To develop an understanding of a complex topic, basic research - on/offline - is the first necessary step to take. Talking about the facts as a group and/or collectively reading texts on the topic can help in the process. If possible, the best way to develop a deeper understanding is to get in touch with experts and/or witnesses. In the best case, to conduct an interview or even organize a meeting as a group or a workshop on the topic. Also taking as many different points of view, even if you don’t agree with them, is an imperative to create a differentiated opinion on a complex matter.
<ahref="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is a highly abstract (high-level) programming language in which logical and clearly structured codes for projects of various sizes have been written since 1991. It is equipped/comes with a significant amount of libraries that simplify complex tasks.<br>
We used the Python library Mwclient to interface with the <ahref="#mediawiki">MediaWiki</a><ahref="#api">API</a> in order to extract the results of semantic queries.
To develop an understanding of a complex topic, basic research - on/offline - is the first necessary step to take. Talking about the facts as a group and/or collectively reading texts on the topic can help in the process. If possible, the best way to develop a deeper understanding is to get in touch with experts and/or witnesses. In the best case, to conduct an interview or even organize a meeting as a group or a workshop on the topic. Also taking as many different points of view, even if you don’t agree with them, is an imperative to create a differentiated opinion on a complex matter.
Individuals don’t know they are going to be archived. The act of archiving clusters them together even if they didn’t intend that. For the outsider, the material that they produced can seem like some kind of collective work that was created in a certain time span, maybe even with the aim of being in some sort of a bundle. We collect it all together under a theme, title or event and hope it does justice to the writers, makers, editors etc.
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The intent of the act makes it all come together in to form an “archive”, a very general word. This process can go in many directions, it is almost arbitrary. I came across an article called “Archive, Archive, Archive!” by the artist Julie Bacon. The article speaks about archiving in the postmodern art world. I felt like it described some of my feelings. She writes: “Surveillance practices mark our time, and people are aware to caring degrees that they are documented, and that bodies of information exist that pertain to them but are remote from them”. When you write a poem, take a photograph or write a political article arguing against your government, do you always think about what will happen when it gets public? Can you know that someday someone else will use this material in ways that you maybe didn’t intend to?
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“Does inclusion liberate us? Does the act of putting things on display empower us or do away with hidden forces, put them under control?”
In this process there are more questions than definitive answers. Reading, tagging and sorting the material means you spend a significant amount of time with the archival material. A relationship is formed and with it your own perspective. When a third party is dealing with the material it imprints itself in it.
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How should we observe the archive? We are not seeking to “improve” it, but merely to represent the idea behind it and make it accessible to a wider audience. We were given a purpose, willingly or not, so we joined forces, had many conversations, discussions and arguments. We tried to make something that will balance all the different elements that were effecting us and the success of this process can not be measured by regular standards. “Drawing the purse of these thoughts together, what glitters is the poetic-political value of archives, the fact that their aesthetics seek of, and more than that are ineffably bound with, subjecthood: their imagination is a form of agency, their agency colours our dreams, by that I mean our actions.” The time spent with the archive is a significant parameter. Things that were clear to us at the beginning, could have completely changed by now. The more you dive in, the more you know and the less you realise you don’t know. “An awareness of the relationship between practice and ideology is key. The choice of what we do and how transmits attitude, as much as the content and the motives that we are owning up to or claiming”.
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I find myself asking more question, not trying to give answers. I direct them to myself, my colleagues or into space. If we had more time, would the number of questions increase or decrease? We search the past to answer questions about the present and the future. The fact that the archive was created makes it a part of the present and future. It can be a tool for answers but for much more questions as well.
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This was written based on my personal experience and in relation to the article “Archive, Archive, Archive!” By Julie Bacon, Circa Art Magazine, 2007.
While lexical search returns literal matches to a search request, semantic search "understands" the query. When compiling the search results, this search procedure relies on previously entered, definitive, metadata information and thus usually returns more accurate results. Multiple requests can be combined to create more complex queries. There are two different factors to the queries: Which pages the search is based on and which information is obtained from them. <ahref="#mediawiki">WikiMedia</a> uses a simple semantic language <ahref="https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki">"Semantic MediaWiki"</a> for this.
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We used it to selectively query the previously entered content using meta data.
<divclass="name Written by Tisa Neža Herlec"></div>
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<i>Not all the meanings can be constructed rationally.</i>
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Excuse the wind. He has no control over his actions.
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One of my friends said that we can blame the wind for everything that is going on now. This chaoticism, this unpredictability of the directions that things are taking, that we are taking - as a globalized entity.
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And I wonder a lot about this - multiple organisms constructing one, a global subject (maybe a westernized/first-world subject, governed, disciplined and regulated by political apparatuses that are the slaves of this abstraction of capital, so are we the slaves. Control exerted over a global mass.) [Foucault, biopolitics] We always exclude, trapped in a bias of our own privileges. The unthinkable Other does not constitute this pseudo-global entity humanity is. The process of somehow disabling humanity in its whole/as a whole has always been present.
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The wind comes here as a good metaphor on the unpredictability of how things will go. Causality that we can't plan or understand. The scope of affairs is now too big for anyone to be able to comprehend it fully. There is no after. There is no going back to how things were. There is only an uncertain continuation, conditioned by the deterioration of our systems, infrastructures and perceived stability. (One thing that I do count on - heavily - is the revaluation of human contact, communication, vicinity, connection, solidarity and empathy - born in the synapses between individuals, growing over the cracks of systemic repression whose interests lay in the management of death - struggling against the death of capitalism, as we know it.) [Mbembe, necropolitics]
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And the constant that remains is belief. <br>
The wind blows from the North, East, South, West and North-East, South-East, North-West, South-West. From all the defined directions of the sky and the combinations in between them. The liminalities and the divisions within abstract constructs constitute what we believe in.
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I said once in a song of mine (maybe it was a poem): <i>"Mathematics give me a sense of meaning, when emotions fail." </i>And, this is my recurrent observation of humanity in its interactive potential, it does not have the space to stretch, branch out, take over. Rationality, the discourse of logos, the utter need to understand, to grasp, to clarify and to stabilize is taking the lead and, while doing so, dismissing all of the other potentialities of human nature. Sensation, emotion and all their derivatives that exceed an individual and find their place in relationality, reinforcing the translucent material that holds us together. To make political rhetorics passionate!?
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Abstract constructions such as border, nation, money - and so many others. Collective imaginaries, crude mental infrastructures that seemingly bring us together. What do they actually do? A raw deconstruction of the mere possibility of us being at the same space, same time, combined.[<ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZoMzWraS_c">How does it feel?</a>] To be a collective organism, a massive organic entity. And then these building blocks of material of our realities just get scattered all around the consequences of some mischances and bad decisions from before our times.
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I see now three children on a balcony, holding guns. They are observing carefully, searching for their targets - aiming and shooting. Playful game, is it a pigeon or a person who disobeys the rules? The regulation of the masses is exercised by its very particles. Power is dispersed, diffused. There is no king, no tyrant we can point at with our fists and run towards in wrath. Who to rebel against? Against the part within ourselves that is obliged to follow some repressive structure of obedience?
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It is this silent communication that happens. How animals feel the earthquake coming, there is something in the air that makes them nervous. And the birds are up in the air, flying all around, releasing sounds that only their peers can understand, we have no idea what they are saying. [Didn't Adorno say something like: Brave are the ones who allows themselves to understand the language of the birds. ??? They know stuff.]
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Language. Meaning. Communication. Understanding.
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And then the doors close and they open suddenly. The doors of meaning on the verge between understanding and oblivion. Somewhere in between, always somewhere in between. Collective meaning-making. Plurality of voices in the voice of the collective organism. So silent it seems.
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I talked to a friend yesterday, she is a gemini, she has this problem - it was funny, it is funny how we might boil down our concerns onto our personal horoscopes. Again, an abstract construction that wants to help you understand things, and then they get even more complicated.
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The world is foreign to simplicity. The natural take on how things are is immense complexity and chaos. And then with a punch of one hand, firmly, we try to tame it, and put it in a form that is understandable. For a while, maybe, it holds its stability, sooner or later it dismantles again. And we panic. Should we wonder?
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Who are these guys training for? Punches, kickbox. If there is a war coming, we are going to have to use more weapons than just our bodies, intellect, predictions. The war is already happening. What is war anyways? There is this discourse going on about this whole viral virus situation - hello pigeons - being at war with an invisible enemy. We have to defend our integrity. It is not about life, it is about death. And nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to suffer. Pain is painful. [prof. Sapolsky, behavioural science] Except the ones that do, and the ones that got used to the idea of doing so. I believe there is this strong pressure of surviving, and - honestly - I like it. (Gotta love my privilege.) But it is more than just mere survival. I want to survive well. [Maria Hlavajova was talking about this in december]
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And here, we come to screaming and interaction. War, again. If you do not know the war is already happening, and you hear a big crowd screaming, somewhere, 3 blocks away from you. Not too far, you can hear the mass, the distinct voices of many people. You can't estimate how many there are, there is a lot of them. And then the first thought that pops up - it happened to me in 2016 [nazi group attack on the <ahref="http://atrog.org/en/">Autonomous Rog Factory squat </a> in Ljubljana we were defending against eviction] - is this screaming ... What caused it? What does it react to?
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Did it react to something beautiful, fun and joyful, something that we are celebrating by letting our voices penetrate into the air around and just letting it echo out loud. Joining the screams of other people. Letting the overall scream be so loud that everybody hears it, not only 3 blocks around, everybody, the whole world screams it.
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Kind of masked in silence, masked in our own habit of not releasing this scream - this is the opposite of it - the scream that targets the inside is even louder, and its potency is nerve-wracking. The scream that wants to be heard, the scream that wants to release itself, but be damned, there is something preventing that! The inability to express. (Rational rethorics that do not allow the release of emotion. The high-pitched utterance of women, called "ololyga". Patriarchal logos. "Thank you", ancestral fathers.) [<ahref="https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Angeliki/Grad-thesis">Angeliki Diakrousi, Let's Talk About Unspeakable Things</a>]
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Like an impala, when she thinks she is going to be eaten by a leopard. Captured in the claws and sharp teeth of the predator, she freezes. She freezes and plays dead and waits for her death. And then, there is a hyena, entering the scene. And the leopard doesn't want any trouble, so he moves away from his prey, leaving the impala laying on the floor in a state of catatonic immobility. The impala, struck by a sudden shock, a bodily sensation, she is heavy and still like a stone statue. And she remains to be so, until ... she starts moving. Until she reverses the scream that was echoing inside of her body. Until she decides that her scream has the possibility to be released. And what happens then is that her body suddenly starts shaking, trembling. Like a vigorous earthquake. The shake starts in her legs and then continues to spread over her whole body. And this is how impala, the doomed prey, brings herself back to life and then continues her path into it. The discharging cycle kept her from accumulating trauma, from dying in the place that was designated for her, almost certain death. Hyena, thank you, you were a beautiful and needed variable in this situation. [<ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox7Uj2pw-80">Observe it here.</a>]
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What is important to understand here, is the very process of releasing the scream. The step that is so important for any being, also humans. It prevents the trauma, it prevents death (that is, death of any kind - whether the death of the organism, or the death of sensoriality, of the voice etc.) Individual trauma. Collective trauma.
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The reason behind the lack of a voice, the echoing scream of the collective organism, might as well be the deep trauma accumulated in the world and the time and the repression this collective organism lives on a daily basis. Its "natural" environment disables the organism. This is not how symbiosis is supposed to function, right?
Back to the scream being released. The release depends on an irrational decision, on something that is embodied, something that is the body itself. The body, unrepressed by logos. <i> body <voice> logos.</i> [Mladen Dolar, A voice and nothing more.] The scream can forget about meaning altogether, emotion prevails. The animal instinct wakes up. Does this recognition of the animal within mean the awakening of the Political Animal? [Aristotle, Politics]
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The other option - apart from the beautiful and joyful scream that tells about the success of a community, of the good that happened, of pleasure - is the scream of terror, of horror, of something that is ultimately bad. Caused by something that strikes you, something that strikes the collective organism (If there is such a thing. What about the posthumanist notion that the human body is already a conglomeration of so many microbiotic organisms, collectively assembling an entity?). And then, instead of being caught in this dread, you let out this pressing scream and everybody hears it. The scream is a sensory, emotional response to a strong stimuli, to the horrors (or the pleasures) experienced. It testifies of rage, the absence of hope, the need for help, (enjoyment). It is a primal utterance imprinted in our DNA. An utterance dismissed by the social contracts currently in place. Considered as vulgar, disruptive, unfitted. Children screaming.
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And me, 3 blocks away, I cannot distinguish one scream from the other scream, both seem the same. Their nature is nothing that I can predict or grasp. And that is a scary fact! In fact, I don't know ... Now the wind blew my thoughts away, the thoughts about screaming. Maybe that's a good thing. I can think about silence now.
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Silence sometimes just prevails in the brain, very rarely, but sometimes - the brain is empty. (Does this signify the absence of morality? The absence of Socrates' Daemon? [Dolar]) It is empty like a gliding surface of ice and reflections, something that is yet to be determined. Something that is a blank page, a space of opportunities, a space of so many noises - none of them being in the forefront. They are somehow all merged into a soup - like a cosmic soup, not a chicken soup. Plurality. Multiplicity. Multitudinousness. Completely interwoven one into the other. All of them, all of these sounds in silence. Each one of them is moving at a different pace. Ah, this shining, glimmering sensation of it being very far and very close at once. Silence as a loud chaotic presence of indistinguishable voices. And nobody cares what reality is, because reality differs on every subjective eye, sight. Ah, then one can rest, because none of the impulses are more present than others, none of the thoughts are more correct than others, none of the meanings or the emotion or the sensation are more pressing than others. Maybe that is the absolute state of bliss, maybe that is what they call zen. To observe, but nothing in particular. To observe everything in its entirety. The whole picture! The macro moment of sensing and thinking in this flux that never ceases, but we disrupt it with the need to get the thoughts heard, with the need to emphasize, to choose, to deliberate. To pick the right particle of silence and amplify it until it becomes the fuckingscream that resonates in our ears so much, that all of the other possibilities of silence dissipate into mere possibilities. The overflow of thoughts also prevents us from hearing them. Their presence is compromised. Isn't that sad in its own beautiful way?
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So, silence can be bright and relieving, in some sort of a pre-natal state of any being, of a being of any thought, of presence ... Silence as the presence of the untold. The materiality of dreams - I wonder where it comes from, it might as well come from silence. The multiplicity of sounds which all are equal. Is this the state of equality that we as humanity are striving towards? Are we?
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But silence can only be pleasant if we CHOOSE it as the object of our contemplation and admiration, if we are not obliged to stare into her eyes. If it is a personal, an almost intimate decision. If she affords herself to us as an insight into a distant existence of a multifaceted, always present sonority. [of course: John Cage, 4''33'] By the way - the saying that goes: Silence speaks louder than words. - do we still believe that?
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As the nature of the scream, also the nature of silence can be the force that causes us to suffer. It can be the engine of torture. Nerve-wracking and unpleasant. Stuttering voices, words that cannot flow directly into the ears of their possible beholders, meanders of avoidance of meaning. Suppressed opinions and intellects.
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Sometimes, it is the social contract that prevents us from being able to utter, to reside in silence. Other times, it is the authority, the teacher that compels you into being silent and only speaking when you are ordered to do so. At times, you, yourself and your lack of confidence or the internalized absence of subjective relevance keeps your mouth shut, while thoughts are racing in all directions, crashing at full speed into walls that we build around ourselves.
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Sonic pollution. The noise of the sirens that signify urgency and disaster make our voices inaudible. We go silent when the fear of shock strikes us. Cities go silent when we are forced to stay inside, the frequency of real-life interactions gets smaller. (But here, I have to state this crucial difference of our pandemic to the others that happened in the past. During the plague, people could not communicate! Now, we do nothing but that. Just think of it. After the plague nothing changed. What will happen to us? Is this difference of having the possibility to exchange meanings as potent as I imagine?)
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The silence in the atmosphere before a big storm ... You can smell the rain before it hits the ground.
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At times, it is the repressive government that takes away your human right to speak freely and articulate your opinion, offering it to the world. Absoluteness, one voice that governs thoughts of all. The powerful voice. The acousmatic voice. (Pythagoras that lectures from behind a screen, the Wizard of Oz.) [Dolar] <ahref="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY4jU85o8pE&t=">The illusion of the source of the powerful sound.</a>The pressure to conform. Hegemony over meaning.
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Censorship - a repressive act targeted towards the human potential of meaning-making and sense-making. I consider censorship as being a severely physical act. Holding a firm hand against the mouth of the one that attempts to speak (scream). Gasping for air. Cutting out somebodys' tongue ... And it is not only physical in this particular visceral sense. The consequences of censorship effect and endanger the very lives of the people that disobey its forceful decree. Here, I must also say that censorship is not the prohibition of a voice per se, but a prohibition of any meaning-making activity (here encompassing voice and its derivatives (text), but also art (any sort of imagery) - in all, any form that transmits meaning.
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Let's also take a glance at the overwhelming quantity of data that we are being fed with daily. How is data treated, who owns it, how it accumulates capital - these are the crucial questions in this age of digitalization and global connectivity. [Vectorialists vs hackers. Hackers Manifesto - Mackenzie Wark] The world of <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth">post-truth</a>. Who to trust? Whose words to internalize? How to train our personal subjective sieves that drain out the unnecessary meanings, like we would drain the spaghetti water?
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Words are dangerous. Meanings are dangerous. <br>
Fragile abstract constructions are endangered. Opposing the hegemony over meaning is dangerous for the ones in this delinquent activity of resistance, because it is de facto dangerous for the entirety of the hegemonic powers that put us in this tight corner in the first place.
On the other hand - how dangerous is it really to be empowered to speak? It is not always a life-threatening situation that we, as the emancipated voices face. It all depends on our location in this world and the forces that govern it. The future is, nonetheless predictable. Observing situations in politically repressive environments of the past and the present affords us the construction of a prediction on how things will evolve in time, wherever we are. The tendencies are clear.
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A glance at history, at presence - at any given time, humans find ways to disguise their meanings with the intention of sharing them (no matter what the repressive factor is). It might be by using symbols. Substituting Jesus for a fish somewhere under the grounds of <ahref="http://www.historyofpainters.com/catacombs.htm">catacombs</a> for example. The intricate art of cryptology. Or memes that depict much more than they appear to - with the knowledge of the context they are created in, they can be read as a source of pure content. We invent poetry, metaphors, analogies (we empower interpretation, or better said: we empower meaning through interpretation.) - to say things that should not be said, that should not be understood by everyone. Abstract. Disguised. Lyric. Generic. Only the ones that need to understand it, get the code, the recipe to recognize the meanings under their disguise. Sometimes meanings are reserved for particular people, but mostly they are avoiding the people that should not hear them. <br>
Are they afraid of meanings? Are they dreaded by the fact of how concepts and thoughts and meanings, produces of the human mind would break apart their constructions of power and authority, their takes on the world that we must adjust to, comprehend as the truth and nothing but the truth? What does God think of all this? "Who has the right to construct narratives?"
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The ones that hold power are the ones that have the capability, the taken (not given) right to interpret, to guide the meaning anywhere that they want to. [arche - archons as the ones that have power over commencement and commandement. Archive fever - Jacques Derrida] They hold the knowledge, they are the ones that interpret it, they are the ones that reinforce the laws and rules. They write and speak speeches to convince us into absolute belief. They draw graphs and pull numbers out to impress us. They consider their truth as the objective truth, the only truth that has the right to exist. They are the ones that write histories. And history is always written by the winners of battles. Political power is the voice that narrates the past, the present and the future. History. Daily life. Absolute power over meaning - do we give them that?
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Not everyone is simply going to be convinced. To doubt, to <ahref="https://soundcloud.com/tisaneza/i-can-think-with-my-own-head">think with your own head</a>. To claim the right to utter, to speak, to scream, to express, to state. To construct meanings and share them with others is a human need and a right. When it is taken away from us, we are fueled to oppose, our need to resist is enhanced. To interpret and to contextualize are crucial abilities that allow us to escape repression. Therefore, there is always a stream of resistance, a community - sometimes hiding in the catacombs, other times anonymously roaming the space of the web - a hive of thinkers and philosophers and radical particles that think not alike the rest. [see: <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(chemistry)">chemistry - radical</a>.] Your next-door neighbours?
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Possibility. Vision. Utopia. Reality. The antidotes. To intervene. To react. To invent. To hack. To be listened to!?
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There are always ways to spread these thoughts and meanings across the walls of restrictions and regulations and attempts of discipline. Meanings get formed behind closed doors, in the underground mechanisms of collective articulation, within currents of resistance - sometimes lonely, pertaining to an individual as well as oftenly shared and exercised collectively.
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Is this the process of the formation of the collective voice? A collective organism of utterance? Rising from repression, from a counter-position to the existing state of affairs. It is the scream that is being expressed, gradually becoming louder and more present, less afraid and empowered, emancipated, stronger > full of meaning! See it as a bubble that is rising from the bottom, floating upwards and popping on the surface, visible to everyone! <br>
Meanings can never be killed.
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<i>One girl just looked at me in a really weird way. I think I got a little bit too involved in what I was saying.</i>
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<i>And, another police car in a <strike>fucking</strike> park.</i>
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<i>For a moment, everything seemed to be so ordinary.</i>
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From this position of un-knowing and attempting to understand - in a visceral, holistic way, I say thank you, to you that kept up with all of these thoughts, meanings that had the need to be at least provisionally articulated. Thank you for your participation in their resonance, going outwards.
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Maybe this is the process of the formation of the collective voice. <br>
You tell me.
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What about the empowerment of the individual voice? Individuals do, after all, constitute the collective. <br>
An <ahref="https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php ">API</a> (Application Programming Interface) is an interface that enables external programs or systems to communicate with the software. The API defines how to access and how to define requests. Some APIs are created specifically for certain programs, others follow industry standards.<br>
We used MediaWiki's API to organize and bundle a large amount of material and later in the process also to export the search queries from the Wiki user interface and then, using <ahref="#query2html">query2html</a>, converted them to HTML.
<ahref="https://www.python.org/">Python</a> is a highly abstract (high-level) programming language in which logical and clearly structured codes for projects of various sizes have been written since 1991. It is equipped/comes with a significant amount of libraries that simplify complex tasks.<br>
We used the Python library Mwclient to interface with the <ahref="#mediawiki">MediaWiki</a><ahref="#api">API</a> in order to extract the results of semantic queries.
Using the <ahref="#mediawiki">MediaWiki</a><ahref="#api">API</a>, <ahref="#pythonscript">Python</a> and <ahref="#pandoc">Pandoc</a> we converted the results of <ahref="#semanticqueries">semantic queries</a> to a <ahref="#staticwebsite">static website</a>.
Under certain conditions it may be necessary to publish content without leaving a trace of identity behind. To protect the contributors and server locations also means working with some technical limitations. At our project, this boiled down to facing reduced bandwidth speed when accessing websites, hosted in the Dark web through the Tor Browser, and also because of the necessity of implementing a static website.
It makes no sense to try and work against these restrictions, but rather to accept and find ways to work within the limitations. A clearly defined field of work can also speed up and enrich the process.
Max Lehmann
5 years ago