NOTES https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.textprocessing


Bibliography: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings
Download texts: https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/eGmApCmrlAWSA2l

15 January 2018: Text processing
WYSIWG, ascii, writing/language/code, markup, keyboards
Invitation: https://apass.be/textprocessing/


-----------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction:
    
Research as an artistic practice
Rigurous without disciplinary knowledge

Femke: external caretaker for the research center. 

Design / software / relation btw sw and other types of practice like for example the medical profession, health; or graphic designersinforming software tools for typography / 

Q: what does it meen to talk about (digital) tools and how does that take to artistic research.

Other people: Martino, Seda and Sina to think of a program that couldmake sense, by reading practically alongside theory. And see howthese two speak to each other.
*understand relations with technology as such (Simondon, Barad)
*specific practices such as text processing, local servers, compressions, keycards and databases.

We don’tofyen look at infrastructures and layouts when we write a text.
Sina is interested in memory practices – and will have a conversation while looking at apass website.

Focus of what happens in apass, but which could serve in other places.


We’ll try to document these sessions (sound recording due to interesting ways of speaking or ways of reading, plus 

Round: 
Martino: also implicated. Have a background in arts and design. Started a hacklab in Amsterdam. Political urgencies. Technologies that start to embody social assumptions. Moved to bxl and works with constant. Try to think what is a critique of software, or software as a critique. Digital tools we use, but not as an expert thing but sharing thiscontinuous process that can go very deep in layers of abstraction. Political agency of these tools. 

Pablo: know about the program through Lili. Researches in Parts. Research based on artistic practice.  Develop projects with smallappliances with ardiuno for example, to find solutions to artistic projects. 

Jara:Mediation (of not only humans) / Extended notion of technology, and the subjectivities that emerge.Poilitical implicaitons of cultural devices.  Material conditions of possibility.

Pierre: co-curator of a.pass. What an institution of artistic research can be today. Part of this group. Function: sometimes curating, some other times caretaking, some thertimes mentoring. Developed a language as a choreographer. Through dancing evolved to the status of artist researcher and also dramatourg. The shift happened when became dramatourg. Try to think about the material conditions of possibility. Busy with pieces “without” text. The notion of text becomes extended, included critical questions of what is body, what can body do, what is representation, etc. Now starting to develop own project. Here because bumped into the necessity to understand the practiceof digital devices in a non-innocent way: learning which kinf of normative/authoritarian apparatuses they contain. Played by forces that he was not conscious of. Try to be more informed. Fin it crucial as an artist but also specifically as a member of a.pass. How we archive, for what, in which format, etc. supported the idea to have FS. Prefer also to learn collectively!

Seda: researcher at Leuven, electrical engineering program. Work rather interdisciplinary. Working on privacy and surveillance. Worked along with constant on these for like 10 years now, developing different techniques to engage in this critically. The Technogalactic Software Observatory. Bring those techniques into a room. Try to make academia accessible to constant’s community and the other way around. Sometime to see them fail and some other times floursih! There is an issue with doors at their university: gone from keys to cards. All of a sudden our door became databases.

[fingerprints!]

Joke: background in filmmaking, but not doing it at the moment, which makes an analog person. Not a digital person at all. Works as production coordination at a.pass. How to implement the content we are working on in the institution iteself. It is all ad hoc knowledge. 

Ascii tables -- Remember highschool.
all the layers of inscription
when we go asdeep as possible in the inscription, at some point it is going to be on hard drive areas

word processor: 

[+technolayers if you zoom in, but also out: alphanumeric conventions...] -- [readable for "us" aka "alphabetised humans"!]

in the lower level of abstraction, there needs to be text. Markup language. The processing partof language. there is constantly a process of rendering. 

crl+u shows the source
formatting, markup and encode
green are "commands", so the machine does scape them, but are there for the human.
everytime there is something on a screen, there is some sort o rendering (colouring, showing links...)
syntax colouring: a consensual colouring scheme.
!DOCTYPE is like a declaration (oin this case, html is the formatof the file)

[Q:how much plain is what's called "plain text"?]
layers of culture that tell the historyof how these technologies came to be and how their hegemonies operate.

W3c -- standarisation processes

Andrew Russel: talks about interoperability between standards, not just because of efficency but also because of labour reasons, open standars' history of labor! 

docx
doc
social justice, subjectivities, productive/economical/privative, reproductive, eurocentric, 

mission: One Web.

delegation / vernacularism/localism/situatedness

state/private/... but were/how the commons  // autonomy from scratch? // paranodal

for people growing up, how much more intensively these standards operate.

different control/power. One is how to manage communication. Another is how to look at specific features, shapes, etc.

popular signs in unicode...

which was thoughtby american engineerings, but suddenly need thousands of charactersthat need to be 5-dimensionally ...
the binary is not directly shown on unicode, but compacted to hex

<p means paragraph

id is a specific location

left to right mostly, but when right to left you can re-arrange the standard, mirroring. Not in the level of computation, but always in the level of rendering.

there is a privilege to left to right.

DOCUMENTS:
whatever is just for humans to read.


----------------------

-------------------


+

What we'll do in monday readings: get our hands in tools, but also keep our brains open.
In the afternoons to read against the experience with certain tech in the mornings.

Today: teletype.
Interesting to compare to less physical processing of text.

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjfffffffffff

--
THE ascii table

THIS IS TEXTPROCESSING TOO

I am inscribing a text on a server. It is being translated into 0 and 1 as I type.

Ascii encoding http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/compilers/ASCIIChart.pdf

Exploring four types of files: html, doc/odt, pdf, (python) code






Andrew Russel -- Open Standards