TitleTactical Watermarks

KindRepublishing Platform

PlaceRotterdam, May 2020.

SizeNA

withXPUB

Tactical Watermarks is an online republishing platform that exists in both the clear and dark web. I actively make use of digital watermarks as a means to explore topics such as anonymity, paywalls, archives, and provenance. While the primary intention of analogue watermarks was to leave traces of authenticity, marks of quality or even aesthetic enhancements, digital watermarks are being used as a way to create accountability for users. Through this platform, I describe and document ways of living within and resist a culture of surveillance in the realm of publishing.

I am motivated by all the invisible individuals behind extra-legal publishing platforms, from curators, the ones who host, upload and even download material. Through the act of watermarking, I embed layers of information often dissolved within the processes of sharing texts. I experiment on how the process of adding stains can be twisted and revived. Stains are what I call user patches or marks that are difficult to remove and that do not play an active role in archives.

In this platform, users can upload and request different titles. While talking with members from the Library Genesis forum, I understood the need to create a tool that allows people to share watermarked pdfs in a safe way. My platform is NOT a library, and it is also NOT an archive. I don't keep the files or intend to archive them. What I open is a space to de-watermark files, and append new anonymous watermarks with the technical and personal regards around sharing specific texts. In the end, these stories will circulate alongside the main narrative. This is an automated republishing stream that spreads these new and unique files to Library Genesis.

Tactical Watermarks (2020). License — Copyleft: This is a free work. You can copy, distribute, and modify it underthe terms of the Free Art License http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

TitleCollectiveioning

KindPrint and Digital

PlaceRotterdam, June 2020.

SizeNA & A4

withXPUB and Open Source Publishing (OSP)

Collectivioning is a publication that collects the work generated in our time at XPUB, from collective Special Issues in the first year (Special Issues 07, 08, 09), with threads that connect to the second year graduation projects.

We presented the threads in our collective and individual research in a live online moment together on Friday, July 10, 2020 at 18:00. Now, this web-to-print website remains online, where you can choose to make your own co(ll/nn)ections. You may also print out what you collect from it at your own leisure.

Our deepest thanks to XPUB staff, to editors and invited guests from Special Issues, to servus.at and lilimit for borrowed infrastructure, and to Sarah Magnan & Gijs de Heij from Open Source Publishing for working with us on producing this web-to-print publication.

TitleThe Library is Open

KindPrinted Publication

PlaceRotterdam, July 2019.

Size240 x 180mm

withXPUB and Femke Senlting

The Library Is Open was a series of workshops that made the operations within libraries visible. The workshops invited intervinients into taking actions and incorporating roles of legal and extra-legal libraries (municipal, pirate, academic, +++), impersonating their custodians, and fostering a public that form a community around collections of texts.

The series of workshops was developed under the thematic issue Interfacing the Law , together with Constant, and its member Femke Snelting. Constant is an artist-run organization which work often departs from eminisms, copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. Femke Snelting is an artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software.

The thematic issues Interfacing the Law involved a group of guests and projects that work alongside extra-legals spaces of knowledge production. The guests and their projects include Eva Weinmayr and the Piracy Project; Bodó Balázs on research on shadow libraries such as the Library Genesis; Anita Burato and Martino Morandi on implementing open source cataloguing system in Amsterdam's Gerrit Rietveld Academie library; Dušan Barok and Monoskop, a wiki archive and shadow library for arts, media and humanities;

The dialogues with guests and their projects informed understanding towards present or hidden processes in knowledge production. Such as calling question towards shadows and biases casted by knowledge taxonomy; examining digital proprietary tools (also known as DRMs) as impediments freer access and circulation of knowledge; developing tools and gatherings of annotation to foster collective interpretation towards existent knowledge.

The workshops are held in Leeszaal West, a community reading room ran by over 100 volunteers in the West of Rotterdam. The event was divided to three themed workshops, Marginal Conversations, Knowledge In Action, and Blurry Boundaries.

TitleBlurry Boundaries

KindWorkshop

PlaceLeeszaal Rotterdam West, June 2019.

SizeA4 reader

withTancredi Di Giovanni and Bohye Woo

Select, annotate, analyze, scan, correct, digitize, print, read, transfer, erase, encode, curate, hack, interface, work, copy...

What libraries become possible when you transform physical books into digital files, and vice versa? When a digital copy of a book is made for a digital library specific steps are followed. Each of these steps requires a decision – to use tools and to spend time. The work involved in digitising a book is invisible and the digital version often loses its connection to the physical book and the library it came from.

We aimed to reflect upon different topics such as:

- the friction between the physical and digital book, what is lost and what is gained when you pass from one format to another.

- the physicality and contingency of these passages, the labor involved to produce those copies and its hidden position.

- the mindset of the librarian who has to choose how to produce the digital library, which format to chose and what kind of information to reveal.

- the possibility of a digital library which provides the history of the book and the people involved in its life.

- annotations which reveal information and challenge the common, static idea of the book.

TitleText Laundrette

KindWorkshop

PlaceWdKA Publication Station, February 2020.

SizeNA

withSimon Browne

Text Laundrette is a workshop in which we use a home-made, DIY book scanner, and open-source software to scan, process, and add digital features to printed texts brought by the participants to the workshop. These are included in the “bootleg library”, a shadow library accessible over a local network. The workshop was organised by Simon Browne and Pedro Sá Couto, for the 2020 py.rate.chnic sessions and first held at WdKA in the Publication Station, February 2020.

Text Laundrette is a print party workshop.

We will use a home-made, DIY book scanner, and open-source software to scan, process, and add digital features to printed texts brought by the participants to the workshop. Ultimately, we will include them in the "bootleg library", a shadow library accessible over a local network.

Shadow libraries operate outside of legal copyright frameworks, in response to decreased open access to knowledge. This workshop aims to extend our research on libraries, their sociability, and methods by which we can add provenance to texts included in public or private, legal or extra-legal collections.

TitleThe Network We (de)Served

KindPrinted Publication

PlaceRotterdam, April 2019.

Size280 x 105mm

withXPUB

The Network We de(Served) embarked with the Infrastructour. The Infrastructour wove a network of infrastructure underpinning the project. During the Infrastructour, we travelled from home to home by bike in Rotterdam, configured different routers' configuration and set up self-hosted home servers with Raspberry Pi. The Infrastructour revealed attributions of networking such as its interdependencies and myriad layers of dependencies within infrastructure. During the process of self-hosting as a community, we expanded our understandings of networks, autonomy, online publishing and social infrastructures. These understandings are twofold, both on networking's technics and social relevancies. Further research departed to a series of (inter)independent hyper-publications that is connected within a network ring.

The series of researches are categoriezed according to different relevances of networking. "What is a Network?" questions and redefines the nature of networks, representation and typology of network, and bringing the the para-nodal spaces into light; "Autonomy and its Contingencies" reveals the contingencies of maintaining digital autonomy, with projects researching into Mastodon, a decentralized social network; " Social Networks" looks into the sociability of networks, how networks can be potent means for social organizations, and how social understanding of network can inform new network imaginations. Network(ed) Publishing reinvents publishing by taking networkability of archive matter into account, such as the interwoven hyperlinked texts and initiating records of ephemeral, deprecated links. Last but not least, "Mapping Networks" seeks to understand network mapping with cartographic means, and questions the map-ability of networks, such as questioning nodecentrism as a representation that overshadows other possibilities of interpreting networks.

The Network We de(Served) is developed under the thematic issue Welcome to the Federation, along with Varia, its members Manetta Berends and Roel Roscam Abbing. It is a space for developing collective approaches to everyday technology.

TitleTen Thesis on Life Hacks

KindPrinted Publication

PlaceVaria Rotterdam, October 2018.

Size148 x 105mm

withXPUB and Silvio Lorusso

The ten theses in this document are meant to provide a widened perspective on Life Hacks, and on their relationship to our collective experiences and reflections. The criteria listed in first thesis allow us to test whether something is a Life Hack or not. The remaining theses present extended arguments, supported by examples, that identify specific features of Life Hacks, the environments they exist within, and the kind of culture they foster.

This publication’s format incorporates the Life Hack ethos. With the addition of a series of holes, each loose page can be seen as a hackable surface. We invite users to collate and bind them, making an eclectic choice from a range of unorthodox materials.

DOWNLOAD HERE!

TitleIris Version 0.5

KindInstallation

PlaceRotterdam, December 2018.

SizeNA

withXPUB and Silvio Lorusso

Life Hack: Start Up, Burn Out is a thematic project developed with researcher Silvio Lorusso to explore the notions and phenomenons of start up culture, quantified self, gig economy and precarity in everyday life. The project entailed three public presentations at Varia Center for Everyday Technology, in the south of Rotterdam, and Het Nieuwe Instituut, as part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s fellowship program on the theme Burn-out. The project is composed of one participatory publication, Ten Theses on Life Hacks, and a speculative device, IRIS.

IRIS is a speculative and seductive device that's inhabited by two antagonistic personas. When audience looks into the reflection of the contemplative mirror surface, IRIS detects movement and a life hack guru whispers the words of self-help wisdom and radiates ambient, remedial light. The guru purports to enlighten the global precarious workers by unleashing their innate power of the entrepreneurial self. The guru persona is designed to help full-time, part-time and zero-time employees to cope with the complexity of modern life, divulging secrets of the precarious worker, of autonomy and maximum efficiency. As the guru speaks, however, the anonymous cyber-pirate abruptly intervenes to rouse a cry of rebellion against this oppressive society of self-management. The antagonism between the two characters presents IRIS as a speculative device that invites parasitical contemplation towards the self-help and self-optimization culture.

TitleBlindspot

KindInstallation

PlaceFBAUP, February 2018.

SizeNA

withRita Graça

Blindspot aimed to create a discourse around CCTV and video surveillance. The reader of the installation was led to experience the constant state of surveillance they are living under, playing with safety and confort.The right to privacy is very complex and the questions that we wanted to raise were:

What are our rights regarding our privacy?

Are we the main responsibles for neglecting our privacy and enable the use of our data?

Our is CCTV increasing our safety but invading our privacy?

Blindspot is brought to life by two components. Building the database and displaying it. We created a programme using Python and Open CV (Open Source Computer Vision) using a “Front face Haar Cascade”, an open source library. After achieving face recognition in Python we programmed it to caption a frame when a face was recognized. The software would crop the face and save it in an independent directory.

To display the database we created a website in PHP that was able to randomly select images in real time and display them in a grid. Afterwards, with MAMP, we broadcasted this website offline with a chrome cast in the university bar where people didn’t know if they were being filmed or not, creating an uncomfortable environment.

All laws were respected according to the Portuguese guidelines, all the images were deleted within the 30-day regulated period.

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