Adashboard (for fiction)

An will talk about collaborative narrative practices within Constant during a workshop on ‘Real Time Composition’ with Joao Fiadeiro and others proposed by performer Adva Zakai @ Dominokingdom. In her talk she will try to use the words ‘event’, ‘suggestion’, ‘confirmation’, ‘save’, ‘loop’, ‘error’, ‘judge’, ‘sharing’, ‘generosity’, ‘manipulation’, ‘responsability’, ‘care’, ‘complexity’, ‘here & now’, ‘the elasticity of the system’, ‘timing’, ‘trust’, ‘engage’, ‘empathy’, ‘value’, ‘forking’, ‘bug’, ‘utopia’, ‘unity of action’.
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Le souhait existait de faire une reprise de Kaleidoscope. Malheureusement le set-up de lumières, son, haut plafond s’est avéré trop compliqué pour le contexte universitaire. Membre de Constant An Mertens donnera une conférence sur Kaleidoscope, en référant à d’autres projets artistiques qui réunissent des pratiques collaboratives, systèmes de notation et caméra(s) de surveillance.

Plus d’info

An participated in the 11th Festival Bandits-Mages, in the program ’Anticipated Worlds/Augmented Territories’. In the lecture she interweaved a personal register with a historical register and a storyteller voice.

Fiction allows you to take a distance from everyday reality and to inject new perspectives in work practises. Which examples of so called feminist science-fiction could inspire a methodology in which sharing, exchange and the right for mistakes are central? Could we link the potential of new models embedded in the ’Cyborg Manifesto’ by Donna Haraway to the statement of Linus Thorvald in the following sentence, from the notes he distributed with the first release of Linux: ’Interrupts aren’t hidden.’ And what happens when you try to apply these ideas to a collaborative server project for women? An Mertens will not answer all these questions, but will take them as a starting point for an unreleased storytelling session.

Consult the catalogue of the festival.

Wendy Van Wynsberghe en An Mertens praten over het gebruik van fictie, collaboratieve tools, collectieve beslissingsname en (vrije) licenties in een sociale context voor studenten van de opleiding MA Agogiek UGent.

This is the second of the 2 main questions I presented at the Open Knowledge 1.0 last Saturday in Limehouse Townhall in London.

The second question came up when I thought about the possibilities of linking collaboration and infinity with the practice of literary creation.

Authors are about the most individual workers on earth – apart from collaborating with their editors, they only ask others to read and comment on their texts. They decide on which comments they accept. It is a very intimate process. You don’t just ask anyone to revise your text, only people you trust and you choose because of their vision of life, on art, on society, etc. It could be an interesting experiment to try to write a community novel but I believe it is not more than a very fun game to play. If your interest is aroused, I can refer to a Penguin experiment. It was called ‘amillionpenguins’. Apparently, an infinite number of people can only write a comedy together. The meta-discussions about writing, terrorism, rules were the most interesting part of the experiment.
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This is one of the 2 main questions I presented at the Open Knowledge 1.0 last Saturday in Limehouse Townhall in London.

The first question deals with the possibility to share and might add some flavour to the discussion about the concept of ‘open’, as in ‘open knowledge’ or ‘open source’.
As a human being and writer – both bodies are intimately related – I naturally tend to favour the principles of sharing, exchange, generating, regenerating and degenerating (:-)). I like to adhere to the idea of ‘open’ culture as it stated in the Free Art License based on the GPL.

All very well, but as an author I am confronted straight away with the limitations of this freedom. What’s more, the open culture seems to be only half open or half closed, unless the notion of ‘open’ also allows for in-between situations.
I’ll make this somewhat clearer for you. I live in Brussels. Officially, it is a bilingual city, unofficially the city is multilingual. As a Dutch-speaking person I often find myself in murky in-between situations.

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