ART&RESEARCH

For several reasons we ourselves go to other peoples’ spaces. Constant has an office that can become a workshop space, but at each public moment (besides the web of course which is already a space belonging to someone else and to be negotiated) we enter into contact with different places that we think are open, possible and accessible to our researches. Amongst others, these spaces can be cybercafés, training centers, bookshops, squats and cultural institutions. The purpose of these meetings with other groups is to temporarily implant ourselves and create negotiations, explanations, shared resources and contracts where a common language can be found. We think of our projects with other groups as an open exchange/reverse with the risk to become invisible. This is because we sometimes work at the heart of a structure itself whether that be a network, a discourse or inside the structural spaces of our partners. In the revealing of our sources our activities produce traces, therefore invisibility does not imply disappearance, but the opening of doors with quotes by using weblogs that follow our path and gestures during lectures, workshops that follow our use of free software for design, video, or sound. One can also follow our engagement and thoughts in developing a font or a cartography software; but what imports here to be visible is the project, the trajectory, the process, we don't want to make believe in a magic act of creation, or to make believe in the isolated creation process. We question and teach ourselves in public. I'd like to insist on this perpetual motion due to the ‘absence’ of permanent place, but also due to some of our practices.

Instruments

I will take for an example, our decision to use free software⁹. Graham Harwood, an artist-programmer has described Gimp (image editor free software) as  “a Photoshop with its guts open”, which suggests a live image that software can be more that just a set of easy tools to be used that will function without glitches. Free and open source software is not always ‘user-friendly’ in the usual sense of the word. On the one hand 'user-friendly’ can mean something else according to the expectations and the skills of the users. On the other hand, like most of open software, ‘free’ software is ‘a work in progress’. It offers an opportunity to create something out of the missing links, out of the hiccups and misunderstandings as the base code is not hidden such as it is in commercial software. Free software allows us to see the guts of our tools, to get rid of the corset, feel the weight and the limits of our technological extensions.

As in the absence of place, our use of free software creates at the same time:

- A link, a dependence to a community of programmers with whom we can be in contact. And the visible doubts, glitches in the software can be the source of meetings and collective works.

- A slowing down in our rhythm of production which allows us to ask (ourselves) questions: Is our work, communication and creation done with software, but also BY software? What happens if our work IS software? How can we think of ourselves outside of their use? How can work, adapt, re-invent, change our tools when their use is restricted by licenses? How can we understand what the software does to the aesthetics of our works.  How does our work function if we cannot distance ourselves from it and try other ways of doing? As in slow motion, free software allows us to see ourselves doing.

- The publishing of sources is to share mistakes and solutions. To go back over the traces we leave and we (re)trace or mark. These marks can be images of groups at work, computer code, a revealing of our ‘cuisine interne’ where we share the products and the recipes which can be reused, modified and distributed. Software in progress is learning in progress and learning in motion.

- But of course this slow motion brings questions of how to combine this collective work, this new time of work as for example, graphic designers? The Open Source publishing team of Constant shares fairy tales and glitches of the line of production. When the team is at work you can follow them on their weblog, it is a group practice.

To trace and traces

With our processes we have multiplied the ways we communicate. From events to portals, weblogs, databases, interviews, diagrams, images, and texts we see and enable to be seen, to research while manipulating data and techniques. These different ways of communication generally follow the specific type of project, and the type of space that the particular project implies will dictate the use of the traces that are expected.

I'd like to focus on one example concerning a work that deals with graphics and the  cartography of data. BAM, the Flemish institute for visual, audiovisual and media art¹⁰, asked our OSP (Open Source Publishing) team to design a publication about the institute activities. Part of the institute’s activities is to give information and make visible the visual and media arts scene in Flanders. Constant is of course one of the actors in this field, therefore on the weblog of OSP you could follow the technical adventures to design this book with free software. OSP/Constant was also asked to propose a graphical form to the database, to give a visual and printed form to the data collected by BAM. If the diagrams that were realised were to be published in the book, Constant/OSP wished to add an appendix to them to highlight the process of fabrication to share the questions asked in this process of scrutinizing the database. The questions were formulated using softwares that revealed as much as the methods used by the institution to collect the data, as they revealed the data collected on the actors of the visual and media field in Flanders. The same way, the various diagrams side by side are an indicator of the questions asked and the different possible standpoints on this data. Design can show or hide a process, and as we know an answer is as important as how a question is asked.

Displacement

It is here in this talk where paths are crossing themselves; I could take two different roads that are always complementary to us. One is the displacement from space to space, the second is the use of writing and reading in our working process. We consider here, reading theory as a work space, as an hospitable space and above all, reading means for us also to put theory at the stake of reality and practice. For example: “Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.”¹¹

To hang the word cyberfeminist on the web, to translate it and to read the texts produced lead us to take theory for practice, for reality. We went from the web, to translation, to publications. We went from workshop places and image critics to training centers. If digital technology is changing our relation to the world, it implies every woman having relationships with technology: being someone working on the cash machine in a supermarket, being in contact with biotechnology, being in a call centre or making electronic music. In 2001 we entered into a training centre for women that used technology, a training centre for secretaries, admin servers or web designers. We brought in artistic activist practices, theoretical concepts and technical knowledge. We brought our use and understanding of technology.

Feminist history, science, philosophy, cyberfeminist theory and gender politics were all discussed in workshops alongside hardware, networks and the experience off free software use. There were meeting days where concepts and machines were worked, manipulated and rebuilt with the hope of building links between different women’s groups who practiced technology. To ask ourselves who has access to technology, to media and how the representation of technology works, in turn enables us to question gender and the image of women in the media, to ask which technological understandings we share ; it leads us to enter training centres and workplaces for women. This exchange of practices, common creations and organisation of works, lets in traces and a knowledge of how so called  ‘immaterial’ labour works, lives and allows us to weave links with people who do not normally pass by the places codified as cultural. If the use of free software and free licence can be considered as a performative and transformative act, in our relations in the engine or ‘between’  the process of our displacement, our feminist position also plays the agitator, the creator of questions, the reconfigurator of fields of creation.

[Fig. 5]

Digitales¹² were training-centre meeting days, and were exceptional in all senses of the word. [Fig. 5] An exception in a reality that separates the different users even on the web. It is where we stand to work and to use, it is the language and their goals which are determining the physical and virtual spaces of each of us. Words, uses and spaces only exist when you have met, crossed and opened them, they then make sense and create links to something already seen and experienced. Interdisciplinary and collective work only exists by practice and  repetition. This exception should become a habit; the habit and habitat, a meeting space where responsibility of the meeting is shared; we all had to become both hostess and inhabitants.

In 2006 we organised the last exceptional meeting days, and taking a group from the origin of the project, began with the aim to build and maintain a feminist server with free software. I refer back to the words shown at the beginning of this talk. They were learned, exchanged and debated and almost six years before becoming the links between functions and practices in the group. I could describe in detail what they do mean in practice, how we deal with different times, different labour definitions, skill sharing, organisational decisions and so on. But as here, I have created a loop in this talk that goes back to the beginning. I would therefore like to end on the function of the texts that we are in turn writing. Texts that often take a grip on quotes to enable a narration and questioning process. These texts that we write, like this one, are mostly the result of invitations we receive to share our experience. These texts are tracing and telling our trajectory more than they are reproducing it. They are at the same time, the repeated attempt to weave links between intuitions, knowledge, tests and meetings. We use theory quoted now and then as a way to mirror, hang or attach. They are like a voice over which accompanies the process, like subtitles. I am thinking of these texts, I am using them as a bonimenteur commenting upon scenes of a silent movie, underlining this, forgetting that, looking for her words to accompany the course of her story in front of an audience.

At the difference of information, narration doesn’t care about transmitting the pure heart of the event, it incorporates it in the life itself of the one who is telling to communicate it as her own experience to the one who is listening to it. Then the narrator lets her trace on it, like the hand of the ceramist on the argyle vase.¹³

 

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