Etherpads, jitsi links, mailing lists, zulip threads, wiki pages. git repos, IRC rooms, bootleg libraries radio streams, code notebooks… As a program XPUB explores the technosocial implicancies of platforms and (digital tools) with a focus on Free/Libre, self-hosted, and feminist technologies. As with other educational institutions, lockdown raised the stakes and heightened our sensitivities to the impact of our infrastructural decisions, including the often rough edges between the promises of collective presence and the practical, social, embodied limitations. The presentation will be accompanied by an intervention with devices built during the workshop ‘Small, clumsy, and intimate devices for awkward hybrid settings’ facilitated by Chaeyoung Kim and Erica Gargaglione.
x-what?
XPUB is the 2-year Master Experimental Publishing. Initiated in 2015 by Aymeric Mansoux, as a program XPUB explores the dual sense of “making public” both in: (1) exploring the multitude of forms of making things public, with a particular attention to technological frameworks, and the social, historical, political context in which this act occurs, and (2) the way these acts of publishing create publics (and nourish networks).
The program has roots in Media Design Program (Femke Snelting / Matthew Fuller 2002), and Networked Media (Florian Cramer, 2007).
When introducing the course, we like to say that the course has two important particularities: (1) a focus on collective work, (2) a DIY/DIWO approach to considering our tools and workflows and how the choices made shape this collectivity.
In particular the course concerns itself with the technosocial implicancies of platforms and (digital tools) with a focus on Free/Libre, self-hosted, and feminist technologies. Rather than relying heavily on cloud services, XPUB (self-) hosts and maintains many of the servers and services that the course uses. Students learn and practice skills of programming and server maintenance in order to gain first hand experience with the materials of software and networks.
Given these long standing interests, the course was already quite invested in thinking about digital infrastructure before the pandemic arrived. So in early 2020 a number of pieces were already in place…
Mailing list
A mailing list…
Hosted by “neighbouring network” lurk, the mailing list has a long history with now separate lists for media design and xpub. The protocols underlying email are great example of federation, sadly they are also under persistent attack (Oct. 2022, Microsoft drops IMAP support from outlook).
Zulip threads
Replaced a forum
Interesting bridge function with email
Not so good: Archive / Public (though it’s being worked on)
Initially used in technical courses, the wiki (s) are a good example of how infrastructure choices can spread in a more “grassroots” / bottom-up way even in the limits of an institution. As the wiki was embraced by writing tutors, who themselves worked with other “pathways” in the Master (Fine Art, Lens-based), certain practices developed – for instance of reading and annotating texts. In addition, the use of a simple (and now quite deprecated) Wiki Calendar has become a central infrastructural to both XPUB and the other pathways.
Software with an attitude
You’re browsing a database with a program called Wiki Wiki Web. And the program has an attitude. The program wants everyone to be an author. So, the program slants in favor of authors at some inconvenience to readers.
Posted on the original “wiki”, the Portand Pattern Repository; sadly the original seems to no longer be online
Wiki attitude
privilege writing over (just) reading (reading takes a bit of effort)
A software with a unique history, including becoming swallowed then spat back out from Google, etherpads are realtime collaborative writing spaces. You can think of Google Docs, or maybe Office online, but etherpads have their own particularities, probably more notably the way each authors contribution is color-coded (authorship colors), nb you can choose not to see the colors and/or remove the colors, but they are there by default. This, together with the “realtime” nature of the writing experience leads to a very particular experience that lends itself to a quite open-ended set of uses, such as…
Sign up sheets
Forming (sub) groups
Q+A / Discussion forum
Mood boards
Meeting notes
Equipment lists
Flexible Roles
One common experience with etherpad, taking notes during a meeting, assessment, or a live event. In these sitations, people can take on different roles, with fast typists alternating if trying to transcribe, while slower activities like correcting names (of people, of references), allow people with (community-) specific knowledge to contribute. The (near)realtime temporality of the typing makes negotiating these roles a subtle dance (not without an aspect of intimacy as errors are corrected, misunderstandings made explicit).
The Hmmm example of challenges of transcription: situating community knowledge. Ideal? Imagine transcription as a bot co-existant with other users in the pad.
Crossing systems / Different temporality
Etherpads and wikis by their text-centric nature are mixable.
Etherpads ephemerality however means it’s not ideal as an archive. Though the full history of changes is stored (and indeed can be replayed as a kind of text video time lapse), the granularity of this history is at the level of keystrokes. Copying and pasting a text from an etherpad into a wiki is a an example of a gesture to mark the passage of a text from an active/synchronously collective state to a slower more archival one.
jitsi rooms
jitsi / жици / wires
A Bulgarian word for wires, Jitsi, is an open source project with a (relatively) long history, started as a student projct by Emil Ivov studying in Strasbourg in 2003, is a mixture of tools using the XMPP protocol, itself a response to early proprietary (text/chat) message services. Later embracing WebRTC protocols, it developed to the browser-based Jitsi Meet server/service.
Combined with a public server + a VPN (virtual private network), these self-maintained and (re)locable servers can be used both locally, and as a means of publishing via the larger Internet.
Remote login is like Astral projection
Remember, the Internet consists of thousands of interconnected networks and hundreds of thousands of computers connected to these networks. As an Internet user, you’re at a computer which is connected. Since your computer already has a network connection, you can take advantage of this and log in to these remote computers by having your computer establish a network connection and emulate a terminal that is connected to this remote system. The original ARPAnet was created partly to let researchers do exactly this – log in to remote computers – in a way that let them share the expenses and resources of the network in common. Today, users continue to use the Internet for remote login, from terminals, PCs , and workstations to systems supporting library catalogs, on-line databases, special applications, and a growing number of pay-for use services like …
Daniel Dern, The Internet Guide for New Users, 1994.
pandemic!
Code notebooks / Social shell
Special Issues
The course is structured in two years. Year one is divided into three units called “Special Issues”, where a guest editor (often representing an external partnering institution) develops a theme and works towards some form (or forms) of “release”.
In the spring of 2020, course founder and returning guest editor Femke Snelting was confronted with the impending lockdown and the idea of focussing on a Radio stream as outcome was a hastily arrived at solution.
Radio streams
Luckily there was a friendly neighboring icecast server…
Radio Implicancies
RI … name of what became of series of three consecutive special issues led by Femke Snelting with Radio/Streaming as an output format, and which encouraged participants to research and investigate how collective work is shaped by technical systems through collective making and listenting within our own (small) networks.
Radio Implicancies is about practicing interdependencies. About how to stay with the complex entanglements between the personal, the economical, the political and the computational. About thinking, using and making technology with mutual relations in mind.
Made during the first lockdown, the work started with a collective writing exercise on an etherpad, an interleaved conversation in the form of a cadavre exquis, one startins a sentence and the other continuing the thought. The two later came together in a jitsi call to record a re-speaking the lines that each had written, using etherpad’s feature differentiating the writing of each author with color, but with the decision to to flip the script and read each others lines rather than their own. The result is full of both intimacy, as each imagines inhabiting the others thoughts, and awkwardness as they often struggle to synchronize with their collective script.
Like Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, the piece creates a sound scape that in its own way resonates with the particular affordances of the hybrid combination of virtual spaces created by the writing pad, and by the audio recording.
Example: Radio Implicancies: Floor van Meeuwen: The Cloud
‘Small, Clumsy, and Intimate Devices for Awkward Hybrid Settings’ by Chaeyoung Kim and Erica Gargaglione (Master Experimental Publishing, Willem de Kooning Academy) Wait. How are hybrid settings actually affecting the way we sense others’ presence in public events? How can we bring intimacy when hybrid media interrupt instead of facilitating modes of togetherness? In this three-hour workshop, participants can build their own small, clumsy, and intimate devices to hijack the idea of hybridity. The devices will be physically built to be used during the following ‘plenary closing sessions’, both online and offline.
Awkward Gestures
While a familiar gesture is one that fits perfectly well in a generally accepted model, an awkward gesture is a movement that is not completely synchronic. It’s not a countermovement, nor a break from the norm; it doesn’t exist outside of the pattern, nor completely in it. Like a moiré effect reveals the presence of a grid, awkward behaviour can lead to a state of increased awareness; a form of productive insecurity that presents us with openings that help understand the complex interaction between skills, tools and medium. … We use our awkwardness as a strategy to cause interference, to create pivotal moments between falling and moving, an awkward in-between that makes space for thinking without stopping us to act.
From the introduction (mag net reader) “a radical change is to be detected between the lines: publishing on paper is not about rigorously selling and distributing content to a specific target readership. It is more a ‘gesture’ that creates a space of intimacy between the publisher/editor and the reader. This space of intimacy is definitely a ‘physical’ one”
Embracing awkwardness…
Accept the overlaps/reduncancies, learn to embrace them!
Commonalities…
Resistance to the prescriptive (text as interface, structured text, markup)
Allow flexibility/play with roles
Versioning
Prioritizing process over product
Interoperability through linking
Security through context
Prioritizing/Persisting for small scale
pipelines (text, image, and sound; “an image of an image is an image”)
self-hosted
Differences…
Temporalities
“Hardnesses” / durability / ephemerality (sudo as a heat gun)
Audience
(no) login (required)
Summary: Embracing Awkwardness
Don’t fear “redundancies”: use multiple systems and value their different contexts, affordances, sociality, and temporalities and permanence
Work with different “hardnesses”, understand that work is a process where editorial work has different needs at different times in a project, eventually leading to the archival
Choose tools that work with others (that work with “external” sources, for instance via links)
Avoid prescriptive systems with fixed (production) roles, prefer “holistic” tools with space to swap roles, make mistakes, (re)negotiate
Embrace seamfulness: avoid totalizing systems that promise “seamlessness”
OUTTAKES / RESOURCES
Digital Lethargy
Tung-Hui Hu
Digital Lethargy
Dispatches from an age of disconnection
The feelings of fatigue or burnout or boredom that users experience today are not simply a result of speed or societal acceleration, but also come from the dominant narratives of digital capitalism, which map doing and actualization onto liveness and subjectivity, which promise to turn even unproductive moments into productive ones, and which devalue any form of time that connot resolve itself. (Digital Lethargy, Tung-Hui Hu, Introduction)
Whatever / Notifications as timepass
“Whatever” is a temporary gesture, but perhaps, like the phatic “um” or “uh-huh,” it is ultimately a way of reconciling those two irreconilable temporal scales – the hyper attentive command logic of cybernetic communication which demands a response in real time, and the limited capacity of human response. To offer a crude example, under the guise of user empowerment, my phone frequently presents me with notifications and alerts that seem to demand my immediate attention or resolution, emails that require my urgent feedback. Unable to respond and feeling unfit for interaction, I end up hitting the “snooze” or “dismiss” button, and instead waste time on Candy Crush or the equivalent. The alerts from friends and coworkers are still there, but after enough of them accumulate, I begin to see them as timepass: not as opportunities to connect or socialize, but simply a catalog of words to flip through, like a stack of old magazines. (Digital Lethargy, Tung-Hui Hu, Wait, then give up)
… If a network produces a continual if low-grade sense of crisis by continually demanding interaction or imput from a user, lethargy helps us see whis structure not as a crisis that can be solved by spectacular action but as an endemic pressure.
The persistence of Surveillance, relation to power
In a collection of personal essays titled Minor Feelings, the poet Cathy Park Hong deines her book’s title by describing a body of literature that comes out of a loack of change – “in particular, [the lack of] structural racial and economic change… Rather than the individual’s growth, the literature of minor feelings explores the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place” (Hu, Start when it’s too late)
In response, sociologist Simone Browne argues not only that surveillance is “nohting new to black folks,” but that we can only understand how surveillance operates throught its ongoingness: “to see it as ongoing is to insist that we factor in how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order.”
Git repos
Bootleg libraries
In their second year, XPUB students develop a research project and thesis. Simon Browne’s research would result in the publication Tasks of the Contingent Librarian, and also added a new infrastructural element that continues to serve local community today.
Feminist server manifesto
A feminist server…
Is a situated technology. She has a sense of context and considers herself to be part of an ecology of practices
Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist
Builds on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it
Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns
Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something is being made invisible
Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use, scalability and immediacy because they can be traps
Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice
Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies
Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client-server relations where she can
Treats network technology as part of a social reality
Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible
Does not confuse safety with security
Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity
Tries hard not to apologize when she is sometimes not available
Since returning to in-person events, at XPUB we continue to use our self-hosted jitsi server in particular instances:
for applicant interviews (as before)
small scale, individual tutorials and (staff) meetings
As a way to record events – through screen recording
To host dedicated “online open days”
As one element in a mix of tools
Jitsi+screenrecorder as video documentation; julie blanc from pagedjs
Text
Following Engelbart, attempt to show rather then tell…
Engelbart’s “Mother of all demos” is an often cited example of hypertext before the web, but it’s equally prescient of the mixture of the mix of audio/video streaming and collaborative tools that are part of a contemporary hybrid workplace.
It’s telling/suggestive how in this late 1960s example analog video switching technology used in television production was used to produce the “split-screens” of camera views and CRT text and information displays to make video conferencing (done using microwave transmission) and screen sharing appear to be “natural”. In fact the demo was a carefully orchestrated theater piece with a director and crew such as would be present for a live television production.
Engelbart is visibly awkward at start of the demo. At one point, when something doesn’t happen as expected, Engelbart notes apologetically to his audience that he isn’t yet “warmed up”. He makes a slip of the tongue early on, momentarily asking this audience to imagine a computer that is instantly responsible, before returning to script to say: instantly responsive, and punctuates the verbal glitch with a nervous laugh. I find myself often thinking of this slippage: technical systems are often about responsibilities, the importance of attending to the roles software creates and enforces, the way certain actions are enabled and encouraged while other actions are prohibited or discouraged. How prioritizing “responsiveness” puts high demands on both technical and human resources that means other aspects will be possibly forgotten here (example of streaming vs. documentation, or costs going to extra bandwith to support a (mostly) local event).
The awkwardness of the first interactions, the calm dread on Bill’s face as his camera image is revealed (reminding me of my own horror switching on the camera to join a 9AM management meeting); Engelbart’s joke that there’s nobody here but a big audience (again the friction between the apparent intimacy of the meeting, and the larger frame of expectations – in this case of selling the concept to an audience of sponsors). The negotiations as Engelbart can’t move his mouse (or you on 12 or 13?).
Sadly, the dictates of “good design” push for systems to resolve their dangling links, to reduce the possibilities for errors; with every iteration of the design, the system becomes smoother and smoother, meant to do what it’s intended, avoid the unexpected; like good infrastructure, the operation of the system should “disappear into the walls” and allow people to focus on their “content”.
In fact part of the beauty and fascination of seeing this early system is the way the participants navigate the system, with its glitches and bugs, together, dealing with mistakes as they arise. Despite the say this demo has been canonized as the birth of modern hypertext (among other things), it’s clear that the system is highly idiosyncratic and that the users are deeply personally invested in how it’s been constructed and how it can be eventually adapted in the future.
The “tragedy of good design” (in this sense) is that aims to exclude users from exactly that magic space of negotiation and imagination of what can and should be possible to do in a particular mediated situation.
The trouble is as Franklin calls it our technologies of control become increasingly prescriptive, placing people in fixed roles with no or little space for negotiation, optimizing workflows that go “one way” and never allow the “baton to be passed backwards”.
In design terms… the interest in reversing flows, extending design from a fixed position of translating “locked content” into form, and to embrace the situation of networked production where design decisions can “flow back” to influence say the writing of a piece, where the impact of the network we can use can influece how we collaborate.
The way responsiblities are encoded in software systems: think the “moderator” vs. “audience” role in zoom, or the various levels of “membership” in a wiki.
Social Shell ??? (To say that sociality of time-sharing systems, built into every PC essentially). In theory, I think people are probably not suprised to think that their laptop or phone can also function as a server, in practice and given the functioning of contemporary networks in which we find ourselves, putting that potential into practice is challenging.
While Engelbart’s research demo was dazzling its audience with its highly orchestrated and speculative vision of a future that wasn’t quite there yet (with NASA and ARPA as chief sponsors of the work, many in that audience would have been military), projects like Community Memory (1973); 6 years later, Lee Fehlsenstein and members of Resource One be placing teletype terminals not far away in Leonard’s record store on the campus of UC Berkeley. Here a project rooted in student activism and the Free Speech Movement would be discovering first hand the ways even quite rudimentary text storage and retrieval could function as an asyncronous network for users to find each other to exchange messages and skills.
BBS: Bedroom Bulletins
Jason Scott’s BBS Documentary, an oral history of early Bulletin Board System operators (aka BBS sysops), one sysop describes the thrill of hearing his PC, running in his bedroom, start making noises during the night as people were visiting his board. He goes on to describe how he could tell what games people were playing based on the sounds his hard disk would make.
Wikipedia is a complex example. While popular discourse might argue that wikipedia is somehow “anonymous” or even “author-less” it’s in reality hyper-authored, every change is timestamped, commented on, and attributed if not to a wikipedia user then to an IP address or other form of digital fingerprint. (Like many digital systems, wikipedia’s underlying database provides for a kind of hyper-accounting). The display of a wikipedia article is literally the tip of an iceberg; the outer surface of a thick palimpsest of social interactions playing out asyncronously over the span of years (in the case of popular articles), and on different scales both human and machinic. In addition to the direct edits made by human authors, programmatic “bots” are an essential part of the wikipedia editing ecosystem that continually patrol edits and raise various “flags” to signal the attention of a distributed and dynamic team of human editors. (Cristina Cochior)
Etherpad
Commenting a thesis by Avital B., itself a reflection on the students experience of mediated communication
In jitsi/etherpad with Avital
Remote Assessment
Scoring the scorer; Using the school’s office online to edit the official Assessment comments, I get an 87%
Alone with machines
Wiki Wiki Web
SOFTWARE with an attitude… Radical decision to allow all users to be editors + “anonymous” editing (that is editing without having an account). SUPPORTED by a technical decision to keep the full history of changes (enabling a rollback of edits)
Include EXAMPLES (screenshots) of different forms…. with a focus on presence / privacy / publicness… ?
Multiple sites/services, typically self-hosted, mixed and matched
Resistance through enduraance
Embracing platforms/systems/websites as:
inherently imcomplete (part of a larger web)
ephemeral
fragile, in need of care / attention
Resisting the
total: (Calendars that announce you have the “day off”! – Hot air balloon)
permanent (Cool URIs don’t change)
Special position for designers * Embrace the limits * Support people’s natural way of exiting / coping / enduring within the multiple overlapping incomplete imperfect systems.
In turn artworks that similarly work within the supply chain – at times complying with or even embracing an algorithm’s dictates – help us to pay attention to the self-sabotaging thoughts that spring from the lethargy at the periphery of our digital lives. (Hu, Introduction)
(maybe this idea is not ready yet)
Unintention effect of many privacy measures, such as the GDPR (and say explicit negotiation of cookies), or an insistence on “secure” protocols like https, are that control mechanisms like cookies and certificates are looked on with increasing suspicion particularly when coming from small scale / local institutions or individuals vs. their ever present use in multi-national platforms like Facebook, where the platforms very ever presence and monotonous design helps to hide.
URLs and bridges
In the proposal, Berners-Lee imagined “gateway” servers that would “generate a hypertext view of an existing database.” While gateways provided one kind of bridge, the eventual design of URLs (those “Universal Resource Locators”) would go a step further by allowing direct references to resources across both extant and yet to be specified future protocols anticipating browser software able to negotiate (or delegate) the different links.
A list of URL schemes (protocols) including the web’s own HTTP: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt.
As history would prove, the ability to publish documents with prose text mixed with “hot words” that would access resources with a single click was, as technologists like to say, disruptive. It created a new kind of networked reading characterized by informal and contextual discovery: browsing. Parallel to this was a new writing practice where writing with links gave exposure to previously obscure resources. Indeed, early popular websites were often those that provided comprehensive links to available resources on a particular subject, contextualized by its writers. In this way sites could be seen as portals for viewing the web via the perspective of a particular theme or community. In addition, deliberate linking strategies like webrings emerged as a means of expressing solidarity between individuals and groups through web publishing.
Ironically, HTTP’s popularity in practice led to its effectively killing some of the very protocols it embraced. Google would again later disrupt web practices by creating an indexing scheme based on an analysis of the linking structure of the web, thereby also first profiting from the practices of portals and webrings and subsequently making them less visible. Given this pattern of destructive appropriation, a crucial question becomes how to design and use technical protocols in a way that values adjacent practices, sustaining and nourishing rather than undermining them.
Engelbart + Franklin Introduction to technology + reflection…
Course RadioImplicancies Different infrastructure Examples of the Worshop Inside the arts / cultural production, XPUB is educational / academic Bullet points (Embracing Awkardness…)
Use the devices to ….
FOCUS ON XPUB EXAMPLES… Give the context…
Mark + Tisa… guide the audience
Happenning in lockdown …. tell the story… (suddently being thrown into using) Awkwardless… Embracing the seamly ness , small scale self hosting, jitsi + embracing the hiccups… trying to use them as part of the reflection to trigger future thinking…
Floor Jingle Board parliament… Get people using Jingle Board parliament …
(In the 3 examples cover etherpad, soupboat, remote login, radio stream … )
3rd iteration: focus on class as the audience… END WITH A JAM SESSION…
Resources….
Femke’s quote Why XPUB insists on NOT using big tech….
Diversity in tools & ways that things can be shared, but it’s more than software… Reflection on tools while using them / making something…
Tell the backstory… (XPUB infrastructure)…
Non-prescriptive… No-login… (maybe introduce these points alongside the infrastructure!!!!) Etherpads:
