Table of Contents
VJ12 Brainstorm | VJ12 Press Release | VJ12 Expo, video programme, readinglist
Reference Rooms
Hallway
Haute Surveillance
Francois Bucher
A hoax based on the life and work of Jean Genet (TBC)
This video develops from a real event that took place during a theater seminar in the masters degree program at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Columbia. The seminar occurred during one of the university's worst periods of violence. Two students in charge of a presentation on the life and work of French author Jean Genet, decided to play a hoax on their fellow students - a hoax that involved an armed kidnapping
Code Swarm
Michael Ogawa
An experiment in organic software visualization (animation)
Code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.
Human Calculation Machine
Michael Murtaugh + participants
http://constantvzw.org/vj12/spip.php?article13
An exercise in Human Computation (video documentation)
Participants performed parts in human-only powered computer, capable of addition and counting. Core concepts like binary representation, logic gates, and timing will be discussed and enacted. An exercise in bringing the “digital” back into the hand. The final machine execution / performance will be recorded as video documentation.
De Rekenaarsters
Grietje Keller
The early history of computing in The Netherlands (Documentary, 2005)
According to figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics, in the Netherlands only 12 percent of women work in ICT and most of them can be found in HR and consultancy. In areas such as network management and programming, even fewer women are employed. In this documentary, Grietje Keller traces back the early history of computation and shows a very different picture.
Screening Room
Video Programme
http://constantvzw.org/vj12/spip.php?article7
A program with web videos around the central themes of the festival. Videos are screened in a loop and can be consulted, annotated and commented upon using the Active Archive Video Wiki.
Active Archives
Constant feat. Michael Murtaugh
Drawings: Pierre Huyghebaert
Video Wiki version 0.5
How do “We” share information “Together”, how do we channel information through each others' network, under which conditions? How do we produce digital content together? Online video needn't be limited to the single image framed by VCR style controls popularized by sites such as youTube. By combining media plugins with scripting languages like JavaScript and PHP, the form and display of online video can reflect the potential of presenting multiplicity: multiple image, multiple authors, multiple playouts.
Copy Shop
In the Copy Shop you can find a photocopier at your disposal, an USB printer and repository of digital works to be duplicated and taken home.
Reading room
The Reading Room contains a collection of related books and other related materials.
FLOSS-Manuals
FLOSS Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools. They include authors, editors, artists, software developers, activists, and many others. There are manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source softwares, about how to do things (like design) with open source software, and manuals about free culture services that use or support free software and formats.
Kitchen
Food and drinks are prepared at democratic prices in our custom built kitchen.
As with the commander of an army
Femke Snelting
http://snelting.domainepublic.net/files/isabella.zip
An exercise in reading by command
As with the commander of an army uses a simple language pattern to find imperative verbs in all 1177 pages of Isabelle Beeton's 19th century Book of Household Management. Results are fed into a synthetic speech programme which renders them audible. The Book of Household Management combines recipes that reduce redundancy (a familiar strategy in computer programming), with careful attention to the necessarily repetitive work involved in the making and keeping of a comfortable home. As with the commander of an army uses the original text of The Book of Household Management, as made available through The Gutenberg Project at: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/0/1/3/10136
Side room
The most useful book
Constant feat. OSP
An incomplete collection of inspiring, confusing and clarifying manuals, cookbooks and instruction sheets
e-traces
Michel Cleempoel
http://etraces.constantvzw.org/informations/
Daily updated news from the e-traces information service (cork board)
The e-traces weblog presents a selection of articles from various sources about the generalized movement towards a surveillance and, more particularly, in the context of the Web 2.0.
Yoogle!
Michel Cleempoel, Nicolas Malevé
Version 1.0 (single player version) of Yoogle!, an online game that will make it possible to play the roles of different players in the market of web 2.0, and to participate to the manoeuvres of all of them.
Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers
Ginger Coons
A mostly fictional text-based adventure game. The situation is fictional, the world in which it is set is fictional. The references it makes to copyright law and the Canadian Copyright Act, however, are currently true.
You may be infringing copyright without even knowing it. Lawbot can help. Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers is a text adventure game created to teach the basics of Canadian copyright law. It drops you into a futuristic world where copyright enforcement has gone mad. On your quest to rescue your partner and set things right, you'll learn about things like fair dealing, infringement and alternatives to traditional copyright. Why would you want to learn about all that? Because you're probably infringing already and it's nice to know exactly what it is you're doing that bothers so many industries so much.
<$BlogTitle$>
jodi
“When Blogger interpreted <$BlogTitle$> as a malicious spamblog and actually blocked 3 of the blogpages Jodi created, <$BlogTitle$> exposed the myth that blogs are the medium that realized total freedom of speech. In this case, the process of making meaning became very literally a process of destruction. Moreover, it became clear at once that blog users actually have to answer to a built-in political system. This politics is based on a system governed by the desire and belief that it will be used to distribute knowledge and opinions in a specific, ‘preformatted’ way. Bloggers that do not answer to these conventions risk the possibility of being blocked or to have their blogs completely deleted.”
Central Room
Surveillance wall
Denis Devos
An installation running multiple softwares scanning local internet traffic
Origin, content and destination of the networked traffic passing through the V/J12 WiFi is analysed and visualised.
Amongst the F/LOSS softwares we used: driftnet, upsidedowninternet …
Print/poster
http://aj.chaton.free.fr/portraitsengl/architecte.html
Anne James Chaton
Description
Object Room
Textile object
Lina Kusaite
Textile object imprinted with the documents involved in the procedure of being naturalised as a Belgian
notvalid.html
Jonathan Vingiano
http://jonathanvingiano.com/notvalid.html
An ongoing experiment with the interpretation of invalid html
The work itself seems to be a series of words in a variety of colors, though each word has been assigned the color value of itself. For example, the html tells the browser that the word “freedom” should also be the color “freedom.” The browser then chooses what color “freedom” should be. Different browsers will interpret “Not Valid” in a different manner.“
Annuaire téléphonique
Ludivine Loiseau
Description
All Tags
Evan Roth
http://evan-roth.com/all-tags.html
One sentence contained within every HTML tag in alphabetical order
The first connection
Leonard Kleinrock
http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/first_words.html
A record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET
It took place at 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. This record is an excerpt from the “IMP Log” that was kept at UCLA.
Audio Room
Stops, or how to punctuate
Text: Paul Allardyce
Readers: Nicholas James Bridgewater, stepheather, Laurie Anne Walden, Miranda Stinson, Sarah Jennings, Shurtagal, Zachary Brewster-Geisz, Shurtagal, Kara Shallenberg, Clarica, Kristen McQuillin, Robin Cotter, Ada Kerman, Robin Cotter, Philippa Willitts
http://librivox.org/stops-or-how-to-punctuate-by-paul-allardyce/
Throughout the ages, languages continue to adapt and change. English, being a relatively new language, is a nice example of that. Though the English vocabulary is continually evolving, the system of punctuation has remained constant for the most part. This means that grammar books from 1895 are still applicable today. Therefore, if the following sentence looks correct to you, perhaps listening to Paul Allardyce's Stops, or How to Punctuate would be a good idea.
Grey Literature Radio
Pierre De Jaeger + participants
http://constantvzw.org/vj12/spip.php?article44
A radio-phonic fiction, produced during the V/J12 Grey Literature Radio workshop on November 21 and 22.
Paper Music
Alfredo Costa Monteiro
http://www.archive.org/details/hr021
Experimental music piece by Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité
Annie Abrahams, Igor Stromajer
http://www.intima.org/oppera/oips
Combining world wide web communication protocols with the strictly coded art form of an opera (sound)
“Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité” explores the poetics of a contemporary sound form: opera as a sound event for the audience in the form of a live internet audio broadcast. In that way it combines the notion of the world wide web communication protocols and classical artspace: an opera house. Opera is a very strictly coded form of art with a lot of passion, and internet is a lonely place of solitude and intimate communication which is becoming more and more fragile, dangerous and suspicious.
Poster Room
CCtv manifesto
AmbientTV
http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=dpamanifesto
Opportunistic infections of the surveillance apparatus (poster)
Filmmakers render aspects of nature, human activity and imagination visible. The documentary film continues to be a potent form in all its variety, from the personal video diary to “objective” fly-on-the-wall shoots, to the hybrid fact/fiction (“faction”) film. But the most prolific documentarists are no longer to be found in film schools and TV stations. In some European and American cities, every street corner is under constant surveillance using recording closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras. Such cameras are typically operated by local government, police, private security firms, large corporations and small businesses, and private individuals, and may be automatic or controlled (zoomed and panned) from a remote control room. Filmmakers, and in particular documentarists of all flavours, should reflect on this constant gaze. Why bring in additional cameras, when much private and public urban space is already covered from numerous angles?
Hoeveel Olifanten Lust een Slang?
Vlaams Theater Instituut
http://www.vti.be/files/OlifantenPoster.pdf
Poster mapping theater-funding in Flanders from 1975 - 2007 plus audio interview with Dries Moreels
In 2007, The Flemish Theater Instituut (VTI) decided to publish a poster with a visualisation of all funding decisions in the period 1975 - 2007. Which theater organisations received structural grants during this period? What was their piece of the cake? The poster 'How many elephants a snake can eat' tells us much about the development of the performing arts discipline, of subsidised organizations and the changing attitude of the government, global movements and the diversification of the cultural landscape.
Het Vlaams Theater Instituut bracht de decretale geschiedenis in kaart en visualiseerde deze in een affiche. Welke organisaties kregen in deze periode structurele subsidies? Hoe groot was hun hap uit de taart? Het affiche 'Hoeveel olifanten lust een slang' vertelt ons veel over de ontwikkeling van de structureel gesubsidieerde organisaties en over de veranderende houding van de overheid, over de globale bewegingen/diversifiëring van het culturele landschap.
A Unicode Poster
Mark Longair
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~mark/random/unicode-poster/
Giant image of the Unicode and ISO 10646 character set, a marvellous, doomed, never-ending endeavour
“Strangely, it seems as if lots of people don't understand why I think the Unicode and ISO 10646 character set standard is such a marvellous, doomed, never-ending endeavour. Anyway, I thought it would be excellent to have a giant poster of all the displayable characters in Unicode, and it turned out that someone (Ian Albert) had already created such a poster. So, why didn't I just download and print out that version, and instead generate my own?”
Decode Unicode
decodeunicode
All character sets currently available for computers on one poster. By integrating 2000 new characters, the second edition of the poster was updated to Unicode 5.0. The poster now displays exactly 51,980 characters on two square meters. Three color offset printing, format 1,17 × 1,75 m, second edition, 600 copies.
Flocking Diplomats
catalogtree
http://www.catalogtree.net/projects/parking
Series of posters visualising parking violations by New York diplomats
Parking violations by diplomats between 1998 and 2005. Of all 143702 violations, 141369 were suitable for geocoding, resulting in 16355 unique loactions. In collaboration with Lutz Issler (geocoding and programming).
Van Abbe Museum
Jan van Toorn
Documentation of our attempt to display this classic poster in Zennestraat 17 Rue de la Senne.
The poster designed by Jan van Toorn for the Van Abbemuseum (1971), is a museum exhibition promotion but it is also a bold critique. It manages to disclose the banalities of both the art market and of accepted visual communication processes. The work represents Van Toorn’s career-long concern with reclaiming the media as a channel of communication, from its modern role of mere distribution, or worse, of obfuscation and deception.
Front Room
The Transformer
6 black-and-white images from the Isotype Archive, Reading
In the 1920s, philosopher, sociologist, and economist Otto Neurath and his associates developed unorthodox working methods in order to produce 'pictures out of data'. In the sotype method, a central role was given to 'the transformer'. Marie Neurath explains: “It is the responsibility of the 'transformer' to understand the data, to get all necessary information from the expert, to decide what is worth transmitting to the public, how to make it understandable, how to link it with general knowledge or with information already given in other charts. In this sense, the transformer is the 'trustee of the public'”
Goodiff
Alexandre Delaunoy
A service for automated tracking of semantic changes in web service policies
GooDiff is a consumer-oriented service for keeping track of changes of important documents - and indirectly the services described by these documents - provided by selected Internet service providers. Its “mission” is to increase transparency for end consumers such as you and I.
epicpedia
Annemieke van der hoek
A web application that presents itself as a theatre script
EpicPedia is a web application that presents itself as a theatre script to explain the development of a Wikipedia article. The script 'translates' the revision/editing history and all the generated meta data of a Wikipedia article to a theatre script and hereby exposes Wikipedia’s mechanisms. The projects’ title, EpicPedia, refers to Bertolt Brechts’ Epic Theatre, the starting point for the theory behind this web script.
logowiki
Wayne Clements
http://www.in-vacua.com/logo_wiki.html
Unacknowledged alterations to Wikipedia pages
logo_wiki identifies military, corporate, and governmental editors of Wikipedia ('the Free Encyclopedia'). It does this by tracing back the editor's IP address. logo_wiki shows recently edited 'diffs' pages (with changes highlighted) and shows who the shadowy editor is. logo_wiki does this by replacing the Wikipedia logo with the editor's logo. Military, corporate and governmental users are responsible for many thousands of unacknowledged alterations to Wikipedia pages. logo_wiki reveals this process occurring in real time.
Google will eat itself
UBERMORGEN.COM feat. Alessandro Ludovico vs. Paolo Cirio
Google eats itself - but in the end “we” own it!
“We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end “we” own it!”