authentic is this now then? This worked well. I think you’re in the right place, welcome!
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
14:18 It can be more equal. I also remember that we had an event taking place at four locations. See: https://thehmm.nl/event/the-hmm-4-locations. You inspired us to do that, Esther, when you said that a good example of a hybrid experience is a football game that people watch together on a screen but also in a spacestadium. Read the interview with Esther Hammelburg by Lilian Stolk, ‘“We’re Here Together Now” Is the Crux of Every Event‘, The Hmm, 9 August 2021, https://thehmm.nl/we-are-here-together-now. Even though they’re watching a screen, they’re dressed up and watching together, which gives the feeling that they’re part of this live game. We tried to translate that into a cultural event that took place in four different places at the same time. There were two on-site speakers at every location. The rest of us watched a livestream. There was no single, big stage, because the whole event was decentralized. But then, we got feedback from the online audience saying that they missed seeing who was on-site in the different locations.
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
16:42 Already early on we had the idea of making a website, which is accessible at home, and an exhibition intallation with a tablet. It’s still possible to browse MUMORIES and even to contribute. Go to: https://mumories.hackersanddesigners.nl/Interaction But it wasn’t easy to integrate our multimedia experiment into an exhibition. During the opening of the exhibition, we tried to create a comfortable setting, like a spaceliving room. a living archive obviously needs a living room We had a sofa with 25 years of MU catalogs on it, inviting memories to be triggered. We also created a layered audioscape. People on-site could audiolisten to what was happening around them live, but at the same time, recorded memories were being played on the speakers. front camera is being moved too, we want some good close-ups for our hosts :)
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
18:49 I was thinking exactly the same. This automatically decenters the main stage. When you have a audiopodcast or maybe a videoYouTube video that you don’t necessarily need to watch, you’re able to do a bunch of other things and suddenly spaceyour house becomes your own stage. It’s funny because, in the physical space of MU, you wanted to recreate a living room, right? Fellow audience, how are you feeling? Are we blasting into your living rooms? Do you want/have agency? But for me, since I’ve never been to MU, the experience of MUMORIES was the other way around. I was in my living room listening to memories that were created in this space I’ve never been to, and I don’t know what it looks like. It was like a dream or something from the distant past, suddenly acquiring a presence in my living room. The point of decentering the stage, of course, is to give agency to the audience, wherever they are. My next question is about this. I am enjoying sitting but being there at the same time we live in the future darlings full stop no i meant . Do you have any other examples, comments, reflections, or thoughts about audience agency?
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
20:08 It starts in the tool development. We didn’t develop the ideas for this toolkit by ourselves, but we organized two workshops where we asked people: what could be the ways of an online audience to have agency in this event, in spacephysical space? Then, we developed the camera that we were playing with just now and the scent diffuser we descussed before. So, from a development point of view, these tools are not made by us as prescriptive solutions to a problem, but rather by the audience itself or by the organizers of events. On-site, it does feel like a living room a little bit. It’s warm in this space, people are tip-toeing around behind the camera They aim not a grand ‘solution’, but a tiny intervention that gives the online audience some sort of presence on-site.
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
21:18 It was difficult to determine what kind of meaningful contributions an online audience can have in a spacespace. We often experience that it became a bit gimmicky. How to avoid audience participation and participatory events being gimmicky is a big question for sure… They could turn on a light, but how is it affecting the physical event? We also did experiments where we did it the other way around, so that the on-site audience could influence the videolivestream. For instance, by pressing a button they could let the livestream screen turn around. But that didn’t really work because it was enabling the online audience even less because the live stream view became worse. Together with MU and Affect Lab, The Hmm has been collecting many practices of hybrid culture beyond the gimmick into a publicly available repository called ‘Toolkit for the In-Between’: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/10/21/the-hmm-mu-and-affect-lab-launch-toolkit-for-the-in-between
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
24:18 There is one question from the chat: what about non-real-time and non-real spacespace?
-
from: Sound and Temporality (chapter)
26:15 Two months ago we organized a data center tour with The Hmm. You can find the program of the Data Center Tour here: https://thehmm.nl/event/the-hmms-data-centre-tour This one was a five-hour trip, and we didn’t like the idea of such a long livestream. We instead invited podcast makers to be there and record all the speakers They also spoke with some visitors and recorded audiosounds of the data center and combined it all into a podcast episode. This different format really added value, that could not have been created if it was just a videolivestream, because it was also adding the layer of the participation of the visitors and the space with the sounds of the spacedata center. We have to remember that a livestream recording is not really recording the event… This audio report, because it also included the audience and also included the space, was a way better translation of the event. Listen back to the Data Center Tour here: https://live.thehmm.nl/the-hmm-s-data-centre-tour
-
from: Thresholds of Access (chapter)
09:25 I reached out to Ren, specifically in context to this question and with your work concerning disability justice and just in general, cultural hybridity. There was a pandemic and with it came state-enforced restrictions on mobility and movement. camera:30 So, access to culture became a problem for able-bodied people. We’re here in this two-year consortium about hybridity, specifically because of access being a problem for able-bodied people. Now, of course, those restrictions on mobility have been lifted. But something important to think about from a disability and crip justice perspective is the immobility of some disabled people – bedridden people, people that cannot leave the spacehouse because of their immunodeficiencies or whatever it is – these immobilities and limitations are also state-enforced. It’s not that it’s in their body, or it’s their choice. This is something that’s imposed on them. They have been demanding a hybrid cultural sector far before the pandemic. ‘The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities entered into force in 2011. It enshrined, among other rights, the right of people with disabilities to access cultural venues such as theatres, cinemas and museums, and to enjoy cultural materials, books, films and music in an accessible format’ (https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-persons-disabilities). However, this is often an after-thought for institutions. So disabled voices or voices that speak from a disability and crip justice perspective are very important to hear. Now, in post-pandemic, hybridity is a trend. We’re talking about it, and I think an immediate request or demand is to center disabled voices in these developments rather than continue to move forward with our mostly able-bodied realities.
-
from: Thresholds of Access (chapter)
16:48 My perspective has definitely changed. I first started thinking about accessibility and disability justice a long time ago, when we - as Hackers & Designers - were invited to design websitePlatframe, a platform for a conference organized by TU Delft. You can access the documentation for this platform, ‘Platframe’, here: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Publishing/p/Obfuscation_platframe is the Hmm accessible enough for you Madame Bertha? Out of nowhere, we received this email with a very generous list of points of feedback from Ren and Iz who had done an audit. I say ‘generous’ because it wasn’t ‘this should be that way and this shouldn’t be that way’. Each of their points was followed by a reference, with a question, with an open invitation to have fun and experiment. That platform ended with a guided tour, so one of the results of trying to make that platform accessible was having a very regimented, guided tour of all the parts of it in a way that you could join as a visitor. Then, this whole set of built-up knowledge came to The Hmm. You’re right in saying that it has now been two years of developing and iterating this platform, and it’s still changing. I dont understand much of computer technology I appreciate simplicity and videos of cats I love those Every time there’s a new experiment that is invented by The Hmm or Hackers & Designers around accessibility, there’s a technical question that comes with it. For example, in the Participatory Livecasting group, we’ve developed this toolkit that Lillian and Heerko talked about called ‘Emoji Proxies & Ghost Messengers’,videoand it's what this camera here is doing. This toolkit was explored and presented at a workshop: https://wiki.hackersanddesigners.nl/index.php?title=Emoji_Proxies_%26_Ghost_Messengers. The focus question of that group was: How to give an online audience more agency over the spaceon-site space? Historically, the online audience has mostly been a disabled audience that has to be online, or an audience that cannot get access to that event physically because of transportation, material needs, child care, or whatever it is. In our experiments, we were trying to create a kind of agency for this online audience that the physical audience often takes for granted. that’s totally fine, hope you’re enjoing also this live!
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
09:11 There is a picture of it. With this, we created a very difficult task for ourselves, by giving all the participants some sort of obstacle. It was a game where the offline participants, spacewho were present at IMPAKT, and the online participants had to work together. They have to do all of these kinds of challenges. But there is this big obstacle, which is that they can’t see each other, but they can talk with each other through headphones. So they have different kinds of powers. The game is about becoming a true hybrid human being: both of you are working together to become the future human that is both online and offline at the same time. My attention from back there is selective, free: rather than being constrained to listening exclusively and constantly to the vertical speech of speakers, I choose where to navigate my attentional ship, in the horizontal seas of the world wide web. With these great powers comes great responsibilities… I need to avoid drifting my ship too much and to anchor a bit from time to time We thought that, by making objectthe offline participant have to carry this online vessel around, we would create a dynamic that is more equal. But we discovered so many problems with that. If you’re offline, you run around a lot. So videothe camera was shaking all the time and the online participants became very nauseous. the live participants are interacting with the digital layering of themeselves and their content on the screens, love that hopefully there isn’t an exam at the end I won’t be exhaustive We had to come up with challenges with a little less movement. It was really an experiment where we were trying to figure out how we make both of these participants move closer to each other so that there’s a nice collaboration going on between the two.
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
11:50 What also led me to invite you, Roos, was spacethe escape room you made. That’s an earlier work. It also made me think a bit about what Benjamin Pompe made, which was very different. Roos and Derk’s piece was a game for a selected (few) amount of people where everyone had performancesimilar kind of roles. Benjamin’s piece was set in a game engine and played with what games usually are about: you’re on an island, you need to find something, you’re confronted with an object, you don’t understand the object, it has a secret meaning… All these kinds of forms that we already know and that allow people to step into a certain context easily and engage with it. I think Roos did something similar. What I liked a lot about Roos’s work is that spacethe room we had was a nice gallery, like a white cube, but it was made into a gymnastic room with all the lines on the floor. I think that the background is an escape room. Escape living room The game reminded people a bit of Pictionary or Twister… this is a lifelong tradition I cannot break it like that by coming to the front row, I would loose my identity :(( So they were on familiar ground, but still engaged by a new set of rules, a new kind of gaming. I think that’s what we can take from game concepts in general… To activate people and to have them engage with each other in an easy way. ADHD friendly event Roos’s escape room project is called ‘I want to delete it all, but not now’. but tbh I do like this format … there is definitely some interesting and organic layering with having a small live audience who is also partially commenting on the streamed conversation, simultaneously having whispering giggling conversation
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
15:12 Yes. This was a project that we did together with MU, Varia, Willem de Kooning, and Hackers & Designers… I’m trying to remember all of the partners. The project was linked with the MU archive and it was thinking about how you remember, and spacehow you create a living and a dying archive of an exhibition space. We built this platform where audiopeople could leave their memories or even ‘false’ memories of MU. that :/ We created different paths that people could follow on the platform. During the Living Archives group’s expert session for the In-Between Media Conference, the emphasis on oral testimonies, audio and video recordings as a mediums to challange hierarcies within archives was brought to the table. To read the event report of this day, check out: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/03/31/expert-session-a-living-archive-is-also-a-dying-archive-conference-report-day-2 If they’ve never been there before, they could just leave a memory of what they imagined the space to be like. You didn’t need the experience of being there physically. It disrupts this idea of the institution controlling the narrative of what the archive looks like and tries to play with that. anything is possible, kendal And there’s also the fact that we always misremember and that our memories are fluid, changing things. i hope so We really tried to take that into account in a playful way by having this space where people can think back or even speculate about what kinds of things might happen within this exhibition space. 🙏 hope is the only way 🙏 To leave a real of fictioned memory of Mu Hybrid Art House, visit the Living Archive’s MUmories website: https://mumories.hackersanddesigners.nl/Welcome.
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
18:32 The question made me think of what Benjamin Pompe did in his game. He gave the online audience extra agency. The in-house audience was supposed to answer certain questions but they weren’t able to see the consequences, because only the online audience could attach consequences to certain decisions. performanceSo the online audience was disrupting the in-house audience. A similar experiment was conducted by XPUB 1 students in a radio broadcast titled ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to an Active Archive’. It was a choose-your-own-adventure story which depended on the interaction of the audience to function. For further mention of this, see ‘Chapter 4: Forms of Hybridity’. Of course, we come from a past where being present online is considered like a second level. memoryzing is always speculating, with a touch of fantazy much often I mean, that’s only what you do when you can’t travel there or whatever. Being in the physical space is thought of as the best thing you can do. To balance that, he played around with giving the online audience more agency and power over the in-house audience. And I think when the default situation is online, like in gaming, then maybe off-site people have more agency. It depends on where you’re coming from and how you’re spacemaking this environment into a hybrid environment. If it’s an websiteonline gaming environment, then the hybrid situation will perhaps put the in-house audience at a disadvantage. Because it’s not the natural habitat for a game. So to answer the question, it depends very much on what the original format is and how you want to bend it into a hybrid format. To find out more about Benjamin Pompe’s work ‘The Great Idle’ check out: https://benjaminpompe.com/project/the-great-idle
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
20:32 My thought is that when it comes to a 50/50 balance, it doesn’t mean that both parties have the same level of agency. There are different things at play when it comes to treating both parties equally. Derk and I defined a good hybrid experience as both parties being engaged on the same level. So not being engaged in the same way, but having the same amount of engagement. I think that thought can be contested for sure, but for us, it was a good way of figuring out what we’re trying to reach. Based on that definition, we made that experience. During an early brainstorming meeting at IMPAKT, one of us mentioned the hostage factor, which is when an offline audience always feels more engaged because they are ‘being taken hostage’. takes up a lot of space though, we need to be mindful about what we want to keep in storage spaceYou're all sitting here and feeling that ‘I’m not going to call my friend right now, or stand up and get a sandwich somewhere else’ because you have this feeling of respect towards what you’re seeing. When you’re online, sitting at home, you don’t have this limitation at all. We kept that in mind and made a game where the online party is absolutely needed. Otherwise, if they’re not participating, the game can’t work and they won’t win the challenge. So we implemented the ‘hostage factor’ for our online participants to figure out this engagement question.
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
22:26 I’ll just respond to the 50/50 question. I don’t know how it links to archives but a lot of the work I do with The Hmm is also about hybrid events. /camera: 45 I was just going to say that I think spacewe have to be careful about prioritizing the physical space. FREE THE HOSTAGES!!! Being physically present in an event is not always the default case for everybody or the best experience for them. /camera: 45 breaking the fourth wall right now, the reporters are on the spotlight /camera:180 And for me, that was maybe the most disappointing thing I’ve seen: cultural institutions completely dropping forms of hybridity (after COVID). websiteBuilding live streams, then dropping them and not continuing with hybridity. Because it actually created a lot of access for people, which was mentioned in the last talk. in this chat we are not really hostages actually :) /camera: 180 See ‘Chapter 2: Thresholds of Access’. That’s also tied into this idea that we really prioritize physically gathering together. I am a hostage :( But I think we have to shift away from that idea, and consciously come back to what these hybrid events brought us because they brought a lot. /camera:20 That’s why I really like the question about whether we can move away from the 50/50. A lot of assumptions are held about who the audience is and what they prioritize. Maybe that’s an element we value, but that’s not necessarily the case for everyone. The more we continue with these practices, the more people will know that there are accessible spaces that they can enter, and that we don’t always just prioritize physically gathering together. /camera:45
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
24:47 This is a very difficult question. A lot of people ask me about the question of archiving. What do you do with this information? textDo you write it down? Do you document it? I’m like: ‘No, that’s not what it’s about’. I do use it as a tool for the next projects and it’s also a learning experience. Arjon mentioned the Escape Room project, which I did in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. spaceI created an escape room that you couldn't really escape out of. It was a commentary on us trying to escape from the big data platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram, but constantly returning back to them. And that this feels like an endless quest. In the escape room, you could play it in the traditional way: go with your friends and figure it out. But because it was during the pandemic, I also had an online experience in which the host of the escape room would videowalk around with a body cam. The host would connect with a group of friends that would websitecall in via Microsoft Teams. So the group would see through the eyes of the host and tell them: ‘Oh, open this door, please.’, ‘Please look at that.’, ‘Enter this code’. It was interesting since it was a truly hybrid experience and it worked in different ways. In the online experience, people played the puzzles in a different way. The underlying factor of the game was about being dependent on parties you don’t trust. The host played a very important role in the escape room. At some point, you would discover you can’t trust the host or what they’ve said, but you’re literally tethered to the host with a cam. In the offline and the online experience, the level of dependency was completely different, but it still worked out. The conversations that I had with the players afterward were really about these uncanny valley moments of dependency. And I thought it was interesting because it wasn’t really the first reason why I made the project. https://roos.gr/I-want-to-delete-it-all-but-not-now You find out these surprising things and how people experience something you’ve made afterward, but via different eyes. And the players have all been given the same level of agency. Would it be useful to think about archiving (or the future lives) of this kind of experimental cultural programs in a bigger way than within one organisations? Would it help to have a shared infrastructure between cultural institutions and workers? But what players do or how they engage with your project is not always aligned with your intentions. And I find how people engage from different perspectives really interesting.
-
from: Interaction and Activation (chapter)
28:31 That’s a good question. I don’t know if I could answer the larger question of whether we can change this in hybrid times. I’m not an archive scholar, but I think what you’re saying is that some things just don’t get archived. We were working on another research project with The Hmm in which we were mapping hybrid events and also looking at different case studies. Red threads: dependency and agency. Spot on We were looking at it as ‘Is it something that lives forever (forever being a really relative term)?’ /camera:20 and ‘Is it something that you have to be there to experience and then it’s just gone?’. And I think all those things fit on this spectrum of hybridity. /camera:40 Probably not everything has to be preserved. Also because we work inside of these funding structures, textwe always have to document and prove we did things in order for them to be valid. /camera:60 This point was also brought up in the Hybrid Publication’s group: ‘It seems that most cultural institutions are so busy organizing events, that their archives become an institutional obligation to justify received funding.’ This quote was taken from the ‘Introducting the EtherPort’ blog post, to read it fully, visit: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2023/11/16/introducing-the-etherport . With the Hmm, we would document through our livestream and websitethe livestream would automatically go online. /camera:80 And recently we did a data center tour in which we took a bus and spacemoved around the periphery of the data center. /camera:90 We thought it would be really boring for people to have to watch this back. So instead we created an audio tour. People were audiorecording each other's experiences and the sounds of the data center. I think archiving doesn’t have to be this 1:1 digital twin version of what happened because that’s probably impossible. It’s interesting to rethink the archival format in ways that are different from what the experience was for people who were participating in it. Listen back to the Data Center Tour here: https://live.thehmm.nl/the-hmm-s-data-centre-tour
-
from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
03:40 Now, within the context of Going Hybrid, we’ve been looking at expanding or exploding the old methods of hybrid publishing into different media, into audioaudio, into spaceonsite interventions. green book gets keyed We had multiple people in our group that were doing experiments like this. For instance, Maria van der Togt created the work Hard Copy, Soft Copy: a websitelittle local server hosting a ton of pirated textbooks, combined with an objectonsite book printing station. Read more about Hard Copy Soft Copy here: https://sandberg.nl/alumni/maria-van-der-togt/work/hard-copy-soft-copy–impermeable-domains. Another example is Victor Chaix, who developed the concept of digital social text. Victor Chaix, ‘Hypothes.is: Playing with Digital Texts’ Expandable Confines’, Institute of Network Cultures, 2023, https://networkcultures.org/longform/2023/07/13/hypothes-is-a-story-of-playing-with-digital-texts-expandable-confines. He’s looking at the afterlives of online text and how people can create social relationships and meaningful conversations with each other using tools like the websitebrowser plug-in Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is is a browser plug-in that allows the user to (collaboratively) annotate any website. Read more: https://web.hypothes.is. These are different forms of hybridity that we try to explore in different directions from this point. Read more about the Hybrid Publishing group and the backgrounds of the members here: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2022/07/06/the-crowbar-of-cultural-publishing-introducing-the-hybrid-publications-research-group.
-
from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
09:31 Our initial approach was more editorial than tech-oriented. On one of the first days we worked together, we made a little objectminizine called text'Elements of the Conversation Starter'. We did that during one day together at Varia in Rotterdam and then risoprinted it on the spot - it was really fun! You can download or read the minizine here: https://networkcultures.org/goinghybrid/2022/11/14/minizine-elements-of-the-conversation-starter. In this minizine, we map out what we find to be meaningful types of take-aways from cultural events. One element is mood or atmosphere. For instance, if spaceit's snowing outside during an event, a reporter might not think about including that in the report, but it’s actually interesting to read because it sets the stage, and sketches a mood. Then, there are also more traditional elements, like interesting quotes, and the red thread of an event. Having defined these types of main take-aways that can make event reports interesting, we started mapping or tagging this kind of content to see what kind of different pathways start emerging from a text.
-
from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
21:27 Each Tuesday, we would have an interview. textWe had an Etherpad, where we would write some possible as we started to think, and in the process, we would allow our focus to shift. Etherpad is an open-source web tool for collaborative writing. I think this resonates with the earlier discussion about the archive. Michael refers to Chapter 1 Radio Worm’s archive shouldn’t be just about collecting all the audioMP3s and dumping them somewhere, as, by the way, they’re already doing on websiteMixcloud. Maybe we should focus more on the community, on how this radio is made, and who the makers are. And so we’ve shifted to interviewing the makers. Tuesday morning we started for the first time at the studio with no set ‘caretakers’, as we call them (in the past we had prearranged a caretaker role). ‘Caretakers’ are the students in the radio studio during the broadcast, who take care of that weeks radio show plan. We started by playing a recording of something we presented on Sunday at the spaceZine Camp in Worm. To find more about Zine Camp 2023 check: https://zinecamp2023.hotglue.me/?home. While that was happening, the class was voting on questions to ask the makers. Then, performancewe had a rotating shift, of different question askers and engineers to do the mixing. unfortunately we need to keep a low volume here :( Ash, Lucas Simonis, and Lieuwe Zelle, the main makers of Radio Worm, got asked these questions. It was in the space of 48 hours, so much had been happening. We were textconnected on the pad but also spacevisible through the studio window. I think that was an amazing experience.
-
from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
26:04 I would also like to connect back to Clara’s intermission. does anyone have questions for the live hosts? feettiverse ? 👀 Clara mentioned how people in the Philippines were ready for catastrophe implicitly, because they those institutions or industries haven’t traditionally been there for them. As a result, the Philippines is a society that’s much more prepared to work locally and to care about the community. Another inspiration is, again, audioRadio Worm. They don't broadcast on FM, because they don’t need to have a huge audience. They work much more in a tradition of audioavant-garde music, where people were working in small-scale, connected alternative scenes. My point is: we’re not trying to recreate Meta. It’s about creating counterpoints by cultivating spacenonstandard spaces that can function differently. The Fediverse can bring mass to these counterpoints, so that networked initiatives can nourish each other, rather than then having to always fend for themselves and eventually disappearing.
-
from: Forms of Hybridity (chapter)
28:13 It’s the idea that we have a federated digital infrastructure. This is, by the way, not something so radical or new. In fact, email is federated. But big up to these words, I feel like this section really grounds the purpose of this whole hybrid event … which is developing social and network protocols and non standard medium combinations and spaces that battle the platform homogenization (the mid) There’s no technical need for a centralized company like Google to provide you with email services. Instead, we have a shared resource, an inter-network of networks. Everyone can have their own inbox, with different providers, but still connect to each other. spaceIn the Fediverse, this kind of federated software is cultivated. For instance, Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter. There is not one centralized Mastodon server, but anyone with the required skills, time, and resources can run a Mastodon server. It looks like Twitter and it functions almost the same as Twitter, but it can be managed at a community level. How to arrange moderation? Which other instances do you as an institution want to follow or not follow? This is a subtle shift away from individual settings and responsibilities, to allowing more local institutions to be able to make decisions and take care of infrastructure together. But it works globally over the Internet as a protocol.
-
from: Participatory Livecasting (chapter)
During one of the first meetings we had, we agreed that a better hybrid live experience is not necessarily more immersive. We’ve experienced that more connection between audiences (on-site, online, and among each other) can also be achieved in a performancelow-barrier collaborative spreadsheet drawing session, for example. On websiteThe Hmm’s live stream website, developed by Karl Moubarak and designed by Toni Brell, online visitors are visualized by still imagea simple dot at the top of the page. Visit The Hmm’s livestream website here: https://live.thehmm.nl. When people performancesend an emote, the dot of that person for a moment changes into the emote of their choice. This is a very subtle way to let the online audience feel seen and acquire some agency: they literally claim a bit of space on the live stream page and can operate somewhat autonomously by changing the contents of this space45px * 45px area. But this agency remains tied to the online environment. We decided that, in this project, we wanted to research how the online audience’s agency can extend beyond this 45px*45px area and into the physical space of the event, and how to make a more direct connection between online and on-site audiences. We wanted to develop mechanisms and prototypes that enable the translation of input from the websiteonline audience to outputs in the spacephysical space and vice versa. This, for us, is the essence of ‘particpatory livecasting’.
-
from: Participatory Livecasting (chapter)
During the project, we focused on the development of the tool Emoji Proxis & Ghost Messengers, which translates changes in the online environments (like textchat inputs, a new online performancevisitor entering the space, or a still imagereceived emote) into something that happens in the spacephysical space (like a light goes on, a smoke machine turns a vote is cast, or the program shifts). This tool is a kind of open-source plug-in we developed for The Hmm’s livestream website.
-
from: Online Critical Reflection, a Fable from the Past? (chapter)
These exercises, with what Varia provisionally calls more-than-computational practices, were collaborative and speculative acts of questioning and discovering unobvious forms of using existing digital tools for new ways of reading existing content. What emerged out of these highly engaging experiments was, as Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochoir described it in their report from our collaboration, ‘a formation of a social environment in and around the texttext'. Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochoir, ‘More-than-computational Reflections (in the Form of a Report)’, Varia, 19 December 2022, https://varia.zone/en/more-than-computational-reflections.html. These relational approaches between readers, writers, computational tools, use protocols and their entanglements allowed us to explore spacethe spatial and collective dimension of how readers, writers, and publishers can textengage with each other through text.
-
from: Online Critical Reflection, a Fable from the Past? (chapter)
There seems to be a certain paradox between the need of urgently building forms of resistance and the general slowness with which many online users embrace the tech. Introducing new tools or methods will always require curiosity and most likely will push audiences outside of their comfort zone. Yet the experimental side of tech in its geekiness tends to create a literacy barrier that scares away many older and younger folks relying on the frictionlessness of contemporary corporate UI’s. Is critique of the digital culture bound to always be inaccessible? Is that a productive course of action? Can we create websitecritical interfaces that would also allow to build spacesafe spaces for critical reflection and at the same time create more critical mass for resistance in online media?
-
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
Trains are great.
You start from point A,
then you arrive at point B,
and in between you can read,
write,
sleep,
chat,
eat,
drink,
play,
even work.
But anyway,
I’m on public transport in the Netherlands,
on a spaceNederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) Intercity Direct train now,
on my way to deliver a talk with Clara at a hybrid
cultural event in Rotterdam.
The event is described as hybrid because some
people can attend on location and some can follow
online.
It sounds fancy,
but in many cases,
it just
means websiteZoom,
a videovideo projector,
objectchairs,
one or several cameras,
and a video mixer (in the best of cases.)
In these events,
awkward interactions and audioaudio/videovideo glitches Oh no :( We cannot hear the sound on-site
come for free, the green is clear now
but (at least for some of us) it also means that we
get to sit together again,
just not too close.
At least for now,
I get to post-pandemically daydream one more time
in the train on the way to point B.
Is it the post-pandemic though?
I like when the water level of the small canals in the
fields is getting so close to the grass that—
Gooooooede morgen, ticket alstublieft. we can hear it well form our decentralized and networked living rooms -
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
Not sure why,
but I am always super stressed during these
checking moments.
As if I had done something wrong,
as if I was traveling guilty — already of something.
Anyway,
what was the other train of thought?
Ah right,
hybrid events
To be honest,
it feels a bit weird that we’re calling the pandemic
and/or post-pandemic turn of technology ‘hybrid’,
as if hybridity were a novelty.
Here—and in many other places blessed by the so-
called digital revolution and the church of
technosolutionism—
it feels as if we have already been in hybrid
systems for a very long time.
See,
this train ride is already a much more
fundamentally hybrid experience than the hybrid
event I’m going to.
When the controller checked my ticket,
it was not so much of a discussion
or exchange between two human beings over the
validity of a ticket.
It was a software—and network—
mediated interaction over digital access control
validation.
My credentials,
all sorts of personal information,
were checked by a worker paid to be a spacemeatspace
bridge.
This bridge’s function is to ensure the data stored
on my card’s chip can travel to an Application
Programming Interface (API) from the NS
computational infrastructure via the wireless
spaceinterface of a objecthandheld device.
To be sure,
the digital record of our courteous ritual is most -
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
Most of the stuff displayed and announced on the
spacetrain is also pulled from the websitenet,
and in the meantime everyone is glued to their
objectphone, microdosing drops of dopamine,
mindlessly performancedoomscrolling.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
A boomer cliché, right?
Maybe.
In the meantime,
while we argue over the freshness of this critique, /camera:90
our hyperinterdependence on hybrid systems has
remained unchallenged,
unregulated,
unconditional,
and ultimately underestimated.
Chapters are written,
panels are moderated,
slides are presented,
research is funded,
but radical discourse is not met with radical action,
and thus the hyperinterdependence stays on track
towards an increasingly gloomy destination.
Well, on track, not always.
When the computational infrastructure of NS failed
on 3 April 2022,
the effects were telling.
The whole train infrastructure stopped nationwide,
and NS employees,
without their daily software-generated instructions
and schedules,
simply went back home,
unable to do any kind of task.
Maybe that’s the problem.
The path to the offered destination,
regardless of what or where it could even be,
is so broken that we wouldn’t be able to reach it
before the infrastructure supporting the journey
completely collapsed.
In the meantime:
Let’s write more software.
They say it’s cheap.
LOL.
The meme/tired adage that ‘computation and
storage are cheap’ is not going away,
despite their well-documented extractivism,
resource-heavy labor, and bloated infrastructural
requirements that
(despite being ‘merely’ computational)
demand a recursive amount of even further
investment and resources. Fun fact 3: All dots at the top of the screen represent members of the audience. So there’s about a classroom full of us. Curious to know which dot you are? Use the ‘emote’ function at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll see
But, hey, we need apps.
More apps.
It’s not surprising that the software side of the
NS infrastructure is becoming an increasingly /camera:100
important part of its agenda and financial
investment,
even boasting new performance indicators such as
‘user-friendly travel information’. From the NS annual report ‘Performance on the main rail network and the high-speed line’, 2021, https://www.nsannualreport.nl/annual-report-2021/our-activities-and-achievements-in-the-netherlands/performance-on-the-main-rail-network-and-the-highspeed-line/performance-on-the-main-rail-network-and-the-highspeed-line.
As a traveler whose existence needs to be validated
by take-it-or-leave-it data extraction,
I don’t really feel like a friend of the NS.
More than anything else,
to me,
this clearly shows how operating systems and
software interface language is transforming the
traveler into a computer user or a pawn used by
computers for who knows what purpose. -
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
Wait, one sec, I’m in the train in the spacesilent coach thing.
-
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
What? Your audiosound is breaking up. Are you in a spacetunnel?
-
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
We were the perfect digital doomsday preppers. The content of the course was precisely about creating your own technological infrastructure for collectively making things public and creating publics for issues that mattered to us. We were ready. We embraced the moment. But even for us, the spacehybrid classrooms also failed. Because it’s not just about free software, open-source software, or self-hosting. These software-led forms of organizing life ah I love this video, is there a link to it somewhere to refer to later? are just not working. And as a result this built up slowly towards a line of thinking that I think should be made explicit. Behind the scenes, people are getting relaxed, chatting, laughing. It seems like the collective nerves for this event have loosened a bit COMPUTERS ARE SHIT, SOFTWARE IS SHIT, INTERNET IS SHIT. Like, in all caps. [Snark]
-
from: Hybrid Trains of Thought (chapter)
This is the thing we were discussing: over-platforming in the pandemic. <3 Everybody built too many different instances of the same platform or software instead of making consortium efforts to share infrastructure. If we had done that, there would be less shit to maintain, and not just technically speaking. Many of these pandemic-as-crisis infra-experiments have been deserted. It’s a job in itself to keep these new spacevirtual office spaces, servers, online classrooms in active and meaningful use.
-
from: Talkshop Mumories: Living Archives (chapter)
Thanks for the intro. What I pulled in may connect to some of the people who are also there. Actually, the question of the life spans made me think a bit about something audioI once heard Spider Alex talk about. And Spider Alex is a system administrator for a kind of feminist server network and in particular works at spaceCalafou, in Barcelona. In fact, actually, this was a quote that I found on Varia’s website from audioa radio broadcast that they did on A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers:
-
from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
Our main objective was to to find new cultural and digital strategies that expand the room for reflection and collectivity, with the use of alternative ways of online publishing. In this process, we were keen to experiment with making event reports can more open-ended, multi-voiced, and non-linear. Instead of creating FOMO-inducing descriptions, or bureaucratic documents, we wanted to create a structure for event reporting that would give readers an interesting, explorative experience. We looked at textreal-time transcriptions and instant publishing, non-linear and modular formats, objecton-demand printing stations as part of spaceexhibitions, and audioaudio-texttext hybrids. We found inspiration in zines, websiteinteractive digital longforms, wikis, annotated maps, hybrid indexes, chat-to-print tools, objectbook printing machines, and performanceinterventions in spacepublic space. There are so many alternatives to the boring and bureaucratic event report! Among the interesting practices we found, five deserve a special mention:
-
from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
Hypothes.is is a free Chrome extension that lets users websiteadd annotations to websites and have discussions on websites. Download and explore Hypothes.is here: https://web.hypothes.is. Opening this bookmarklet spaceprojects a transparent layer over any website, PDF or ePub, in which one can comment and annotate even when the original website does not provide that possibility. Moreover, other users opening that same text, will be able to see others’ annotations and react to them. Comments section on YouTube closed? Just open the Hypothes.is bookmarklet and comment away. It is obvious that Hypothes.is, as a unique and powerful tool against centralized power and censorship, is extremely promising for educators, journalists, researchers, publishers, and activists. However, it is evenly vulnerable to trolls and spam. Victor Chaix developed the idea of ‘digital social text’ using Hypothes.is. This idea is discussed in ‘Chapter 4: Forms of Hybridity’.
-
from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
In 2022, Varia started publishing the hybrid, bilingual textnewsletter SomeTimes / Af en toe. Read SomeTimes here: https://varia.zone/en/sometimes-af-en-toe.html. The contents are created collectively by the members of Varia in OctoMode and published as text.pdfs and objectflyer-like prints. The format of these newsletters is a direct expression of the collective working process Varia uses. According to Simon Browne, contingent librarian and member of Varia, it cost some time to set up the template, but it’s pretty simple in its use. The .pdf newsletter is a seamless extension of the websiteVaria website, spreading news on events and projects to the collective’s (international) network of cultural workers, geeks, and organizers. The print version, which feels like a crossover of a flyer and a local newspaper, allows for a bigger spacepresence in the Rotterdam neighborhood. This reflects a tendency within Varia during the lockdowns, to not go online, but to focus on the hyperlocal and provide a community space. Urgent, hybrid publication in the arts doesn’t always equal digitization, but rather an adaptive workflow and method that allows for the right hybrid format according to needs.
-
from: Introducing Etherport.org (chapter)
To question and circumvent paywalls that enclose knowledge that should be public, Maria van der Togt has created the artwork Hard Copy Soft Copy—Impermeable Domains (2021). Read more about the work here: https://sandberg.nl/alumni/maria-van-der-togt/work/hard-copy-soft-copy–impermeable-domains. The work consists of websitea virtual platform with an open-source collection of textdigital publications, run on a objectraspberry pi, and a spacespatial printing and binding set-up. Members of the public use the objecton-site computer to select any of the documents and performanceprint and bind it on the spot. In rescuing material from the clutches of corporatization, the work upholds the true definition of ‘public’ through the simple gesture of providing resources without any expectation of return.
-
from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
We’ve seen videolive streams set up on a spacestage, with performancespeakers giving a lecture and no audience except the viewers at home behind their computer; clunky live events with pre-recorded interviews that pixelate with every hesitation of the WiFi; videoInstagram Lives that nobody watches or that everyone is watching; countless videoZoom live streams with break-out rooms and tens of people on audiomute, fighting the Zoom fatigue or their clingy cat. Already in November 2020, Geert Lovink wrote about the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue: Geert Lovink, ‘The Anatomy of Zoom Fatique’, Eurozine, 21 November 2020, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2020/11/21/anatomy-of-zoom-fatigue. And we’ve also seen marvelous experiments: objecta big screen on a spacelive stage that shows a lively, textonline chat which is actually integrated into the conversation; performancea buddy system where an offline visitor takes their online friend by the hand (meaning, on their phone) and guides them through an spaceexhibition, event, Q&A’s with speakers live on stage.
-
from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The research of the archives group resulted in MUMORIES, an audioaudio spaceinstallation where visitors are invited to share their memories of cultural institution MU Hybrid Art House. These memories are collected and form a websiteliving digital audio archive that can eventually be listened to on site but also online. The growing collection of MUMORIES made possible by this interface literally gives voice to the immaterial impact a cultural practice like MU’s has on visitors. You can explore and interact with MUMORIES online here: https://mumories.hackersanddesigners.nl/Welcome.
-
from: Introduction: Hybrid Culture in a Changing World (chapter)
The linear succession of chapters, intermissions, and appendixes allows you enjoy the content in the same order that it appeared in during the live event. But if you’re feeling more adventurous, you can pay attention to the spacemargins of this publication, which are portals to non-linear reading experiences. In the inner margins (print) or on the right-hand side of the page (digital), you will find the ‘textlive annotations’: a direct reproduction of the chat during the live event, in which a team of reporters has commented on both the contents of the program and their own experiences. Also in the inner margins (print) or on the left-hand side of the page (digital), you will find textmedium-based tags (e.g., ‘still image’, ‘audio’), indicating the kind of media and hybrids discussed. In the digital version, you can click on these tags to discover other paragraphs with the same tag, making Screentime Airtime Facetime navigable by medium as well as by linear progression. In the print version, you’ll find a more traditional index in the back of the book, showing the numbers of each page the tag appears on. Both functionalities are features of the Etherport tool, which was used to create this publication.