Broken knots are knots that aren't tied well, done with a wrong material or was under more pressure than it could take.Broken knots are knots that aren't tied well, done with a wrong material or was under more pressure than it could take.option to have a mode of reading, where you will be guided by strings to This thesis expects participation from its reader. You have the option to have a mode of reading, where you will be guided by strings to start reading from a certain section according to the type of reader you are and read the loops one by one until the end, weaving through the text. To determine the string or mode of reading, there are some simple questions to answer.
Bends are joining knots. They attach two strings together. The bend above is a sheet bend and it works well when koining two different strings and can take stress.
@@ -70,17 +73,19 @@ Alongside the different strings to follow the text, there will be little drawing
that raise interesting opportunities for research and distinct events I went through while making the project and underneath the drawing you can find the relation to the knot itself explained. For example if I
couldn’t manage to do something I planned to do, this will be represented with a broken knot. Bend knots which are used to connect two strings, will be representing the relation between theories and my own experiences/motivations. Hitches which are knots that are formed around a solid object, such as a spar, post, or ring will be representing the evidence or data I have collected on the subject. We move on now with the working end and make some loops!
-## HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR STRING
+### HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR STRING
This map will reveal your mode of reading. The order of reading will be indicated with a loop sign Please hold a string in your hand as you read the text and make knots or loops as you weave through the reading
as an exercise for concrete thinking. See you at the standing end! and a number on top of the sign with a color. This is the numeric order you should follow to read the thesis, if you choose to read with a mode.
Every reader starts from 1 and continues until 12, with a consecutive numeric order, according to their color/mode.
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+
+{.image-95}
## Working End
+1 1 1
+
### Loop 1
### Why am I doing this?
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-
-
-
- the book: (whispering in the reader’s ear) Being -vulnerable means being transparent, open and brave, trusting others to -handle stories with care. By publicly sharing and processing our -narratives, we take ownership of our experiences while contributing to a -collective voice. Even when we incorporate stories from others, our -names remain attached to this collective creation: Ada, Aglaia, Irmak, -Stephen. We have created interfaces highlighting the balance between -communal sharing, individual responsibility and awareness.
-the reader: Interfaces?
-the book: Interfaces are boundaries that
-connect and separate. They’re the spaces that fill the void between us.
-An interface can be an act, a story, a keyboard, a cake; It allows us to
-be vulnerable together, to share our stories with and through each
-other. I am a collection of these interfaces.
the reader: (confused) What do you mean a -collection, like a catalogue?
-the book: Yeah I guess. I weave the words and the -works we created during…
-the reader: we?
-the book: …I mean the four of us, the students of -Experimental Publishing at the Piet Zwart Institute. From 2022 until -today, June 2024, we published three special issues together. We wrote -four theses and made four graduation projects. We grew our hair out and -cut it and grew it again and dyed it. We cared and cried for each other, -we brewed muddy coffee and bootlegged books.
-(The book tears up).
-Finishing a Master’s is a bit of a heavy moment for us and this book -is a gentle archive, a memory of things that have been beautiful to -us.
-the reader: (sarcasm) do you have a tissue, im soooo -touched.
-the book: malaka, just read me.
-
-
---Water, stories, the body,
-
-all the things we do, are
-mediums
-that hide and show what’s
-hidden.
-(Rumi, 1995 translation)
All intimacy is about bodies. Is this true? Does it matter? I doubt -it. Do you know? Let’s find out, maybe.
-Once, I thought that everything in the world was either one or zero -and that there was a harsh straight line between them. Then I found out -you could step or hop across the line, back and forth, if others showed -you how. Today, I am no less binary, no less interested in dichotomies, -but I am willing to dance through them if you are too. Can we dance -these dichotomies together, embracing the contradictions of the virtual -and physical, the comfortable and uncomfortable, intimate and -non-intimate? I can’t do it alone, the subject is too heavy and the -binary is too 1011000. I won’t ask you to resolve these contradictions, -I have no desire to. Instead, I hope we can cultivate the tension and -tenderness inherent in holding together incompatible truths because both -prove necessary.
-To dance through these dichotomies I will start in a specific -position, growing from Donna Haraway’s in ’A Cyborg Manifesto”. In her -essay, Haraway explores the concept of a cyborg as a rejection of -boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. A symbol for a -feminist posthuman theory that embraces the plasticity of identity. -Before she does all this dancing, however, she takes a strong stance of -blasphemy. She engages seriously with traditional notions of feminism -and identity but with irony, not apostasy, which is to say without full -rejection—without unbelief. My position as I jump will be the same as -hers, ironic faith. My mocking is grave but caring and my primary aim is -for us only to spin fast enough not to see the line anymore, while still -being able to see the binaries. It won’t be an easy dance for us but I -will do my best to keep softening for you, I promise.
-I will show you a digital body, make it comfortable and then -uncomfortable, lightly intimate, and richly intimate. I have my own -story, my own digital body, of course. This is where I take my second -stance, however. This time, the position is Lauren Berlant’s, from ‘The -Female Complaint’. The book places individual stories as inescapable -autobiographies of a collective experience and uses the personal to -explain an intimate general experience. In our story, the difference -between my body and the collective digital body is unimportant, I hope -you see that. I will tell you my story if you know how to look, but I -will tell you through the stories of many others who shared them with -me. I have no other choice, every time I have tried to tell this story a -chorus of voices has come out.
-Some of the stories I will tell you will carry memories of pain; -physical and emotional. I will keep holding you while you hear this, but -your limbs may still feel too heavy to dance. In that case, I give you -my full permission to skip, jump, or lay down completely. This is not -choreographed and I care deeply for you.
-I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.
-Safe dreams now, I will talk to you soon.
---“I think the worst must be finished.
-
-Whether I am right, don’t tell me.
-Don’t tell me.
-No ringlet of bruise,
-no animal face, the waters salt me
-and I leave it barefoot. I leave you, season
-of still tongues, of roses on nightstands
-beside crushed beer cans. I leave you
-white sand and scraped knees. I leave
-this myth in which I am pig, whose
-death is empty allegory. I leave, I leave—
-At the end of this story,
-I walk into the sea
-and it chooses
-not to drown me.”
-(Yun, 2020)
A digital body is a body on the Internet. A body outside the internet -is simply a body. On the internet, discussions about corporeality -transcend the limitations of physicality, shaping and reshaping -narratives surrounding the self. This text explores the intricate -dynamics within these conversations, dancing at the interplay between -tangible bodies and their digital counterparts. The construction of a -digital body is intricately intertwined with these online dialogues, -necessitating engaged reconstructions of the narratives surrounding -physical existence. Yet, the resulting digital body is a complex and -contradictory entity, embodying the nuances of both its virtual and -tangible origins.
-There is a specific metaphor that would allow us to better carry -these contradictions as we further explore digital bodies. Do you -remember that dream you had about deep ocean pie? Allow me to remind -you.
-You were walking on the shore, slowly, during a summer that happened -a long time ago. Your skin was warm and you could feel the wet cool sand -sticking to your feet. The gentle lapping of the waves washed the sand -away as you walked towards the ocean. You stepped, stepped. Then dove. -Underwater, the sea unfolded deeper than you remembered. It was a -vibrant display of life: bright schools of small fish, and tall -colorful, waving corals. It looked like that aquarium you saw once as a -kid. Your arms moved confusingly through the water as if you were wading -through a soup or were terribly tired. On the sandy ocean floor, you saw -a dining table. It had a floating white tablecloth, one plate, a fork, -and a pie in the center of it, on a serving dish. You sat on a chair but -could not feel it underneath you. You ate a heaping slice of pie. It had -a buttery-cooked carrots filling. You woke up. In the world, the sun was -still timid and your bedroom thick with sleep. What a weird dream. You -rubbed your face, sat up on your bed, and drank the glass of water next -to you. You felt full, as if you just ate a plateful of carrot pie.
-There were two bodies in this story. An awake one and a dream one, an -ocean one. In dreams, bodies have their own set of rules, often blurring -the boundaries between waking and sleeping, wanting and fearing. Digital -bodies are very similar to dream bodies. They exhibit a similar fluidity -and abstraction, a defiance of traditional notions of physicality. They -share the blurring and inherent potential nature of dream bodies. They -are slower, stronger, and different. They switch and change and melt -into each other, they lose and regrow limbs, they run sluggishly and fly -smoothly. If we scream in our dreams, we sometimes wake up still -screaming. Our waking bodies react to our dream bodies, they have the -same tears, the same orgasms, the same drives.
-This is a story of two bodies, same but different, influenced but not -driven. A tangible body, full of fluids and organs, emotions and -feelings. Cartilage, bacteria, bones, and nerve endings. A digital body, -cable-veined and loud-vented, shiny and loading.
-The digital body is ethereal and abstracted, embarrassing, graphic, -and real but not physical.
-This is the beginning.
-Framing the discourse around bodies on the internet as a clear-cut -dichotomy feels clunky in today’s internet landscape. The web is today -available by body, cyborg dimensions of the internet of bodies, or -virtual and augmented realities, creating a complex interplay between -having a body and existing online.
-As intricate as this dance is now, it certainly did not begin that -way. It started with what felt like a very serious and tangible line -drawn by very serious tangible people; this is real life and this is -virtual life. Even people like Howard Rheingold, pioneers who approached -early virtual life with enthusiasm and care, couldn’t escape -characterizing it as a “bloodless technological ritual” (1993). -Rheingold was an early member of The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (Well), -a seminal virtual community built in the 1980s that was renowned for its -impact on digital culture and played a pivotal role in shaping what -would become the landscape of the Internet. Rheingold’s reflections on -his experience on this primordial soup of the Internet offer insight -into the initial conceptualizations of online life by those joyfully -participating.
-In “The Virtual Community”, Rheingold offers a heartfelt tribute to -intimacy and affection through web- based interactions which, at the -time, were unheard of. He struggles in his efforts to highlight the -legitimacy of his connections, finding no way to do so except by -emphasizing their tangible bodily experiences. The community’s claim to -authenticity thus had to lie in the physical experiences of its members— -the visible bodies and hearable voices, the weddings, births, and -funerals (1993).You’re dreaming again, -good. Would you feel closer to me if you could hear my voice? Is my -voice a sound? Could it be a feeling?
-Even then, and even by people with no interest in undermining the -value of the virtual, the distinction between physical and virtual was -confusing. Rheingold himself reinforces the boundary of body relations -and computer relations by referring to his family as a “flesh-and-blood -family’ and his close online friends as “unfamiliar faces” (1993). -Constantly interplaying digital connections with the physical -characteristics of the kind of connections people valued before the -internet.I will be honest with you, I -have little patience for this recurring line of thought that seeks to -distinguish people’s noses from their hearts, as if there was a physical -love that is the valuable one and a virtual imaginary one that is feeble -and unworthy.
-In any case, his primary interest seemed to be to emphasize computer -relations as valid forms of connection between bodies, not to talk of -any distinction quite yet. It’s the eighties, the internet is still -fresh and new and the possibility to form close relations with strangers -online seems fragile and concerning yet exciting. This is the clearest -the distinction between in-real-life and online has ever been and it’s -still fuzzy and unclear.
-At the same time and in the same digital space as Rheingold, there -was another man, a digital body being formed. This is our second story, -the ocean body we dreamt of earlier is now in a digital primordial soup, -questioning itself and stuck between staying and leaving. In this story, -its name is Tom Mandel and when he died, he did so on the Well.
-Mandel was a controversial and popular figure in this pioneering -virtual community. According to many other members, Tom Mandel embodied -the essence of the Well—its history, its voice, its attitude. Mandel’s -snarky and verbose provocations started heated discussions, earning him -warnings such as “Don’t Feed The Mandel!” (Leonard, 1995). His sharp -comments often stirred emotions that reminded people of family -arguments, fuelling an intimacy that was characteristic of the Well: -both public and solitary (Hafner, 1997).
-Until 1995, Mandel had done a quite rigorous job of keeping his body -separate from The Well and had never attended any of the physical -in-person meetings from the community. His only references to being a -body had been on the “health” online conference, where he often talked -about his illnesses. One day, after nearly a decade of daily -interaction, he posted he had got the flu and that he felt quite ill. -When people wished for him to get well soon, he replied he had gone to -get tested and was waiting for a diagnosis. This way, when cancer was -found in his lungs, the community was first to know. In the following -six months, as his illness progressed, the community followed closely -(Hafner, 1997). They were first to know when Nana, a community member -with whom he had had a publicly turbulent relationship, flew to -California to marry him. The community was a witness and is now an -archive of his declining wit as cancer spread to his brain and his -famously articulate and scathing comments got shorter, fearful, and more -tender.Initially, when a member he often -argued with offered to pray for him Mandel had replied: “You can shovel -your self-aggrandizing sentiments up you wide ass sideways for the -duration as far as I’m concerned.” Later, as the cancer progressed: “I -ain’t nearly as brave as you all think. I am scared silly of the pain of -dying this way. I am not very good at playing saint. Pray for me, -please.
-Before he posted his final goodbye, he chose to do one last thing. -Together with another member, they programmed a bot that posted randomly -characteristic comments from Mandel on The Well—the Mandelbot. In the -topic he had opened to say goodbye, he posted this message about the -bot:
---“I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the truth, one -that winds its way through almost everything I’ve done online in the -five months since my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone -else, my physical self wasn’t going to survive forever and I guess I was -going to have less time than actuarials allocateus [actually allocated]. -But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew on-line… I could toss -out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom -Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn’t really have to leave… -Large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space.” (Hafner, -1997)
-
With the Mandelbot, Mandel found a way to deal with what he later -called his grieving for the community, with which he could not play -anymore once his own body died. By doing so, he was starting to blend -the boundaries of intimacy through computers and bodies, driven by his -love and grief.It’s out of care and not -lack of relevance that I am not showing you Mandel’s goodbye message. -It’s enough to know he was deep in the grief of having to leave a -community he loved and cared for and that pain was felt in every -word.
-When he talked about the bot in previous messages, it sounded almost -like a joke. A caring haunting of the platform, to keep his persona -alive for the community in a way that could be quite horrific for those -grieving. In his admission though it becomes clear that this was closer -to an attempt to deal with his grief around losing the community, his -unreadiness to let go of a place he loved so dearly. A place just as -real in emotion, that was built in part by Mandel’s digital body and its -persona.
-In a tribute posted after his death, fellow Well member and -journalist Andrew Leonard tried to convey his own sense of blended -physicality and emotion.
---“Sneer all you want at the fleshlessness of online community, but on -this night, as tears stream down my face for the third straight evening, -it feels all too real.” (Andrew Leonard, 1995)
-
An internet body has bot-feelings if allowed to. Let me explain.
-A bot functions as a different entity from a cyborg, as it does not -attempt to emulate a human body but rather human action and readiness. -Its role is to mirror human behavior online, simulating how a physical -body might act, what it would click on, and what would it say. On social -media, bots engage in a kind of interpretative dance of human -interaction, performing based on instructions provided by -humans.The first bot communities on the -internet are now born, half- mistakenly. They are always spiritual -communities posting religious images created by artificial intelligence, -all the comments echoing choirs of bots praising. Amen, amen, amen. I am -not naive, I know they are built by humans but it is this performance of -religiosity that I am interested in, and how little humanity is shown in -it. It is something else.
-Unlike an internet body, which represents the virtual embodiment of a -person, a bot doesn’t seek to be a person. It comments under posts -alongside many other bots, all under a fake name and photo but nothing -else to give the illusion of humanity. When an internet body has -bot-feelings, it is a disruptive performance. They are feelings that do -not attempt to be human body feelings, they exist as their own genuine -virtual expression.
-In “Virtual Intimacies”, McGlotten also incidentally argued that a -virtual body has bot-feelings (2013). He described the virtual as -potential, as a transcendent process of actualization, making it into, -generally, a description of bots. Internet bodies, as virtual, would be -by this understanding also charged with the constant immanent power to -act and to feel like a human body. It is a constant state of becoming, -of not- quite-pretending but never fully being anything either.
-Most of the time we can tell disembodied bots online from tangible -people and as such they have the potential to be bodies, without ever -trying to be.
-Of course, when McGlotten described the virtual as such he placed it -in a dichotomy, once again, against the “Intimacies” which are the other -side of his book. The emphasis here lies in intimacy being an embodied -feeling and sense and a carnal one at that. Virtual intimacies are, by -this definition, an inherent failed contradiction. However, McGlotten -plays with the real and non-real in new ways, using the text to -highlight how virtual intimacy is similar to physical intimacy and then, -even more, blurring as he shows the already virtual in physical -intimacies. Applying this to a body, rather than an affective -experience, works just the same.
-McGlotten uses a conceptualization of the virtual based on the -philosopher Deleuze’s,A step in a step in -a step, sorry. which can be used to refer to a virtual body -as well. The virtual is in this case a cluster of waiting, dreaming, and -remembering, embodying potential. Something that is constantly becoming, -an object and also the subject attributed to it (2001). An internet body -with its bot-feelings is a body in the process of being one, acting as -one, an ideal of one beyond what is physical but including its -possibility.
-Going a step further in McGlotten’s interpretation of Deleuze, this -also plays into how virtual intimacies mirror queer intimacies as they -approach normative ideals but “can never arrive at them”. Both queer and -virtual relations are imagined by a greater narrative as fantastical, -simulated, immaterial, and artificial—poor imitations and perversions of -a heterosexual, monogamous, and procreative marital partnership (2013). -A virtual body is similarly immanent, with both potential and corruption -at the same time. It carries all the neoliberal normative power of -freedom that a queer body can carry today but also reflects the unseemly -fleshly reality of having one.
-This is where the story continues. The body from the dream ocean -leaves the primordial soup of the internet to stage a disruptive -performance. It moves from potential creation to a wild spring river. A -fluid being, that exists simultaneously inside and outside normative -constructions. It channels deviant feelings and transcendental opinions -about the collective’s physical form genuinely as people use it to -navigate their physicality. Both virtual and queer intimacies highlight -the constructed nature of identity and desire. They disrupt the notion -of a fixed, essential self, instead embracing the multiplicity and -complexity inherent in human experience. This destabilization of -identity opens up possibilities for self-expression and connection, -creating spaces where individuals can redefine themselves beyond the -constraints of societal expectations while still technically under its -watchful eye. In essence, the parallels between virtual and queer -intimacies underscore the radical potential of both to disrupt and -reimagine the norms that govern our understanding of relationships, -bodies, and identity. They invite us to question the rigid binaries and -hierarchies that structure our society and to embrace the fluidity and -possibility inherent in the human experience.
---The only laws:
-
-Be radiant.
-Be heavy.
-Be green.
-
--Tonight, the dead light up your mind
-
-like an image of your mind on a scientist’s screen.
-‘The scientists don’t know – and too much.’
-
--“In the town square, in the heart of night (a delicacy like the heart -of an artichoke), a man dances cheek-to-cheek with the infinite -blue.
-
-(Schwartz, 2022)
Let’s care for this digital body. I’ll feed it virtual vegetables -while you wipe away the wear of battery fatigue. And why not encourage -it to take strolls through the network, it might be good for it.
-But what if it falls ill? What if its sickness is inherent, designed -to echo like the distorted reflection of rippling water a corrupted, -isolated, and repulsive physical form? Then we must comfort care for -it.
-Comfort care is a key concept in healthcare, described as an art. It -is the simple but not easy art of performing comforting actions by a -nurse for a patient (Kolcaba, 1995). The nurse is in this story an -artist full of intention, using the medium of comforting actions to -produce the artwork of comfort for the uncomfortable. Subtle, -subjective, and thorough. However, achieving comfort for another is far -from straightforward. It demands addressing not only the physical but -also the psychospiritual, environmental, and socio-cultural dimensions -of distress, each requiring its blend of relief, ease, and transcendence -(Kolcaba, 1995).
-In moments of need, digital comfort may become the only care certain -digressive bodies receive. When the distress a body is in becomes too -culturally uncomfortable, no nurse will come to check on it.
-If care is offered, it’s often only with a desire to assimilate the -divergent body back into expected standards of normalcy and ability. -This leaves those with non-conforming bodies isolated, ashamed, and -yearning for connection and acceptance.I -am talking here about the distress caused by mental health issues that -have direct connections to physicality—self- injuring in any direct -form; food, drugs, pain. The culturally uncomfortable diseases, the -it’s- personal- responsibility, and just-stop disorders. This is a -hidden topic of this text because I cared more about the pain -surrounding them and the reasons to hide rather than the grim -physicality of them all.
-In the depths of isolation and confusion, marginalized bodies often -look for belonging and understanding online. Gravitating towards one -another with a hunger born of desperation, forming intimate bonds -through shared pain. Through a shared sense of unwillingness, a lack of -desire, and a desperate need for physical assimilation with the -norm.
-The healthy body, the normal body, the loved body.
-On the internet, these digital bodies claw onto each other, holding -each other close and comfort-caring for one another. The spaces where -this happens are rooms, or corners of the internet that I’ll call back -places. Back places were initially defined by the sociologist Goffman as -symbolic spaces where stigmatized people did not need to hide their -stigma(1963). In our story, backplaces are small rooms online, tender -soft spaces reserved by those in terrible psychological pain themselves, -where they can find relief, ease, and transcendence.
-Of course, when we speak of digital bodies, their physicality is not -relevant. To comfort care for a digital body one would thus need to -provide relief, ease, and transcendence for the mental, emotional, and -spiritual; through the digital environment of the body and the -interpersonal cultural relations of the individual. As with any place of -healing, however, it is a transient place. It is an achy place, for the -last step of the journey will see them leave the community and -compassion that saw and sustained them.
-There is no other way for divergent people.
-In the past and the present, social scientists have studied the -people in the corners of the internet, characterizing these spaces -between people as deviant. Like children lifting stones to look at the -bugs underneath— simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the coherence -discovered where once was separation. A partition that was then -reinforced by the scientists themselves as they began documenting the -bugs’ behavior. They eavesdropped on conversations, captured intimate -moments, and asked again and again what made them so different. The more -they probed, the more they made sure to separate their behavior from the -norm to place the deviants against (Adler and Adler, 2005, 2008; Smith, -Wickes & Underwood, 2013).
-The concept of deviance, particularly concerning what people do with -their bodies and how their bodies behave, I find inherently flawed. -Observing from an artificial external standpoint only serves to further -alienate those already marginalized. I like to approach my research into -the intimacy and comfort care expressed in marginalized digital -communities without the alienation of social science. There are many -approaches one can take if one wishes to avoid this, and the one I am -choosing to borrow is a mathematical approach to anthropology. I would -like to borrow from mathematician Jörn Dunkel’s work in pattern -formation. It’s a conscious choice to approach divergences in bodily -behavior through their similarities, not differences. This includes -specificities in atypicality, of course, but also the distinctions -between me as the writer and them as the writer. You as the reader and -you as the community. Me and you, as a whole. Both exist, both separate -but in what is not of such importance.
---“Though many of these systems are different, fundamentally, we can -see similarities in the structure of their data. It’s very easy to find -differences. What’s more interesting is to find out what’s -similar.”
-
-(Chu & Dunkel, 2021)
Individuals who forge and inhabit these communities, fostering -tender, intimate connections amongst themselves, are not deviant but -rather divergent. Deviance involves bifurcation, a split estuary from -the river of appropriate cultural behavior.Of course, the river itself is not a river; it’s -many confused streams that believe themselves both the same and -separate. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I just don’t love the -river of normativity and I’d rather go swim in the ocean of dreams with -you.
-Divergence can be so much more than that. In mathematics, a divergent -series extends infinitely without converging to a finite limit. A -repetition of partial sums with no clear ending, never reaching zero. -Mathematician Niels Abel once said that “divergent series are in general -something fatal and it is a shame to base any proof on them. [..] The -most essential part of mathematics has no foundation”(1826). Drawing a -parallel to social relations would then imply that there is no end to -divergence, too many paradoxes in the foundation of normativeness to -base anything on it.
-Harmonic series are, on the other hand, also divergent series. They -are infinite series formed by the summation of all positive unit -fractions, named after music harmonics. The wavelengths of a vibrating -string are a harmonic series. These series also find application in -architecture, establishing harmonious relationships. Despite their -integral role in human aesthetics, all harmonic series diverge, -perpetually expanding without ever concluding. They embody a richness -that transcends conventional boundaries, blending into one another -infinitely.
-
-
-By likening digital bodies to divergent series, we embrace the -complexity and infinite possibilities arising from their -interconnectedness and deviation from the norm. However, it’s crucial to -note that the divergence I’m discussing here carries a halo of pain, -accompanied by the requirement of bodily discomfort. There are other -forms of divergence, ways to have different bodies that necessitate -creating spaciousness around normativity to allow them grace to -grow.
-The divergent digital bodies we are dancing with and caring for, -however, are of a particular type. If we were to go back to our water -stories, we’d see that the digital bodies we are following are painful -ones. Cold, deep streams, hard to follow, hard to swim in. Their -divergence from the norm makes them so.
-They have intricate relationships with themselves, existing in -unstainable forms devoid of comfort, nourishment, or thriving. What does -comfort mean for a body whose whole existence is uncomfortable? -Moreover, what if the comfort care performed for these divergent bodies -makes them too comfortable being in their pained state of self? Could -they be?I heard the idea of living -questions for the first time in “Letters to A Young Poet” by Rainer -Maria Rilke and then again on the podcast On Being with Krista Tippet. -It may be a bit transparent but this entire text is informed by the -concept of keeping the unsolved in your heart and learning to love it. -Not searching for the answers for we cannot live them yet. The point is -to live it all. It could be that at some point we will live our way to -an answer but it is feeling the questions alive within us that is -important. Do you?
-Caring for a digital body involves providing it with space to live, -giving its experimental bot-feelings tender attention, and revealing -your own vulnerable digital body in response. It’s about giving it an -audience, hands to hold, eyes that meet theirs in understanding. A -rehearsal room, a pillow, a mirror. These rooms, backplaces scattered -across the internet, are hidden enough to allow the divergent to -comfort- care for one another, sometimes to the point where it is only -the same type of divergent digital bodies reflecting back at each -other.
-So far I have talked fondly of divergence and the harmony of -divergent series, and the need to have no finite ending. I’d like to -tell you a different story now. Divergent digital bodies are, by this -point in our text, built and alive as they can be. They are many, they -are together and seeing each other, producing harmonic waves. They are -in backplaces on the internet, but they are less safe than they seem. -They are themselves resonant echo chambers, with an ongoing risk of -catastrophic acoustic resonance.
-Acoustic resonance is what happens when an acoustic system amplifies -sound waves whose frequency matches one of its natural frequencies of -vibration. The instrument of amplification is important for the harmonic -series, for the music must not match exactly. An exact match will break -it for the object seeks out its resonance. Resonating at the precise -resonant frequency of a glass will shatter it. Digital bodies meet in -these rooms, amplifying their own waves seeking resonance but the risk -of an exact match is that it may shatter them. These spaces full of -divergent digital bodies quickly grow unstable, tethering echo chambers. -Rooms full of reflections, transforming what was once individual pain -into a mirrored loop of anguish. Caring for your own and others’ bodies -becomes increasingly difficult, making permanent residence in the mirror -room unbearable. You all know you must leave before you meet your exact -resonance.
-This is the end of the story. Our digital bodies have a shape, a -sense of life and death, and someone to care for us and to care for. We -are alive and have found intimacy with each other.
-We live in the backplaces, hiding and being hidden online as we have -been for years. We used to be on invitation-only forums, -password-protected bulletin boards, or encrypted hashtags. Now we are -alive in the glitches between pixels, in a shared language of numbers -and acronyms and misdirection. Avoiding a content moderation algorithm, -always hunting the dashboards of social media websites for visible pain -it can cure by erasure. We cannot tell you where to find you or it might -too. We try to stay alive, to hold each other, hiding behind code words, -fake names, and photos. We care for each other as best we can, the blind -leading the blind, the sick caring for the sick. We have brought our -unseemliness, our gory gross bodies to each other and found tender -intimacy and understanding.
-On good days, dashboards are full of goodbyes and my heart swells -with hope, for those of us who make it and for the small bright light -telling us that we may be one of them. At the same time, some of us -leave only to come back ghosts of ourselves, hunting threads with the -empty hope of missionaries.
-Don’t give up, it’s worth it!
-Most of us scoff at this. The idea of leaving only to come back and -tell people you left is uncomfortable, the failed progress that washes -away hope. A healed patient who regularly comes back to the hospital to -encourage the sick, who wish to be anywhere but there. The genuine love -and care within these communities transpire better under goodbye posts. -When people do heal and shed their accounts’ skin, they often leave it -surrounded by all those who once cared for the digital body within -it.
-I’m so proud of you! Never come back, we love you so much.
-Recover, don’t come back. Recover, don’t come back. Recover, never -come back.
-I had a conversation with a friend who once lived in these spaces -between letters but has since moved outside them. When asked, he -mentioned he could only find recovery by leaving that community. His -body has changed since now it is the spitting image of a standard, -healthy body. I didn’t ask, but he knew I’d wonder. He told me he didn’t -like his new body and preferred the divergent one he once built himself. -Why leave then? Why did you stop?
-Because that was no life.
-Now life sparkles, everything feels brighter and more exciting. I got -my will to live back. Before, there was nothing but my body. I was -willing to die for it.
-He pulls up the sleeve of his shirt to show me his shoulder, where he -has tattooed a symbol for a community friend who died.
-I hope I never go back. I miss them every day.
-This is the last dichotomy. For the divergent digital body can’t stay -in a Backplace for very long, the intimacy of it is unbearable. It is an -intimacy that floods, and overruns. In their definition of intimacy in -the context of a public surrounding a cultural phenomenon, the author -Lauren Berlant denotes that intimacy itself always requires hopeful -imagination. It requires belief in the existence of an ideal other who -is emotionally attuned to one’s own experiences and fantasies, -conditioned by the same longings and with willing reciprocity -(2008).If we were to be honest, the -entire exercise of writing this for you requires this very -faith.
-In the context of the intimacy of a Backplace, where divergent -digital bodies have formed a community around existing outside the -healthy and standard, longing and hopeful intimacy becomes a heavy- -hearted and cardinal concept. Being in these rooms and finding care and -love for others like you can be so uncomfortable when the longings, -experiences, and fantasies you are sharing are centered around pain. The -shared cultural experience of existing as a collective divergent digital -body promises a fantasy of belonging, a collective hope, and commitment -that is extremely fragile.
-There is a duality then, if not a dichotomy. As a divergent body, -there is nothing you crave more than to be seen and to be loved in a -space where you are safe, where the faces looking at you are not -repulsed but warm with familiarity. Yet, it is this very warmth that -becomes unbearable and an inherently traumatic intimacy. Being loved at -your worst, at your most embarrassing, cultural borderline self is an -agonizing duality to deal with. McGlotten, who was referenced earlier -concerning the potential of bot-feelings of a digital body, now comes -back to remind us of their impossibility. In his book, he talks of a -digital intimacy that inundates us and is both a source of connection -and disconnection (McGlotten, 2013). We are looking at a smaller scale -than he does, but intimacy in the context of shared vulnerability can be -a need just as intolerable.
-Certain kinds of witnessing can become curses, shivers of resonance -so close to an explosion of glass if only you strike the cord that will -keep me going. Certain kinds of divergence can only end with leaving or -death, truth be told. People in these bodies know this, even if the -digital bodies behave as if there is hope in a future where the -divergence brings joy to one’s life consistently. The shared -vulnerability itself then, is unbearable. I need you to see me, I need -you, who are just like me at my worst, to love me. When you do, I can’t -stand it. It ruins both of us to be seen this way and we need it so -desperately. It has to exist and yet it can’t for long.
-I leave even though I love all of your digital bodies. I leave -because I love you, little digital body and you are me.
-11 Was this the end of this story?
-In the epilogue, you sit your body down and enter your computer. The air
-coming in from the window smells wet and earthy, new. The sun shines low
-on the horizon.
-
You log in to the internet and realize you are being told a story.
-You start to listen, carefully and, full of love, touch the story to let
-it know you are there. Delicate-fingered, curious like a child holding a
-fallen bird. I hold you and the story tentatively.
-
I don’t know if I am touching you, to tell you the truth. Digital
-bodies are stories, like physical bodies are, like dreams are, and like
-water is.
-
Stories that are hard to tell and hard to hear and even more, maybe,
-hard to understand. I have loved these stories and I have loved telling
-them to you. I hope you understand that my goal was for you to live
-these questions, to feel these stories in their confusion. My digital
-body, my bot-feelings, my divergent communities. I have given them to
-you, so they may live longer, like an obsolete but beloved cyborg shown
-in a museum.
-
Look: I was here, Look: I was loved, Look: I was saved.
-
The digital bodies that kept me alive, kept me from becoming fully a
-machine are no longer around in these online rooms. They are in
-different places, being touched by tentative hands, being loved for more
-than their divergence.
-I am too.
-
The rooms, the backplaces, however, are still full of others,
-divergent digital bodies who did not leave, who keep caring for each
-other at the bottom of the whirlpool. There is no happy ending because
-there is no ending. They keep typing and hoping, writing their
-collective pain down on keyboards that transmit love letters to each
-other. I am not embarrassed by my care for you, but you may be so if it
-helps. I know how overwhelming intimacy can be.
-
Telling you these stories was important for me, so much so that I
-will tell you so many more in a different place if you wish to listen to
-me longer. With this story, I dreamt of a digital body for you. It came
-from an ocean of dreams, into a primordial soup that gave it enough
-shape to become wild rivers, deep streams, sound waves. It flooded and
-now, it leaves. A digital body that grew its own feelings, looked for
-others like it, and realized its divergence and the need to leave. A
-dream body, a primordial body, a disruptive body, a divergent body, and
-now, a leaving body. This last story, however, of the leaving and loving
-body, is yet to be told.
-
The sun is now almost up, and the birds are alive and awake, telling
-each other stories just outside the room. We don’t have so much time
-left. I have made you something, to tell your digital body the stories
-of the leaving and loving body. It is a webpage, the address is
-https://vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl/backplaces/.
-
You open the page, and you are asked to write the characters you see
-in a captcha.
-E5qr7.
-eSq9p.
-8oc8y.
-Fuck.
-You try not to panic, but you know you have been detected.
-
Special thanks to Marloes de Valk, Michael Murtaugh, Manetta Berends,
-Joseph Knierzinger and Leslie Robbins.
-Extra thank you to Chae and Kamo from XPUB3 for the food and moral
-support in this trying time and to my other xpubini for being great and
-eating my snacks and gossiping.
-But most of all I’d like to thank the people in the online communities
-I’ve met and loved, you were of course who this thesis was about. Thank
-you for saving me, I will always remember you.
-
Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: -Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, Symbolic Interaction, -31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33.
-Berlant, L.G. (2008) The female complaint the unfinished business of -sentimentality in American culture. Durham: Duke University Press.
-Chu, J. (2021) Looking for similarities across Complex Systems, MIT -News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available at: -https://news.mit.edu/2021/jorn-dunkel-complex- systems-0627 (Accessed: -08 March 2024).
-Deleuze, G., Boyman, A. and Rajchman, J. (2001) Pure immanence: -Essays on a life. New York: Zone Books.
-Goffman, E. (2022) Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled -identity. London: Penguin Classics. Hafner, K. (1997) The epic saga of -the well, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/1997/05/ff-well/ -(Accessed: 01 February 2024).
-Haraway, D.J. (2000) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and -socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, Posthumanism, -pp. 69–84. doi:10.1007/978- 1-137-05194-3_10.
-Hyacint (2017) Harmonic series to 32,
-https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
-Harmonic_series_to_32.svg.
Kolcaba, K.Y. and Kolcaba, R.J. (1991) ‘An analysis of the concept of -comfort’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 16(11), pp. 1301–1310. -doi:10.1111/j.1365- 2648.1991.tb01558.x.
-Leonard, A. (no date) All Too Real, https://people.well.com/. -Available at: https://people.well.com/user/cynsa/tom/tom14.html -(Accessed: 01 April 2024).
-McGlotten, S. (2013) Virtual intimacies: Media, affect, and queer -sociality [Preprint]. doi:10.1353 book27643.
-Rumi, J. al-Din and Barks, C. (1995) ‘Story Water’, in The Essential -Rumi. New
-Schwartz, C. (2022) Lecture on Loneliness, Granta. Available at: -https://granta.com/lecture-on-loneliness/ (Accessed: 08 March 2024).
-Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a -marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance -cybercommunities’, Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967. -doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.
-Yun, J. (2020) ‘The Leaving Season’, in Some Are Always Hungry. -University of Nebraska Press.vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl/backplaces
-Hi.
-I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.
Is all intimacy about bodies? What is it about our bodies that makes
-intimacy? What happens when our bodies distance intimacy from us? This
-small anthology of poems and short stories lives with these
-questions—about having a body without intimacy and intimacy without a
-body. This project is also a homage to everyone who has come before and
-alongside me, sharing their vulnerability and emotions on the Internet.
-I called the places where these things happen backplaces. They are
-small, tender online rooms where people experiencing societally
-uncomfortable pain can find relief, ease, and transcendence.
-
I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar
-Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Cake Intimacies. Each of these is the
-result of its own unique performance or project. Some of the stories I
-will share carry memories of pain—both physical and emotional. As you
-sit in the audience, know I am with you, holding your hand through each
-scene. If the performance feels overwhelming at any point, you have my
-full permission to step out, take a break, or leave. This is not
-choreographed, and I care deeply for you.
-
-
-Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss about leaving
-and siblings. This project used comments people left on TikTok poetry. I
-extracted the emotions from these comments, mixed them with my own, and
-crafted them into poems. It is an ongoing performance, ending only when
-your feelings are secretly whispered to me. When you do, by typing into
-the comment box, your feelings are sent to me and the first act closes
-as the sun rises.
-
-
-
-
-Hermit Fantasy is a short story about a bot who wants to be a hermit.
-Inspired by an email response from a survey I conducted about receiving
-emotional support on the Internet, this story explores the contradiction
-of being online while wanting to disconnect. As an act it’s a series of
-letters, click by click.
-
-
-
-
-Cake Intimacies is a performance that took a year to bring together.
-It is a small selection of stories people told me and I held to memory
-and rewrote here. The stories come from two performances I hosted.
-First, I asked participants to eat cake, sitting facing or away from
-each other and sharing their stories about cake and the Internet. The
-second performance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness
-Festival, as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this
-performance, I predicted participants’ future lives on the Internet
-using felted archetypes and received stories from their Internet past in
-return. Now the stories are here, each of them a cake with a filling
-that tells a story, merging the bodily with the digital and making a
-mess of it all.
-
-
-
-
-The play ends as all plays do. The curtains close, the website stays
-but the stories will never sound the same. For the final act, I give you
-the stories. It’s one last game, one last joke to ask my question again.
-Digital intimacies about the digital, our bodies and the cakes we eat.
-For the last act, I ask you to eat digital stories. To eat a comment, to
-eat a digital intimacy. Sharing an act of physical intimacy with
-yourself and with me, by eating sweets together. Sweets about digital
-intimacies that never had a body. There is no moral, no bow to wrap the
-story in. A great big mess of transcendence into the digital, of
-intimacy and of bodies. The way it always is. Thankfully.
-
-
-This thesis is an assemblageI live -somewhere in the margins of scattered references, footnotes, citations, -examinations embracing the inconvenience of talking back to myself, to -the reader and to all those people whose ideas gave soul to the text. I -shelter in the borderlands of the pages my fragmented thoughts, flying -words, introspections, voices. Enlightenment and inspiration given by -the text “Dear Science” written by Katherine McKittrick. of -thoughts, experiences, interpretations, intuitive explorations of what -borders are, attempting to unleash a conversation concerning the -entangled relation between material injurious borders and bureaucracy. I -unravel empirically the thread of how borders as entities are manifested -and (de)established. How does the lived experience of crossing multiple -borders change and under what conditions?
-The eastern Mediterranean borderlandI -use the word borderland to refer to Greece as a (mostly) transit zone in -the migrants’ and refugees’ route towards Europe., I -happened to come from, proves to be one of Europe’s deadly borders -towards specific ethnic groups. The embodied experience of borders and -practices of (im)mobility change radically depending on the various -identities of the people crossing them. As I moved to the Netherlands I -started more actively perceiving bureaucracy as another multi-layered -border. I was wondering how this situation is shifted and transformed -moving towards the European North. What is the role of bureaucracy and -how it could be perceived as a mechanism of repulsion for some bodies - -a camouflaged border?
-But what is my starting point and where does my precarious body fit -within the borders that I am touching? The language of the -administrative document is rigid and hurtful but myself lies between the -margins of these lines. This thesis does not consist of an excessive -inquiry about the profoundly complex concepts of borders and -bureaucracy. On the contrary, it is initiated by personal concerns, -awareness and my positioning. I choose to structure my argument and talk -through a personal process that is being unfolded in parallel with the -writing period. Accordingly, these words are dynamically being reshaped -due to the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline. A more -distant approach became personal and tangible with -auto-ethnographicalI perceive -auto-ethnography as a way to place myself, my lived experiences, my -identities, reflections in the (artistic) research and talk through them -about structures and within the structures of social, cultural, -political frameworks. elements as I was trying to squish -myself and my urgencies under these thresholds and fit the A4 document -lines.
-I would like at this point to acknowledge and state explicitly my -privilege recognizing the different levels of otherness produced by the -several bordering mechanisms. My European machine-readable passport as a -designed artifact dictates and facilitates the easiness of my mobility. -In other (many) cases the lack of it creates profoundly a severe -barrier“Passports still function as a -technology to control movement. Technologies like RFID chips and face -recognition are part of a control system for digital state surveillance. -Designing a passport is relative to design a surveillance tool. The -analysis of passport designs rarely looks at the social consequences of -identification, control, and restriction of movement, which can have -violent consequences.” (Ruben Pater, 2021). I do not intend -in any respect to compare my case to the lived experiences and struggles -of migrants and refugees. I utilize the paperwork interface of my -smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground the -aforementioned questions.
-This thesis is very much indebted to some text-vehicles that -mobilized my reflections and nourished the writing process. “Illegal -Traveller, an autoethnography of borders” and “Waiting, a Project in -conversation” both written by Shahram Khosravi as well as “The Utopia of -Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” by -the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. Graeber initiated his -research utilizing the horrendous prolonged bureaucratic processes he -had to follow in order to place his sick mother in a nursing home. In -parallel, Khosravi’s work is itself the outgrowth of his own ‘embodied -experience of borders’, of ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented -migrants. I found valuable and inspiring in both texts the personal -filter through which they articulate their positioning and develop -critique.
-I follow a zoom-in approach in mapping my thoughts beginning from the -large-scale rigid border as entity and ending up at the document as the -smallest designed artifact of the bureaucratic labyrinth. In the first -chapter, I touch the concept of borders in relation to migration. I -begin with a personal inspection and comprehension of material borders -as entities. Alongside, I interweave in the text the concept of -hospitality as a cultural attitude towards ‘strangers’ from the state’s -perspective. Conditional and unconditional. How the document I hold in -my hands reflects positions on the government’s conditional hospitality -and what constraints it dictates.
-In the second chapter, I unpack bureaucracy and focus on its -bordering function. From migration ghost bureaucracies to the -educational bureaucracies of my surroundings to even smaller components -of this apparatus. I end up analyzing the document as a unit within this -complex network. Through the “interrogation” of the form as an artifact -are emerging issues related to language, graphic design and -transparency, universality, and underlying violence.
-In the third and last chapter, I bridge the written text with the -ongoing project that runs simultaneously as part of my graduation work -in Experimental Publishing, where I mainly speak through my prototypes. -Talking documents(5) are performative bureaucratic text inspections, -vocal and non-vocal, that intend to create temporal public interventions -through performative readings. The intention is to underline how the -vocalization of bureaucracies as a tool can potentially reveal their -territorial exclusive function and provide space for the invisible -vulnerability.
---“on the other side is the river
-
-and I cannot cross it
-on the other side is the sea
-I cannot bridge it”
-(Anzaldua, 1987)
How a border is defined? How, as an entity, does it define? How is it -performed? I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming -from a country of the European South that constitutes a rigid, violent -border that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees. In -the following chapter, I will attempt to explore the terrain of material -borders in relation to bureaucracy as another multi-layered filter.
-What constitutes a border? Is it a wall, a line, a fence, a machine, -a door, an armed body or a wound on the land? When somebody crosses a -border are they consciously aware of the act of crossing? I am crossing -the pedestrian street and walking on the white stripes to reach the -pedestrian route right across. Are the white stripes a border or a -territory to be crossed to reach another situation? Does the way I -perform my walking when I step onto the white stripes change? Is there -any embodied knowledge about what could be classified as border? Under -which circumstances does this knowledge become canonical? I hop over a -fence that separates one garden from another. What if instead of -assuming that the fence is a device or a furniture or a material of -enclosure, it is just part of the same land? The process or act of -jumping a fence can be itself a moment of segregation and a moment of -re-establishing or demonstrating the bordering function of it.
-Borders could be considered as devices of both exclusion and -inclusion that filter people and define forms of circulation and -movement in ways no less violent than those applied in repulsive -measures. Closure and exclusion are only one function of the -nation-state borders. Of course, borders are not always that visible or -treated and perceived as borders, as Rumford argues they are “designed -not to look like borders, located in one place but projected in another -entirely” (Rumford, cited by Keshavarz, 2016, p.298)
-As institutions, they seem to be much more complex, flexible, or even -penetrable in comparison with the traditional image of a wall as a -bordering device that demonstrates in a way itself. Crossing and borders -are inherently defined in relation to each other. “Where there is a -border, there is also a border crossing, legal as well as illegal” -(Khosravi, 2010).
-I started thinking about hospitality as a cultural behavior and as an -inseparable term in the context of borders due to a recent personal -bureaucratic experience. Hospitality can be instrumentalized to describe -an individual’s as well as a nation’s response towards strangers within -their enclosed territory - a property, a home, a land, a country. What -does hospitality mean and how hospitality under specific circumstances -can be a tool in the hands of a state?
-I will share a personal story related to hospitality and bureaucracy. -I was recently evicted from my previous house [31/01/2024] due to a -trapping contract situation. My former roommates and I were forced to -terminate our previous contract and sign a new one that further limited -our rights. The bureaucratic free market language of the contract, the -foreign law language barrier, the threats of the agent and the precarity -of being homeless in a foreign country forced us to sign the new rental -agreement which was the main reason for our eviction. Currently, I am -hosted temporarily by friends until I find a more permanent -accommodation. Meanwhile, the government requires me to declare the new -address which I do not have within five days of my moving. Consequently, -I have to follow another bureaucratic path. This involves requesting -permission for a short-term postal address while declaring the addresses -of my current hosts [4/02/2024]. I gathered the required documents, I -processed a 9-page-text and another one with the personal data of my -hosts and myself and answered questions about:
---why don’t I have a house,
-
-who are the people who host me,
-what is my relationship with them,
-where do I sleep,
-where do I store my belongings,
-how many people are hosting me and accordingly their personal -data,
-for how long,
-why I cannot register there,
-what days of the week do I stay in the one house and
-what days do I stay in the other house,
-whether and how am I searching for a permanent place and
-what is the tangible proof of my search?
All these questions provoked thinking around the concept of -conditional hospitality as a behavior of the state towards strangers. I -can see that on a smaller scale it is being applied to the hospitality I -receive from my friends in the middle of an emergency. I am wondering, -though, whether is it that important for the government to know on whose -couch I sleep or where I store my belongings. The omnipresent gaze of a -state who has the right to know every small detail about myself while at -the same time questioning people’s hospitality in case of emergency. It -seems that forms of knowledge are inseparably related to forms of power. -It will take 8 weeks for my request to be processed and for the -government to approve or reject if I deserve my friends’ -hospitality.
---“Today as yesterday, her land and her time are stolen, only because -she is told that she has arrived too late. Much too late”
-
-(Khosravi, 2021)
Waiting can be considered as a dramaturgical means embedded in -bureaucratic procedures that camouflage power relations through the -manipulation of people’s time. When people are in the middle of a -bureaucratic process and waiting for the government’s decision on their -case or just waiting for their turn. “The neoliberal technologies of -citizenship enacted through keeping people waiting for jobs, education, -housing, health care, social welfare or pensions turn citizens into -patients of the state” (Khosravi, 2021). I waited two weeks for a -response from the municipality only to discover that my request was -rejected [16/02/2024].
-Contemporary border practices mirror past colonial practices, as they -exploit migrants’ time by keeping them in prolonged waiting, “like the -way colonial capitalism transformed lands to wastelands to plunder the -wealth underneath” (Khosravi, 2021). The current border regime, known by -extended waiting periods and constant delays, is part of a larger -project aimed at taking away wealth, labor, and time through colonial -accumulation and immediate expulsion.
-When someone opens their house to a guest, a stranger, someone in -need, means that they open their property to someone. Hospitality is -interweaved with a sense of ownership over something. Expanding the -concept of hospitality to a nation-scale, we could say that the -nation-building process involves people asserting artificial ownership -over a territory even if they do not own any property within this -land.
-Conditional hospitality is tied to a sense of offering back to the -home-land-nation-state-country as a way to win or trade your permission -to enter and enjoy the hospitality of a place. Coming from specific -places in comparison to others, having to offer some special skills or -your labor - if it is asked for - can be possible conditions that may -allow somebody to receive hospitality. I would say that an efficient -check of these conditions is regularly facilitated through bureaucratic -channels. The concept of unconditional-conditional hospitality is -closely related to exchange. When you do not have something to offer -according to the needs or expectations of a “household”, you may not -receive the gift of hospitality.
-The notion of hospitality is excessively instrumentalized within the -Greek context portrayed as an “ideal” intertwined with the -nation-building narrative and as a foundational quality - product by the -Greek tourist industry. However, the Greek sea has been an endless -refugee graveyard and the eastern Aegean islands a “warehouse of -souls”For further reading: -https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/ -for the last many years. In this case, conditional hospitality applies -primarily to those who invest in and consume.
-Hospitality can function as a filtration mechanism that permits -access – lets in – the ones who deserve it, those who have “passports, -valid visas, adequate bank statements, or invitations” (Khosravi, 2010). -By doing this, unproductive hospitality is being avoided due to -sovereign state’s border regulations and checks. Conditional -hospitality, is about worthiness, is directed towards migrants deemed -good and productive – skilled and capable for assimilation- or a tiny -minority of vulnerable and marginalized asylum seekers who lack -representation. Only in a world where the nation-state’s boundaries have -been dismantled and where the undocumented, stateless, non-citizens are -unconditionally accepted, only at this moment, we are able to imagine -the “political and ethical survival of humankind” (Agamben, 2000). -Hospitality does not seem a matter of choice but a profound urgency, if -humanity desires to foster a future together.
-What about the crossers who managed to travel and reach the desirable -“there”, the ones who transcended the borders and the control checks of -the ministries of defense(7), the ones who enter but do not own papers, -the paperless? What does it mean to be documented and what is -inefficiently documented within a territory? They are threatened if they -get caught by authorities and also according to the official narrative, -they threaten. Since the physical mechanisms of bordering did not -succeed in repulsing them, the bureaucratic border appears as an -additional layer of filtration. The undocumented are non-citizens, they -might be crossers or burners(8), both, or even none. “Undocumented -migrants and unauthorized border crossers are polluted and polluting -because of their very unclassifiability” (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). The -loss of citizenship, denaturalisation, makes somebody denaturalised, -they are rendered unnatural. “Citizenship has become the nature of being -human” (Koshravi, 2010).
-According to Hannah Arendt, the right to have rights and claim -somebody else’s rights is the only human right (Arendt, as cited by -Khosravi, 2010, p. 121). The foundational issue with the Universal -Declaration of Human Rights is its dependence on the nation-state -system. Since human rights are grounded on civil rights, which are -essentially citizens’ rights, human rights are tied to the nation-state -system. Consequently, human rights can be materialized only in a -political community. “Loss of citizenship also means loss of human -rights” (Khosravi, 2010)
---“…This is a transcribed recording of -my phone during a protest on migration at Dam Square in Amsterdam. I -insert part of the speech of a Palestinian woman addressing the matter -of undocumentedness. Date and time of the recording 18th of June 2023, -15:05. “✶” means undecipherableI am here for the rights of -the children which haven’t be in the taking part in the education since -they have undocumented mothers and they are more than ✶ years. I am here -to represent mothers who are looking for a place to have a sense of -belonging or how long are you trying to continue humiliating them and -the female gender. I am here to express my frustration with -INDImmigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst - -Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service. So -frustrated. And I will not stop talking about democracy. Democracy is -the rule of law where everybody feels included. Democracy is a rule of -law where everybody feels * We, undocumented people, we don’t feel a -sense of belonging from the system.”
-
Apart from the rigid visible borders, bureaucracy related to -migrants, refugees and asylum seekers can also constitute an in-between -less visible borderland. I used to perceive bureaucracy as an immaterial -and intangible entity. However, now I can claim that this assumption is -not true. Bureaucracy is material and spatial and can be seen as an -apparatus, a machine, a circuitry, an institution, a territory, a -borderland, a body, a zone – a “dead zone of imagination” as Graeber -claims. It can be inscribed on piles of papers, folders, drawers, -booklets, passports, IDs, documents, screens, tapes, bodies, hospital -corridors, offices, permissions to enter, stay, work, travel, exist, -come and go, leave, visit family, bury a friend.
-Bureaucratic documents especially those related to migration, can -become territories or should be interpreted “as sites where social -interactions happen, where power relations unfold and are contested” -(Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021). When these bureaucratic objects are used and -manipulated, they can constitute sites of “confrontation, reproduction, -negotiation and performance” (Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021) shaping social -relations and producing meaning.
-Bureaucracy related to asylum seekers reveals the profound bordering -nature of these practices, as a continuous process of producing -otherness. Accordingly, I see bureaucracy as a practice that raises -material and symbolic walls for specific groups of people who are -rendered unwanted and unwelcome because they dared to cross the borders -of the Global North.I am referring to the -desirable potential destinations of migrants and refugees corresponding -mainly to Global North countries. It is as if they could -never manage to eventually arrive and shelter their lives within the -desirable “there”. “In these bordering processes, we can detect the -“coloniality of asylum” (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023).In this text they insert the concept of the -“coloniality of asylum” introduced by Picozza, which talks about how -asylum systems are intertwined with colonial legacies and power -dynamics. These systems are often colonial structures reinforcing -hierarchies between nations and reproducing patterns of domination and -oppression. In this framework, asylum is not just about offering -protection but also about regulating and managing populations in a way -that reflects colonial relationships. Bureaucracies in -practice act as filters, determining who, from an institutional -standpoint, deserves to receive protection and who does not. They -operate as systems that classify non-citizens and place them in a social -hierarchy of disproportionate unequal obligations, lack of rights and -access to institutional support.
-While I had this inherent concern about borders and bureaucratic -structures in relation to migration, I decided to start zooming in and -explore my own bureaucratic surroundings through my personal lens. As a -student, I was eager to understand and dig into the educational -institutions’ bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by smaller-scale -bureaucratic struggles and peers’ narratives, stories and experiences. -How can higher education in a European country reflect policies around -migration and border control less profoundly. How can education filter -and distinguish, how it can reproduce efficiently itself?
-I gradually started perceiving the bureaucratic apparatus as an -omnipresent immaterial border - a ghost infrastructure - that one always -encounters but does not really see, a borderland that lies in the gray -zone between visibility and invisibility. Bureaucracy renders us -“stupid” and vulnerable in front of it. It is rarely questioned but it -should be performed efficiently for people to exist properly.
-The contradiction embedded in many cultural and educational -institutions lies in the level of unawareness regarding surveillance via -multiple bureaucratic rituals that (re)produce docile behaviors. How -these mechanisms are masked and standing in the margins of the visible -nonvisible sphere.
---“This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students -to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring -over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance -of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that -fact that, had they insisted their right to enter the stacks without -showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been -summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be -required.”
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-(Graeber, 2015)
The genuine essence of education is not bureaucratic at all, neither -does it have to fit and ground its foundations under a bureaucratic -roof. “The pedagogical process runs counter to the hierarchical, -impersonal qualities of bureaucracy” (Cunningham, 2017). However, people -working in educational institutions acknowledge the fact that entrenched -bureaucratic systems impose their material constraints on teaching -structures and on how these actors in this process interact with each -other.“Students and staff are treated as human capital” (Cunningham, -2017). This determination can dehumanize people involved, like when -“faculty-as-labor” and “students-as-consumers” are marginalized and -treated as just variables.
---“there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a -document of barbarism”
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-(Benjamin, cited by Pater, 2021)
From fences and armed police to nation-state mechanism of -less-material bordering to bureaucracy to the elements of bureaucracy to -the document itself as the minimum unit of an apparatus. Understanding -and unhiding the violence of a form -violence materialized and at the -same time camouflaged by the language structure, the vocabulary, the -graphic design, their ability to render subjectivities that fit and -don’t fit within the controlled territory of the lines of the form. A -language that fragments, classifies, places and un-places. Thus -bureaucratic apparatus is something more than a metaphor it is also a -symbol. It is hard to see that there are many more layers beneath the -purpose it propagates. A metaphor that is so perfectly materialized as -well as naturalized that you cannot even see it.
-The bureaucratic apparatus can be considered as something more than -an infrastructure that organizes institutions, markets, states, etc. It -can constitute itself an institution, a textual institution. As the -factory generates commodities and sets them within a circuit of motion, -bureaucracy generates documents and sets them throughout a communicative -circuitry (Cunningham, 2017). An institution that organizes and -(infra)structures other institutions and similarly reproduces itself -through text. The materiality of a text document reflects the ideology -of the interconnected institutions and their underlying bureaucratic -systems. Language occupies a dual contradictory role as the foundational -element of bureaucracy. Language can become a shroud to conceal the -violence and reinforce hierarchical structures and simultaneously can be -transformed into the rigid rational cell itself. They shape their own -narratives, they reflect the institutional narratives.
-One of the great powers of bureaucracies is their ability to render -themselves transparent. It seems that bureaucracy does not have to say -anything more beyond itself, is self-referential and self-contained. It -is boring or most likely is supposed to be boring. “One can describe the -ritual surrounding it. One can observe how people talk about or react to -it” (Graeber, 2015). The supposed universality of the form which is -carefully constructed can be partly attributed to the individuality and -impersonality of many bureaucratic processes. “Bureaucracies operate -through an assemblage of hierarchy, impersonality, and procedure in -order to complete organizational tasks with maximum efficiency” (Weber, -as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p. 307).
-I had to open a discussion with students from non-EEA (non European -Economic Area) countries in order to understand that they have to -conduct tuberculosis x-rays“To keep the -Residence Permit, some non-European students need to visit the Dutch -Public Health Authority (GGD) after they arrived in the Netherlands. -They will undergo a medical test for tuberculosis (TB). This is a -requirement from the IND (Dutch Immigration Office)”. (Introduction -days, 2021) when they arrive in the Netherlands. It seems -that for the Dutch state, their bodies might be more threatening than -bodies coming from a European country. The relativization in the quality -and the quantity of paperwork requested from different “groups” of -applicants in a specific context deconstructs the myth of the -universality of the bureaucratic form.
-Undoubtedly the success of bureaucracy is drawn from its efficiency -in relation to schematization as an efficient material quality. “Whether -it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is -always a matter of simplification (Cunningham, 2017)”. Bureaucracies -ignore the social existence of a person and fragment, classify and -define them under specific perspectives. Why do they ask for this -information instead of others? “Why place of birth and not, say, place -where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the -signature?” (Graeber, 2015)
-There is a great materiality in bureaucracies. Bureaucratic -procedures are often compared to a labyrinth which appears as a -similarly complex structure constituted by simple geometrical shapes -(Weber, as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p.310). Bureaucratic documents can -be complicated and multiple due to this infinite accumulation of really -simple but at the same time contradictory elements. A constant -juxtaposition of letters, symbols, stamps, signatures, paper, ink, -barcodes, QR codes within a circuit of workers, interweaved and -interconnected offices, repetitive performative tasks and rituals.
-Underneath every bureaucratic document, there is a good amount of -graphic design labor. What kind of visual strategy is embedded in -administrative objects that the design aspect of these artifacts appears -to be invisible? The material decisions applied as well as the material -constraints attributed to the document can transform or produce -different textual meanings and consequently understandings.
---“This does not mean that constraints limit meaning, but on the -contrary, constitute it; meaning cannot appear where freedom is absolute -or nonexistent: the stem of meaning is that of a supervised -freedom”
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-(Barthes, 1983)
When I encountered the green logo of the municipality of Rotterdam I -did not cultivate any feelings of enthusiasm or even boredom. A big -calligraphic “R” with the flawless green ribbons that penetrate it on -the left corner of a 229x162 mm standardized dimension folder with a -transparent rectangle that reveals my inscribed name and surname from -the inside part. I did not put any aesthetic critique over this but I -rather felt this rush of stress for the expected response to my -objection letter or a fine or a tax to be paid within a specific -timeline cause another fine would come if I did not comply with -this.
-One month ago (from the writing present), my friend Chae made for my -birthday this amazing Dutch-government-like biscuit forms, recreating -the entire layout of the document using the interface of a crunchy -biscuit. She used the same color blue scheme and she placed the biscuit -form inside the same standardized dimension folder 229x162 mm with the -same transparent layer that reveals my name and surname. According to -literary critic and theorist Katherine Hayles:
---“to alter the physical form of the artifacts is to change the act of -reading and understanding but mostly you transform the metaphoric and -symbolic network that structures the relation of world to world. To -change the material artifacts is to transform the context and -circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change -the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of meaning is -especially possible when the words interact with the inscription -technologies that produce them”
-
-(Hayles, 2002)
In the latter case, the inscription technology used is the sugar blue -paste and the handwriting of Chae. The text in the white-blue government -document forces a different reading from the white-blue biscuit -document, even if they carry the same bits of information. If I do not -read carefully the text in the folder and if I do not act according to -the suggested actions there is a threat. The level of threat varies in -relation to the case, the identities of the holder, the state, the -context, etc. There is no room for negotiation in bureaucracy and this -is the omnipresent underlying violence. The threat of violence shrouded -within its structures and foundations does not permit any questioning -but on the contrary creates “willful blindness” towards themI am referring to those people subjecting others to -bureaucratic circles shaped by structurally violent situations as well -as people in positions of privilege who deliberately ignore these -facts.. Bureaucracies are not stupid inherently rather they -manage and coerce processes that reproduce docile and stupid -behaviors.
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-This chapter is mainly a constellation of some prototypes I created -while writing and coping with personal bureaucratic challenges. I -provided some further space for my anxiety by unpacking and exploring -the material conditions that nourished it within this timeline.
-An administrative decision on a case may not seem necessarily hurtful -in linguistic terms. However, it can be injurious and severely -threatening. By performing the bureaucratic archival material of my -interactions with the government, I aim to draw a parallel narrative -highlighting the bordering role of bureaucracy and the concealed -underlying violence it perpetuates.
-A bureaucratic text does not just describe a reality, a decision, a -case or an action, but on the contrary, it is capable of changing the -reality or the order of things that is described via these words. -Bureaucratic official documents are inherently performative. These texts -regulate and bring situations into being.
-My intention in transforming bureaucratic texts into “playable” -scenarios is to explore how embodying these texts in public through -collective speechI imagine the theatrical -play as a “human microphone”, a low-tech amplification device. A group -of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the -corridor of the school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right -across, outside of the municipality building. The term is borrowed from -the protests of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. People were -gathered around the speaker repeating what the speaker was saying in -order to ensure that everyone could hear the announcements during large -assemblies. Human bodies became a hack in order to replace the forbidden -technology. In New York it is required to ask for permission from -authorities to use “amplified sound” in public space. can -provoke different forms of interpretations and open tiny conceptual -holes. “The meaning of a performative act is to be found in this -apparent coincidence of signifying and enacting” (Butler, 1997). The -performative bureaucratic utterances - the vocal documents - attempt to -bring into existence -by overidentifying, exaggerating, acting- the -discomfort, the threat, the violence which is mainly condemned into -private individual spheres.
-How performing a collection of small bureaucratic stories can -function as an instant micro intervention and potentially produce a -public discourse. Where do we perform this speech, where and when does -the “theater” take place? Who is the audience? I am particularly -interested in the site-specificity of these “acts”. How can these -re-enactments be situated in an educational context and examine its -structures? Is it possible for this small-scale publics to provoke the -emergence of temporal spaces of marginal vulnerable voicings? According -to the agonistic approach of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, -critical art is art that provokes dissensus, that makes visible what the -dominant narrative tends to undermine and displace. “It is constituted -by a multiplicity of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all -those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” -(Mouffe, 2008).
-I started working and engaging more with different bureaucratic -material that my peers and I encountered regularly or appeared in our -(e)mail (in)boxes and are partly related to our identities as foreign -students coming from different places. I chose to start touching and -looking for various bureaucracies that surround me as a personal filter -towards it. From identification documents and application forms to -rental contracts, funding applications, visa applications, quality -assurance questionnaires related to the university, assessment criteria, -supermarket point gathering cards, receipts. A sequence of locked doors -to be unlocked more or less easily via multiple bureaucratic keys. The -methods and tools used to scrutinize the administrative artifacts are -not rigid or distinct. It is mainly a “collection” of small bureaucratic -experiments - closely related to language as well as the performative -“nature” of these texts themselves. I was intrigued by how transforming -the material conditions of a piece of text could influence the potential -understandings and perceptions of its meaning.
-Title: “Quality Assurance Questionnaire
-Censoring”
-When: October 2023
-Where: XPUB studio wall
-Who: myself
Description: Some months ago my classmates and I -received an email with a questionnaire aimed at preparing us for the -upcoming quality assurance meeting within the school. Ada and I had a -meeting, in an empty white room with closed doors, with an external -collaborator of the university. The main request was to rate and answer -the pre-formulated questions covering issues about performance, -different and multiple topics related to the course, the teaching staff, -the facilities, the tools provided. The micro linguistic experiment of -highlighting, censoring and annotating this document aimed for an -understanding of what a quality assurance meeting is within an -educational institution.
-Reflections-Thoughts: This experiment was my first -attempt to start interrogating and observing the language and the -structure of a bureaucratic document. How these “desired” standards -propagated through text. What is the role of the student-client in these -processes as an esoteric gaze of control over the course and their -teachers? My focus was to locate and accumulate all the wording related -to measurements, rate, quantity, assessments, statistics. Highlighting -the disproportionate amount of metrics-related vocabulary was enough to -craft the narrative around this process.
-These ‘rituals’ are components of a larger “culture of evidence”, -serving as a tool that blurs the distinction between discourse and -reality (Cunningham, 2017). This culture of evidence influences how -people perceive and understand information. The primary purposes of -these metrics are twofold: they play a role in the marketing sphere, -attracting potential students to the university as well as they are -utilized in interactions and negotiations with the government, which -increasingly cuts budgets allocated to universities.
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-Title: “Department of Bureaucracy and Administration
-Customs Enforcement”
-When: November 2023
-Where: LeeszaalCommunity
-Library in Rotterdam West
-Who: XPUB peers, tutors, friends, alumni
Description: During the first public moment at -Leeszaal, I decided to embody and enact the traditional role of a -bureaucrat in a graphic and possibly absurd way performing a small -“theatrical play”. I prepared a 3-page and a 1-page document -incorporating bureaucratic-form aesthetics and requesting applicants’ -fake data and their answers for questions related to educational -bureaucracy. People receiving an applicant number at the entrance of -Leeszaal, queuing to collect their documents from the administration -“office”, filling forms, waiting, receiving stamps, giving fingerprints -and signing, waiting again were the main components of this act.
-Reflections-Thoughts: Beyond the information -gathered through my bureaucratic-like questionnaires, the most crucial -element of this experiment was the understanding and highlighting of the -hidden performative elements that entrench these “rituals”. It was -amazing seeing the audience becoming instantly actors of the play -enacting willingly a administrative ritualistic scene. The provided -context of this “play” was a social library hosting a masters course -public event on graduation projects. I am wondering whether this -asymphony between the repetitive bureaucratic acts within the space of -Leeszaal, where such acts are not expected to be performed, evoked -contradictory feelings or thoughts. Over-identifying with a role was -being instrumentalized as an “interrogation” of one’s own involvement in -the reproduction of social discourses, power, authority, hegemony.
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-Title: “Passport Reading Session”
-When: January 2024
-Where: XML – XPUB studio
-Who: Ada, Aglaia, Stephen, Joseph
Description: This prototype is a collective passport -reading session. I asked my classmates to bring their passports or IDs -and sitting in a circular set up we attempted to “scan” our documents. -Every contributor took some time to browse, annotate verbally, -interpret, understand, analyze, vocalize their thoughts on these -artifacts, approaching them from various perspectives. The three -passports and one ID card were all coming from European countries.
-Reflections-Thoughts: For the first time I observed -this object so closely. The documentation medium was a recording device, -Ada’s mobile phone. The recording was transcribed by voskVosk is an offline open-source speech recognition -toolkit. and myself and a small booklet of our passport -readings was created.
---“So the object here is like not by random it comes from the history -of nation-states and how nation-states and nationalities created like a -form of identity. So nation-state is actually a recent invention that -came into existence over the last two hundred fifty years in the form as -we know it nowadays, in the form of democratic capitalism, before like -monarchies and so on and each citizen of such a nation-state got also -kind of a particular identity”,
-
-Joseph says about his ID card.
We read the embedded signs, symbols, categories, texts, magical -numbers in our passports that construct our profiles. Seeing someone’s -passport, ID cards, visas, travel documents might mean that you are able -to understand how easy or not is for them to move, what are their travel -paths, how departure or arrival is smooth or cruel. Are there emotions -along the way? For some people these are documents “that embody power — -minimal or no waiting, peaceful departure, warm and confident arrival” -(Khosravi, 2021).
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-Title: “Postal Address Application Scenario”
-When: February 2024
-Where: Room in Wijnhaven Building, 4th floor
-Who: XPUB 1,2,3, tutors, Leslie
Description: This scenario is the first part of a -series of small episodes that construct a bureaucratic story unfolding -the processes of my communication with the government. The body of the -text of the “theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents -as well as recordings of the conversation I had with the municipality -throughout this process. I preserved the sequence of the given sentences -and by discarding the graphic design of the initial form, I structured -and repurposed the text into a scenario. The main actors were two -bureaucrats vocalizing the questions addressed in the form, in turns and -sometimes speaking simultaneously like a choir, three applicants -answering the questions similarly while a narrator mainly provided the -audience with the context and the storyline constructing the scenery of -the different scenes.
-The first and the last moment of the performance was during a -semi-public tryout moment where XPUB peers performed the distributed -scenario in a white room on the 4th floor of the Winjhaven building. -They were seated having as a border a black long-table. A border -furniture between the bureaucrats and the applicants. The narrator was -standing still behind them while they were surrounded by the audience. -The main documentation media of the act were a camera on a tripod, a -recorder in the middle of the table and myself reconstructing the memory -of the re-enactement at that present - 6 days later.
-Reflections-Thoughts: Vocalizing and embodying the -bureaucratic questions was quite useful in acknowledging the -government’s voice and presence as something tangible rather than a -floating, arbitrary entity. It was interesting observing the bureaucrats -performing their role with confidence and entitlement, contrasting with -the applicants who appeared to be more stressed to respond convincingly -and promptly. There is a notable distinction between performativity and -performance. Performing consciously and theatrically amplifying real -bureaucratic texts by occupying roles and overidentifying with them can -constitute a diffractive moment, a tool itself. From bureaucratic text -to performative text scenarios to speech. The embedded (but rather -unconscious) performativity of “real” bureaucratic rituals establishes -and empowers (bureaucratic) institutions through repetitive acts. These -theatrical moments attempt to highlight the shrouded performative -elements of these processes.
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-I expanded the “play” by incorporating additional “scenes” sourced -again from the documents accompanying the ongoing “conversation with the -government”. Two weeks after submitting my application for a short-term -postal address [16/02/2024], I received a letter from the municipality -stating their rejection of my request and warning me of potential fines -if I fail to declare a valid address and provide a rental contract. -After extensive communication with the municipality, I decided to -respond to this decision by writing and sending an objection letter -[19/02/2024]. The objections committee received my letter [21/02/2024], -and after some days, they issued a confirmation letter outlining the -following steps of the objection process which involves hearings with -municipality lawyers and further investigation of my case. The textual -components collaged for the next “episodes” are sourced from the -transcribed recordings of my actual conversations with the municipality -clerks, my objection letter, the confirmation documents including the -steps I am required to take.
-My case has finished by this time. I withdrew my objection -[7/03/2024] and I de-registered [11/03/2024] after a good amount of -stress and precarity. My bureaucratic literature is meant to be read and -voiced collectively. People’s bureaucratic literatures should be read -and voiced collectively.
-My intention is to facilitate a series of collective performative -readings of bureaucratic scenarios or other portable paperwork stories -as a way of publishing and inspecting bureaucratic bordering -infrastructures. The marginal voices of potential applicants are -embodying and performing a role. “The speech does not only describe but -brings things into existence” (Austin, 1975). I would like to stretch -the limits of dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document in -public with others and turn an individual administrative case into a -public one. How do the inscribed words in the documents are not -descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized in getting things -done” (Butler, 1997). Words as active agents. I am inviting past and -future applicants, traumatized students, injured bearers, bureaucratic -border crossers, stressed expired document holders or just curious -people to share, vocalize, talk through, read out loud, amplify, -(un)name, unplace, dismantle the injurious words of these artifacts.
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-As I sit in the waiting area at the gate B7 in the airport preparing -to come back to the Netherlands, I am writing the last lines of this -text. I am thinking of all these borders and gates that my body was able -to pass through smoothly, carrying my magical object through which I -embody power- at least within this context. However, I yearn for a -reality where we stop looking at those bodies that cross the -multifaceted borders and get crossed and entrenched by them, but on the -contrary we start interrogating and shouting at the contexts and the -frameworks that construct them and render them invisible, natural and -powerful.
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-Austin, J. L. (1975) “lECTURE VII”, in How to do things with words. -Oxford University Press, pp.83-93.
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-Keshavarz, M. (2016) Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, -Camps and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.
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-Malichudis, S. (2020) How the Aegean islands became a warehouse of -souls, Solomon. Available at: -https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/ -(Accessed: April 7, 2024).
-McKittrick, K. (2021) Dear science and other stories. Durham, NC: -Duke University Press.
-Mouffe, C. (2008) ‘Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic -Internvention’. Open:14 Art as a Public Issue, No.14 (2008), p.4
-Pater, R. (2021) Caps lock: How capitalism took hold of graphic -design, and how to escape from it. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz.
-Picozza, F. (2021). The coloniality of asylum : mobility, autonomy -and solidarity in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis. London: Rowman -& Littlefield Publishers.
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-This project appeared as a need to explore potential bureaucratic -dramaturgies within the educational institution I was part as a student. -I was curious about educational bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by -smaller-scale paperwork struggles and peers’ narratives, stories and -experiences. However, unexpected emergencies - due to my eviction on the -31st of January 2024 - placed centrally my personal struggles unfolded -in parallel with the making period. I ended up conducting accidentally -auto-ethnography as the project was dynamically being reshaped due to -the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline.
-Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections that -intend to create temporal public interventions through performative -readings. I utilized the paperwork interface of my smaller-scale story -in order to unravel and foreground questions related to the role of -bureaucracy as less material border and as a regulatory mechanism -reflecting narratives, ideologies, policies.
-Central element of this project is a seven-act scenario that -construct my personal paperwork story, unraveling the actual struggles -of my communication with the government. The body of the text of the -“theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents, email -threads as well as recordings of the conversations with the municipality -of Rotterdam I documented and archived throughout this period. I -preserved the sequence of the given sentences and by discarding the -graphic design of the initial forms, I structured and repurposed the -text into a playable scenario.
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I perceive the document as a unit and as the fundamental symbolic -interface of the bureaucratic network. The transformation of the -materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in -public aims to examine these artifacts and highlight the shrouded -performative elements of these processes.
-I see the collective readings of these scenarios as a way of instant -publishing and as a communal tool of inspecting bureaucratic bordering -infrastructures. How can these re-enactments be situated in different -institutional contexts and examine their structures? I organized a -series of performative readings of my own bureaucratic literature in -different spaces and contexts, pubic and semi-public WDKA, Art Meets -Radical Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I -invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny theater.
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The marginal voices of potential applicants are embodying and -enacting a role. “The speech does not only describe but brings things -into existence”(Austin, 1975). My intention was to stretch the limits of -dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document and turn individual -administrative cases into public ones. How do the inscribed words in the -documents are not descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized -in getting things done”(Butler,1997). Words as active agents. Bodies as -low-tech “human microphones”. A group of people performs the -bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the corridor of the -school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right across, outside -of the municipality building.
-I documented and recorded these public acts and I re-created the -collectively voiced scenario. This audio piece is a constellation of -different recordings and soundscapes of these public moments, a vocal -archive, published in the graduation exhibition of XPUB in 2024.
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-I would like to clarify and introduce some terms for you in order to
-read this text in the desired way. For a while, we will stay in the
-bight of this journey as we move into forming loops, theories and ideas
-on how interactive picture books can be used to foster curiosity for
-reading and creativity for children. I am building a web platform called
-Wink that aims to contain a children’s story I wrote and am making into
-an interactive experience, in relation to my research. Through
-this bight of the thesis, I feel the necessity to clarify my intention
-of using knots as a “thinking and writing object” throughout my research
-journey. Although knots are physical objects and technically crucial in
-many fields of labor and life, they are also objects of thought and are
-open for wide minds’ appreciation. Throughout history, knots have been
-used to connect, stop, secure, bind, protect, decorate, record data,
-punish, contain, fly and many other purposes. So if the invention of
-flying -which required a wing that was supported using certain types of
-knots was initiated with the knowledge of how to use strings to make
-things, why wouldn’t a research paper make use of this wonderful art as
-an inspiration for writing and interactive reading?
There is a delicate complexity of thinking of and with knots, which -ignites layers of simultaneous connections to one’s specific experience; -where one person may associate the knots with struggles they face, -another may think of connecting or thriving times. In a workshop in -Rotterdam, I asked participants to write three words that comes to mind -when they think of knots. There were some words in common like strong, -chaotic, confusing and anxious. On the other hand, there were variations -of connection, binding, bridge and support. Keeping these answers in -mind or by coming up with your words on knots and embodying them in the -practice of reading would make a difference in how you understand the -same text.
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-Seeing how these words, interpretations of a physical object were so -different to each other was transcendental. In this thesis, I am excited -to share my understanding of knots with you. My three words for knots -are resistance, imagination and infinity. Keeping these in mind, I -experimented with certain reading modes as you will see later on.
-Knots are known to be used 15 to 17 thousand years ago for multiple -purposes. These purposes were often opposing each other. For example, it -could be used to let something loose or to restrain it; for pleasure or -pain; for going high above or down below… I believe this diversity of -uses can also be seen in how people approach knots as an idea or a -metaphor. One can think it represents chaos where someone else might see -it as a helpful mark. Essentially, this diversity is what got me -interested in knots years ago and since then, I have found ways to -implement this “loop of thought” in my daily life and research methods. -There are two main reasons to why I chose to write this essay in a -“knotted” format. One is that I would like to share my process and -progress of research on this project and this involves “thinking with an -object”, in this case types of knots. In Evocative Objects, Sherry -Turkle, who is a sociologist and the founder of MIT initiative of -technology and self, refers to the object in the exercise of thinking as -emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain -relationships and provoke new ideas. I completely agree with this -statement through personal experience. The second reason is that I see -this as an opportunity to experiment if I can use knots as an -interactive (which is not in knots’ nature since they are mainly -practiced in solo) and playful element in writing. This is also why I -would like to take a moment to mention what happens to the interplay of -processes in which we call thought when we think with knots in -specific.
-For Turkle and Seymour Papert, who is a mathematician, computer -scientist and educator that did remarkable research on constructivism, -being able to make a reading experience tangible, or even physically -representable makes the process of thought more concrete. Concrete -thinking in this sense is a way of thinking that I adapted to in the -past years, where you think with the object and imagine it vividly -during the process and address meanings to it as you read or write -along. This way it’s easier to compartmentalize or attribute certain -parts of a text to an imagined or real physical item which makes the -mind at ease with complex chains of thought.
-Imagine you are reading a story… What if you think of the string -itself as the journey and the slip knot (which is a type of stopper -knot) as a representation of an antagonist because of its specific use -in hunting, would this change your approach to reading this story? I -believe so…
-
Slipknot is widely
-used for catching small animals like rabbits and snares. It is also
-commonly used to tie packages.What if instead of a slip
-knot a bowline was on the string, would that represent something else in
-the story because of its usage in practice. A Bowline is commonly used
-to form a fixed loop at the end of a string; it’s strong but easy to
-tie, untie. Due to these qualities, we can imagine the bowline
Bowline is known to
-be used since 1627. Some believe it was used in Ancient Egypt because a
-knot resembling it was discovered in the tomb of pharaoh Cheops. Even
-after it’s used and very tight, bowline is still easy to untie, which
-makes it commonly used. to represent the conclusion in a
-story. What if we have a Square Knot, how would that change the course
-of a narrative? Square knot is used to bundle objects and make the two
-ends of the same string connect. From just this, we can use it to
-represent the connection between the beginning and end of a story. My
-point is, there are limitless implementations on how to use knots in
-literature because of their versatile purposes and the narrative
-vocabulary they create. Topologists are still trying to identify
-seemingly infinite numbers of combinations which we simply call “knots”
-and I see this as an inspiration to keep writing.
One example of the wondrous versatility and potential of knots is how
-they are used to archive and encrypt information. Incan people from the
-Andes region recorded information on Quipus, dating back to 700 CE
-Quipus are textile devices consisting of several rows of cotton and/or
-camelid string that would be knotted in a specific way to record, store
-and transmit information ranging from accounting and census data to
-communicate complex mathematical and narrative information (Medrano,
-Urton, 2018). Another example is the Yakima Time Ball, which was used by
-North-American Yakama people to show life events and family
-affairs.
Square knot is one of
-the oldest knots. Romans knew it as Hercules knot. A roman scholar
-claimed that it speeds up healing when used to secure a bandage. It is
-often used to tie belts and shoe laces.
This is why I humbly decided to document my research process with a -Quipu of my own. I am trying to symbolize the twists, decisions and -practices throughout this year with knots of my choosing. I was inspired -by Nayeli Vega’s question, “What can a knot become and what can become a -knot?”
-This thesis expects participation from its reader. You have the
-
Broken
-knots are knots that aren’t tied well, done with a wrong material or was
-under more pressure than it could take.option to have a
-mode of reading, where you will be guided by strings to This thesis
-expects participation from its reader. You have the option to have a
-mode of reading, where you will be guided by strings to start reading
-from a certain section according to the type of reader you are and read
-the loops one by one until the end, weaving through the text. To
-determine the string or mode of reading, there are some simple questions
-to answer. 
Bends are joining
-knots. They attach two strings together. The bend above is a sheet bend
-and it works well when koining two different strings and can take
-stress.
The three modes of reading are combine, slide, build. After you -discover the starting point with the yes or no map in the upcoming -pages, you will continue the reading journey through the strings of -different colors that will get you through the text. This way, the -linear text will become in a way, non-linear by your personal -experience.
-Bear in mind that you can choose to read this thesis from beginning -to end as a single string too if you wish so.
-Combine mode of reading is for readers who are more interested in the
-journey and the connections between process and result. Slide mode of
-reading is for more laid back readers who aren’t looking to connect
-ideas but are more focused on the motivation and purpose of the project.
-Build readers are detail oriented and academic readers who would prefer
-a “traditional” lead to reading. 
Hitches are used to
-tie strings to a standing solid object. Alongside the
-different strings to follow the text, there will be little drawings in
-the margins as seen above, which will have different representations
-like in a Quipu. Certain knots represent the experiences that raise
-interesting opportunities for research and distinct events I went
-through while making the project and underneath the drawing you can find
-the relation to the knot itself explained. For example if I couldn’t
-manage to do something I planned to do, this will be represented with a
-broken knot. Bend knots which are used to connect two strings, will be
-representing the relation between theories and my own
-experiences/motivations. Hitches which are knots that are formed around
-a solid object, such as a spar, post, or ring will be representing the
-evidence or data I have collected on the subject. We move on now with
-the working end and make some loops!
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1 1
-1
My desire to write a children’s book about grief and memory ignited -when I was studying in college and doing an internship in a publishing -house in Ankara. I was struggling to process a loss I experienced at the -time and to find something to cling to on a daily basis. Then one day I -started hearing a buzzing sound in my bedroom at my family’s house. I -searched everywhere but couldn’t find the source for this noise. I asked -my father and he started searching too. A couple of days passed and the -buzzing was still there.
-One day I found a bee on the floor in my bedroom and realized that -the bees nested on the roof and were coming inside my room through a gap -in the lamp. I was terrified because I have an allergy to bees and -thought they might sting me in my sleep. This moment was when I realized -I was so determined to find this buzzing sound for some time that I -forgot about dealing with the loss I was experiencing. This made me feel -very guilty and I remember thinking I betrayed the person I lost.
-As funny as it may appear, I felt like I was sabotaged by these bees -that I thought were here to hurt me but in the end they made me -understand that its ok to let things go and every being does what it has -to do to find its way of survival. The little habitat that they chose to -create in my room seemed like a calling or a sign that I can aff ect -another living being significantly without being aware of it. This goes -for everything, no matter if some people leave us in this world, they -have living matter in us that keeps pulsing. So then I started -researching bees and their ecosystems. I read Alan Watts, Alan Lightman, -Emily Dickinson, Maurice Sendak, Meghan O’Rourke, Oliver Sacks, Joanna -Macy, Rilke, Montaigne and theories on order in chaos, correlative -vision, harmony of contained conflicts and the mortality paradox. I -wrote a lot and erased a lot and fairly figured out the wisdom of not -knowing things.
-Years passed and I wrote and deleted and rewrote the story that I am
-working on to make interactive today so many times and was waiting on it
-because it always felt incomplete. In a way it will always be incomplete
-because of the natural ambiguity the topic carries. Years later, grief
-was back in my life with the loss of my grandfather. So therefore, the
-story I wrote and abandoned changed again as I attempted to rewrite it
-as a diff erent version of myself with a diff erent understanding of
-death. And this went on… The story remained hidden and I forgot why it
-ever existed in the first place. I wrote and deleted
-and rewrote the story 3 times already. Last year when two
-earthquakes hit Syria and Turkey, I was drowned like everyone I know, by
-a collective trauma and grief. Then this horrible feeling flared up by
-neglect and desperation. It was and still is impossible to mourn so many
-strangers at the same time. I lost two dear friends, I was furious, away
-from home, mostly alone and remembered vividly my failed attempt to
-understand or place grief in one of the piles in my mind.
Previous months, I was working on this story (yes, again) but didn’t -know how to tackle the text because it was so diff erent to what I was -experiencing now, when compared to the last time I rewrote it. A tutor -asked me why I wrote this story in the first place and I couldn’t -remember. I kept tracing back to 2016 and step by step, remembered why, -as told above. The consciousness that this story is actually a personal -history of how I went through grief in diff erent stages of my life, -made me realise that it doesn’t have to be or even can be a perfect -story.
-In the end with the experience I had with loss, I believe the story
-turned out to be an ode to remembering or might I say an ode to not
-being able to forget or an ode to the fear of forgetting. 11 7
-4
The effect of storytelling knowledge on kids’ development and -creativity. What can we learn from open ended and multiple ending -stories?
-ability to form basic stories or to express their emotions through -fictional characters or events. Children are not born with a wide -vocabulary of emotions and expressions. They learn how to read, mimic -and express their feelings over time. The more children read, write and -are exposed to social environments, the more they widen their sense and -ability of expressing themselves. The language gained as kids comes in -many forms and storytelling plays a crucial role in this development. -The exposure to stories prepares the kids to the era of reading and -writing. Children come to understand and value feelings through -conversation (Dettore, 2002). When children are offered to read or share -stories, they also learn to understand people around them better and -gain emotional literacy.
-Storytelling has been a means of communicating with others for many -centuries. It is not only a way to discuss important events, but also a -way to entertain one another (Lawrence & Paige, 2013). Stories have -been told orally, in writing or with drawings for thousands of years and -some of these stories are still alive. This is because language is a -living thing that travels through time and still remains brand new. When -necessary, it just adapts form, evolves and blends in with the changing -world. Children comprehend the idea that they have a story to tell by -hearing other stories and this ignites the imagination. We tend to -forget many things but almost everyone remembers one small story they -heard or read when they were a kid, this moment we remember is the -moment a certain story sparked for us.
-Nowadays storytelling takes many forms. For example, some readers’
-story might even begin from here although it isn’t the beginning.
-Interactivity is one of the storytelling forms that can signifi- cantly
-improve children’s creativity. This is mainly because children as
-readers or listeners get to contribute and aff ect the story. This of
-course requires and improves creative and active thinking. Getting the
-chance to choose a path for a fictional character gives the child the
-freedom and confi dence of constructing a world, a character or an
-adventure. Although this is essentially “writing” as we know it,
-children think of this as a game, yet to discover they are actually
-becoming writers. What kind of reward can we expect from active
-participation in a story? Narrative pleasure can be generally described
-in terms of immersions (spatial, temporal, emotional, epistemic) in a
-fictional world (Ryan, 2009). When we are set to create or co-create a
-world, the narrative has effects on us such as curiosity, suspense and
-surprise. At this point, we start creatively producing ideas to keep
-these three emotions. Multiliteracy
-theory helped me ground my passion of using multimedia for children’s
-literature. Interactive storytelling reminds everyone but
-especially children that there are limitless endings to a story that is
-solely up to the maker’s creation. Learning to think this way instead of
-knowing or assuming an end to a story, I think influences the children’s
-decision making abilities and sense of responsibility towards their
-creations. It is basically the same in theatre where if an actor chooses
-to create an imaginary suitcase on stage, they can’t simply leave this
-object they created on stage and exit the scene because the audience
-will wonder why the actor didn’t take the imaginary suitcase as they
-left. In this case, when kids decide to choose a path or item or any
-attribute for a character in a story, they feel responsible and curious
-to see it through to the end or decide what to do with it. This
-interactivity therefore creates a unique bond between the reader/writer
-and the text.
There are many theories on how to approach interactive literature for -children. Multi-literacy theory and digital literacies are some of the -theories which I find relevant to my aim with Wink. Multiliteracy theory -in a nutshell is an education oriented framework that aims to expand -traditional reading and writing skills. This theory was developed by the -New London Group. They were a collective of scholars and educators who -addressed the changing nature of literacy in an increasingly globalized, -digital world. The theory explores multiple modes of communication -consisting The sense of storytelling settles for kids, starting from age -three. By this time, children have the of multimodal communication, -cultural and social contexts, critical inquiry, socio-cultural learning -theory and pedagogical implications. Multimodal communication focuses on -the variety of communication techniques. This was groundbreaking in the -90s because of its acknowledgment of a diverse range of literacies and -its departure from traditional approaches to literary texts. This theory -includes new media and communication studies such as visual, digital, -special and gestural literacies.
-I kept this theory in mind as I chose the interactivity elements to -use in the picture book. I think the usage of multiple media such as -sound, image and games is a good way to start and diff erentiate from a -regular interactive e-book. The fact that this theory has an educational -perspective and is taking the rapidly changing qualities of literature -seriously, made me consider it as a guide in designing the -prototype.
-Looking through the perspective of multiliteracies, questions come up -for me that lead to the rest of this thesis: What is an interactive -picture book? Is it a book? Is it a game? Is it an exercise?
-What is it defined as? How can we design an interactive reading -environment without confusing children?
-8 9
-5
Differences and similarities between interactive e-books and -storytelling games.
-Storytelling games and interactive e-books have many things in -common. To begin with, they both centralize the narrative to engage the -audience. While both of these formats are storytelling tools, e-books -tend to stay more in a linear narrative and format when compared to -storytelling games where the audience is commonly the main character. -Reading experiences are also a way to be in the shoes of the narrator or -the character but in a storytelling game, you embody the mission and the -experience overrules the story most of the time. In the specific example -of a child, storytelling games are complicated and puzzle driven where -the player has missions to complete. Whereas in an interactive e-book, -the missions are solely based on the interactive elements implemented in -the text and images.
-Another difference is that the visual world in an interactive e-book -is less cinematic and has limited movement. The imagery plays a massive -role in a storytelling game where the world created is offered to the -player. In an interactive e-book, the text itself is designed to be -playful and ready for readers to discover.
-The main difference in my opinion that separates these two methods of
-storytelling is the reward. In a game, we expect to be rewarded by a
-victory, passing a level or unlocking something throughout the
-experience. In an interactive e-book, we work with the story and in
-return we expect a good experience and there is no reward other than
-that. But, the whole design of interactivity involves aspects of a game
-where the reader –not the player- is captured by surprise effects or
-elements that come up on the pages. This ignites curiosity but not
-ambition, which is a good start to foster the love for reading.
-5 4
-11
Ways of using interactivity in digital platforms
-CASA theory, also known as the Cognitive-Aff ective-Social Theory of
-Learning and Development, is a framework used in educational psychology
-to understand how learning occurs within the context of cognitive, aff
-ective, and social factors. Research on cognitive learning with keeping
-in mind the limited attention span and memory factors. For children in
-specific, I think these are very important factors to keep in mind when
-trying to design an interactive experience. This is because children get
-bored very easily and can be disengaged because of failure of
-solving/understanding something in a story. This is something I kept in
-mind as I wrote for children and chose the interactive elements in the
-story. CASA framework
-helped me understand the key elements in designing for
-children.
Finding the balance between making the interactive element surprising -and making it easy to interact with is the key to designing for kids in -this scenario. We don’t want to make them struggle and use the limited -attention span in a non-engaging way but we want to keep the reading -interesting enough so they want to continue.
-Digging deeper into how to do this, I found Children Computer
-Interaction (CCI) study very useful. This study examines how children of
-different ages and developmental stages interact with digital devices
-and how these interactions can support their growth. This made me think
-about digital gestures; how they change through generations and how to
-use these to design a platform where children can navigate easily and
-freely. CCI suggests that when introducing a new media to children its
-better to start easy and clear when they try it. Through this I think
-the best easy interaction is the tap or click for children. It is easy
-to do, instinctive and common. So I decided to base the interactive
-elements on click animations. CCI was a theory
-that helped me decide on the interactive elements. There
-are multiple ways to use digital gestures in storytelling to make the
-experience more intriguing. These are usually elements such as sound,
-animations, voice-overs that are ignited with a click or tap by the
-reader. For children younger than 5, its usually just tapping over the
-page and experiencing an action-reaction. For older kids between the
-ages 6-8, I made some workshops to figure out which types of interactive
-elements are most useful in engaging them in the reading process.
It is true that sound and animations are very inclusive and it is
-engaging for kids to find out which part of a page is interactive by
-clicking on images. Another thing I found out is that kids enjoy being a
-part of the story. For the prototype of Bee Within (the story I am using
-to test interactivity also can be read in the appendix) I will focus on
-color, sound and click based animations according to the results of my
-research. 4 3
-2
What is the target age group for the designated prototype and -why?
-It is tricky when it comes to choosing the right age spectrum for -children’s interactive literature. Children between the ages 3-5, -referred to as preschoolers have more developed social skills and day by -day increasing interest in play. They can take on roles in imaginative -play scenarios. They can also share and take turns more, listen and -think about rules of a game. They can form friendships and connections -easily.
-This
-data about school age children was a starting point to choose the age
-group to have the workshops with.
School age children are between the ages 6-12, which is Wink’s chosen -age group is a little different. These kids can form more rooted -friendships and engage in more complex narratives. They learn to -negotiate and compromise around this time as well. This age group is -desired for Wink because kids this age are open to creative problem -solving, connecting events and comprehending slightly more complex -narratives. Moreover, this age group would benefit the most from the -interactive stories and the reading process because of the developmental -phase they are in.
-The average amount of time children between these ages use on a daily -basis is depending on their parents and circumstances. But to be fair, -it is often not less than 2 hours. If a child isn’t very interested in -spending these hours reading a book, why not ask them: “Would you like -to be a part of a story?”
-Today, kids from age 3 can use digital gestures successfully and
-experience these as simple as flipping the page of a book. This is why
-it is fairly easy to create an interactive picture book which kids can
-navigate themselves and be able to browse through with or without their
-parents. But for Wink, I chose to design for older kids because I want
-to experiment on multi-leveled narratives and I want to avoid the risk
-of confusing children. 3 10
-7
Limits of interactivity in narratives for children and why do we have -less modes of reading and writing for children?
-Although there are many upsides of creating digital environments for
-children due to their advanced skills in technology from early ages,
-there are also risks involved in this where the kid can be overwhelmed
-and confused due to the autonomy they receive. Reading a story is
-supposed to be effortless and a good free time activity but with
-interactive picture books, it is slightly more than that and more
-complicated as an experience. 
This is the elbow of
-our strings. Elbows are created when an additional twist is added to a
-loop. In this case, it represents the counter argument in the
-string.
First of all, with the story at hand, called Bee Within, there are -two other stories in one. Although the main story is about a little -girl’s journey, kids get the chance to hear the Queen Bee’s story and -the tree’s story as well. This is not a must but if they interact with -certain pictures on the page, they will be led to the bee’s perspective -or the trees. This is where the storyline can get a little bit -complicated for younger kids. The child reader at this point should be -able to follow the main storyline after visiting the side quests or -stories presented in the interactive book. To create this balance I -tried to limit the interactive elements I used in the main story. I -tried to keep the picture animations limited and focused more on the -storylines.
-Another aspect I am concerned about after the workshop I did with the
-kids, is the risk of confusion due to an undefined and multimodal design
-for a “book”. Kids tend to be confused when they can’t define things or
-are asked to improvise without knowing the purpose.They know what a book
-is and that it is similar to what they encounter on the screen. But the
-method of reading and interacting with Bee Within is different than what
-they are used to. This concerns me because they might prefer to just
-read a book or play a game instead of discovering a new thing, which
-they are exposed to daily because they are always in a process of active
-learning. So one more thing to learn might come as exhausting.
-Therefore, in designing, I want to make interactions as clear as
-possible for them. 9 11
-8
Interactive reading and writing examples and surveys done with -kids.
-As an improvisation theater enthusiast myself, I tried to engage the -kids with the story through some exercises and games during the -workshops. My aim was to see how involved they want to be in -storytelling. Improvisation has a certain way of storytelling and -interaction where there are either too many options or none. You need to -have good empathy and harmony with the person you are acting with and -you are designated to be creative in your own way. I tried to use -several improv games and warmups to involve the kids in the story more -and see how they see certain characters from the picture book.
-My first attempt was to make a survey at the end of workshops with
-kids to whether they liked it or not, but when I researched further,
-surveying with kids has very different methods and complications.
-There is a
-broken knot here because I ended up not doing a survey with children at
-the workshops. Most kids either really like or really
-dislike things. Finding the in between emotions with a survey, ends up
-being vague. Most surveys done with kids use emoticons as representation
-of a good or bad or average time. Instead, I chose to observe the
-environment and understand how much empathy kids can offer in an
-interactive reading or playing environment. 6 2
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What does the joy of destruction and the awe effect have to do with -interactivity? Indeed, why did we ever start playing games? The most -important aspect of a game for me is that it surprises you and leaves -you in awe towards something you weren’t expecting happened. I feel like -every reaction I give when I’m surprised, is a mirror of what I felt -when I was playing freeze and had to stop moving at any given time or -when I found the last friend hiding somewhere in hide and seek. This -feeling of appreciation and unexpectedness is why most people remember -certain games, movies from their childhoods very vividly. Its an -introduction to a feeling we experience maybe for the first time because -we don’t necessarily learn from books how and when to feel surprised, -that is why it’s a surprise; we live it, experience it and it leaves and -impression with us.
-In my opinion, what drives everyone as a common denominator is
-amazement; because it takes us to our childhoods or distant memories
-where we first felt that feeling of awe. This is the main purpose behind
-any kind of interactive design and I think books can be an amazing
-medium to experiment this with. Specifically because this ancient device
-can take us to numerous worlds. For me as a millennial, books give me
-enough amazement as it is. But as I worked in publishing through the
-years and observed, I think kids today need something more to ignite
-their interest. There are so many factors in a picture book such as the
-image, the text and sound which can be played with to create an
-experience that is more surprising. This is the main purpose behind my
-research and protoype. Today’s world being visually stimulating and
-serving very short attention spans with social media, it is a tough task
-to insert a story or reading experience that requires full attention and
-patience. There are examples of Tiktok stories, Instagram reels, audio
-books and games that try to tell stories worth listening with attention.
-Wink is also an attempt to do this and I believe the key is to make an
-already engaging story enriched with interactive elements that appear to
-you through a click if you choose to. I think this is also the key to
-nourishing a new way of storytelling. 7 5
-3
Interactivity in reading and writing in history. What changed?
-Interactivity has always been an experimental area in literature from -inscriptions to narrative games then to playable stories and artificial -intelligence. I will expand some of these examples from the rich history -of interactive fiction. When I dig a little bit into the media -archaeology there are three still relevant aspects that strike me and -change/improve my approach to Wink. The first is the need to connect -that remains untouched through centuries of human communication, the -second is how there were multiple projects concerning interactive media -especially for kids that later turned into narrative games or remained -as prototypes and lastly how the integration of media and literature has -been such a grand topic even before information and technology era. Some -examples to this is music, masks, puppets, props used in -storytelling.
-Ancient texts with annotations such as The Odyssey, The Mahabharata -are maybe the earliest written interactive experiences in a historical -context. They are published with notes and explanations, clarifications -which make the text inhabit different opinions and approaches in an -engaging way where the reader can choose to hop on and off from the -annotation and margin texts.
-From the 70s to the present there have been many examples but I will -be focusing on a few here. One of them is, Choose your own adventure -books which allowed the reader to participate in the plot. These still -exist as picture books where you are directed to certain pages according -to the choices you make throughout the story. Along with this were also -board games and cards that required interactive inputs. Some examples to -this is exploding kittens or cards against humanity where the player has -the autonomy to be creative and fill in the blanks to win the game. -Simultaneously, text-based adventure games such as Zork and Adventure -were popular. Early days of computing offered a wide space for exploring -virtual worlds. In the early 80s, hypertext fiction contributed to -electronic literature. Hyperlinks were used as a tool to navigate a text -and choose paths of reading. This inspired me to write this thesis with -different modes of reading as well. After the 80’s, Interactive fiction -gained popularity as a genre of interacting with text based input. -Dynabook by Alan Kay was prototyped during this time as a promising -reading and writing device designed for children.
-The 21st century offers a combination of text and illustrations in -augmented reality books that have animations, sound and external -interactions. These are followed by digital storytelling platforms like -Wattpad and Storybird and interactive e-book apps such as Pibocco, Bookr -and Tiny Minies. Most of these apps are dedicated to education however -and not solely to creativity. Their aim is to use creative elements to -foster education for kids.
-With Wink, I want to use a mainly educational tool (a book) to foster -creativity and expression. So I believe it is the opposite purpose as to -these examples in certain ways. I am trying to combine the delicacy of a -narrative where you can only be a reader and the excitement of -autonomous writing and experiencing.
-This is because I think the understanding and usage of media changed
-in the last years. Some tools that created the awe effect for users
-faded and left their place to more compact designs. Although audio books
-were very welcome at some point, younger users nowadays prefer book
-summary apps or podcasts to them. Of course they are still used and not
-outdated but there is certainly a visible change to where media is
-heading. 10 8
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Experimentation of creative exercises to be used in WINK. Exercises -of storytelling with words, images, drawing, sound and gestures.
-Before I completed the prototype of Wink, I reached out to an
-international school in Rotterdam to make a 20 minute workshop with kids
-between ages 6-8. The aim here was to grasp the interactive elements in
-the picture book to implement in the digital framework. I wanted to see
-which parts of the story the children found exiting and which ones are
-not so thrilling for them. It also helped me draw the pictures for the
-book accordingly and edit the text with their reactions in mind. Due to
-a privacy agreement, I couldn’t record or use any data from the workshop
-but I made some helpful observations from my time there. This loop is all about
-the observations I made during the workshops and the decisions I made,
-according to the results.
The first workshop I planned consisted of two main parts that made up -20 minutes. The first 10 minutes we read Bee Within (attached in the -appendix) together in a circle and the last 10 minutes we played little -improvisation games, focused on the three main characters in the story -(the bee, the kid and the tree). I made three groups and gave these -groups the three characters. I asked them to embody a character -throughout the workshop and be loyal to it. Each group of three had 1 -minute on the stage to silently improvise their characters. They were to -use one sentence if they wanted to speak.
-During the first part, I couldn’t observe as I was busy reading but -their teacher kindly took notes during this time, regarding the -children’ reactions to parts of the story. I inserted the bees and trees -narrative to the reading by tossing the paper I had in my hand and -picking up a new one as I kept reading the bees and trees story. This -was crucial because I wanted to see if this multiple stories in one -concept would be confusing for kids. The teacher told me that they were -excited about my gesture of juggling papers as I seemingly read one -story. They were intrigued and confused at first but they did keep up -with the storyline and understood all. Her notes basically said they -were very focused and less interested in the kids journey. They really -liked the bee and were a bit confused with the tree.
-There were 12 international kids and 3 of them didn’t want to join -the workshop, they wanted to observe. I told them that they could paint -and draw what they see. The drawings they made were of their classmates -acting as trees or bees. They drew their classmate with a stinger and -the other was of a classmate as a tree with his hands wide open as he -was performing.
-What struck me most on the second part of the workshop was how these -kids used the room so freely and in relation to their characters. -Because we read the story before the improvisation games, some of their -characters were influenced by how it is in the story we read. Next -workshop, I am planning to not tell the story but to talk about it -before and give context. This is because I want to see how their -understanding changes without a limitation of a story.
-Bees in the classroom that day were all very active and they used -chairs, tables and windows to position themselves in a higher -perspective. Children who played the kid were usually standing closer to -the trees and looked very calm. Trees were all very different. One of -the kids used postits as leaves. Some of them didn’t have leaves because -it is winter. Trees didn’t move at all and the bees were buzzing all -around. “The kid” usually sat near the tree, on the tree (as in the -other performers’ lap or hugged them).
-Overall only 2 groups used the option to say a sentence which were,
-“I want to go on an adventure”
-“I don’t wanna leave Gray(the tree)”
This was a good feedback for me because I realized they are very -perceptive of actions and facial expressions rather than words. The -workshop we did in the studio with XPUB 2 students was harder than the -session with the kids because everyone felt so restricted to obligations -and were not comfortable to let go of bodily control. No one actually -attempted in using objects from the room which is a huge difference with -the kids because they drew on their faces, used plastic bags as wings -for the bee and made sounds with their mouths as trees.
-The next workshop was to discover how improv would work without -reading the story first. This workshop was fruitful because it helped me -realize how much information or guidance I have to offer for children in -order for them to be comfortable to participate and interact without -confusion. We made a circle and I summarized the story to the kids, -acting in the middle of the circle. This broke the ice completely -because I was a part of the workshop and they thought I was funny. For -the next part, I divided the group in three and assigned a character to -them. After this, I asked them to decide on an attitude, pop in the -middle and tell or act out their character. I went first and they -followed easily. They were not under the influence of the story so the -performances were different but they still got influenced by each other, -which in my opinion is inevitable. Some of the kids were buzzing/running -around, the “kids” were walking around, acting like they are playing -which I found very interesting. Some trees were small some were mighty -and old. It was helpful to see the different attributions they gave to -the characters.
-After the circle session, they separated in three groups: the kids,
-the bees and the trees. I asked each group to come up, walk around
-randomly, embodying the character they chose. Then as I rang the bell, I
-asked them to change the character. I asked them to be a busy, tired,
-injured, happy and scared bee one by one. They kept walking randomly and
-acted these feelings out. For the “kids”, I asked them to be angry, sad,
-scared, and curious. For the trees I asked them to be wise, mad, funny
-and happy. The results were amazing. They adapted very quickly to the
-changing of emotions which showed me that this age gap was good to work
-with. The trees stopped walking as I changed the emotions and this was
-an affirmation to not animate the tree with movement but more with
-changing of color and tiny animations. They mostly used arms and face
-expressions to show the emotions, some of them ducked or made sounds. As
-I said mad, one of the kids ran and put her red jacket on. This made me
-think about using color to show emotions for the tree. It was good to
-see that they weren’t scared or discouraged by negative emotions as
-well. We ended the workshop by drawing our characters. It was nice to
-see them own their imaginary characters enough to draw them with joy.
-There is a
-broken knot here because I changed my mind about adding motional
-elements to the tree character. Kids seemed to see the tree as
-stationary.
The last workshop was dedicated to discovering the sound aspect. The -tree in the story speaks in verses so I chose one verse and -read/performed it in a circle to begin with. Then I gave them some -instruments: a drum, a bell, aluminum folio, a balloon and a bubble -wrap. I asked for a few volunteers and they made sound effects as I read -the verse very slowly. This went good and I saw that they like to -dramatize the sounds and make them funny or unexpected. They used the -bubble wrap to make sounds for snowing or aluminum folio for the -volcano. They had great fun but I think I made a mistake by making a few -kids do foley at the same time because they didn’t know how to take -turns and were hesitant at first. Then quite impressively, they made -their own system where they took turns to make effects for each -sentence.
-Then I made four groups of three. 3 kids as actors and 3 kids as -foley actors. They buddied up and made short scenes where one group made -sounds effects to the others acting on stage. This was the best part of -this workshop because they could lead the actors with the sounds they -made or vice versa. This I think is very important because it shows that -they like to be a part of or be effective to the story itself. They were -very creative in using the objects in the room and turning them into a -tool for sound. They enjoyed to foley the bee and the other characters -not so much. Which showed me that I should focus on the sound of the bee -in the prototype.
-Overall, the workshops were very helpful for me to understand where -to focus on as I develop. I realized that some of the sound, color and -movement animations I planned were too complicated and I decided to make -them more simplistic. I decided to animate the tree with only color -because I was effected by this one participant who took the red jacket -to represent the tree was mad. For the bee I decided to focus on sound -more. For the kid I decided to use more visual animations to make it -more interesting.
-One other thing the workshops helped me with is the multiple stories
-I am planning to tell in one narrative. The book I have has two side
-quest/stories so it nice to see that kids weren’t confused with these
-narratives. I decided to make the story of the tree as a click game
-where the lines appear by clicking and the bee’s story through a text
-based game. I wanted to use click game with the tree because it seemed
-like they needed more stimulation to be interested in that story and I
-though a ‘reveal the story’ click game could keep them interested. For
-the bee, knowing they like the character, I wanted to make it more like
-a game to give the kids a chance and autonomy to be a part of the story
-itself. 2 6
-9
The differences of these exercises in WINK than the already existing -interactive e-book platforms The interactive e-book apps existing today, -made especially for children, are quite similar in both format and -purpose. If we take a look at Bookr, Piboco, and Kotobee, we can see -they seek a new way to tell a story but have one mode of reading. The -stories are linear and can be read once, without side quests. This is -the main difference with what I am trying to design. Wink acts as a tool -to play with and choose paths. The story isn’t linear in the traditional -way where you interact with the pictures and finish the book but there -are side stories to the main story that they can discover or choose not -to. I think this is a solid difference. This makes it a playable -narrative, different from a book.
-This prototype is a good start to see how far I can get with the -interactive elements and side stories without confusing or discouraging -the children. There are many other aspects that can be implemented to -this design such as writing elements and drawing but for the meantime, -also in correspondence with the workshops, I choose to test the sound -and image along with one main and two small narratives.
-For future prototypes, I envision space to draw and write as a -contribution to the story and maybe turning Wink into a hybrid format -with more autonomous features. For me, at this point, it’s valuable and -essential to see if my technique of combining narratives is working or -not.
-12 12
-12 After many loops of
-thought, we are here at the standing end of the thesis. There is room
-for more loops and knots in the future to secure this string of thought
-but for now, we have come to the dock and rest ashore.
Reading this thesis with a string, using concrete thinking as a -technique to go through a research and text was a helpful exercise for -me and helped me mark my thoughts and ideas. The overarching theme of -knots and experimental approach to modes of reading was valuable for me -to share and try as an enthusiastic young writer. I like that I asked -the reader to interact with the thesis and follow paths accordingly.
-It was enlightening to see the results of working with kids and be -able to see from their point of view and alter everything according to -these encounters. Using CCI and Multiliteracy theory as a guide to -approach the design and prototype was helpful in understanding how to -approach and tackle the desire of making something for children.
-Now from where I stand, I feel more rooted and have a clearer idea of -what works and doesn’t work. Some features that I think would work very -well like the choice of writing didn’t go as planned because multiple -narratives is already too much. I realized I underestimated the effect -of introducing a new media to children. This is why I decided to take it -step by step with the interactivity.
-Taking a step to make Wink and using the story I wrote and feel is -important in my personal history as a prototype was a breakthrough. I -feel like my interest and desire to discover new ways of writing, -reading and experiencing literature is ongoing and it was a beautiful -journey so far. I am looking forward to making more knots on this long -and mysterious string at hand.
-Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (2009) ‘“multiliteracies”: New Literacies, -new learning’, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), pp. 164–195. -doi:10.1080/15544800903076044.
-Dettore, E. (2002) “Children’s emotional GrowthAdults’ role as -emotional archaeologists,” Childhood education, 78(5), pp. 278–281. doi: -10.1080/00094056.2002.10522741.
-Ingold, T. (2015) The life of lines.London, England: Routledge.
-Lawrence, R. L. and Paige, D. S. (2016) “What our ancestors knew: -Teaching and learning through storytelling:What our ancestors knew: -Teaching and learning through storytelling,” New directions for adult -and continuing education, 2016(149), pp. 63–72. doi: -10.1002/ace.20177.
-Papert, S. and Papert, S. A. (2020) Mindstorms (revised): Children, -computers, and powerful ideas. London, England: Basic Books.
-Ryan, M.-L. (2009) “From narrative games to playable stories: Toward -a poetics of interactive narrative,” StoryWorlds A Journal of Narrative -Studies, 1(1), pp. 43–59. doi: 10.1353/stw.0.0003.
-Smeets, D. and Bus, A. (2013) “Picture Storybooks Go Digital: Pros -and Cons,” in Quality Reading Instruction in the Age of Common Core -Standards. International Reading Association, pp. 176–189.
-Strohecker, C. (ed.) (1978) Why knot? MIT.
-The Effect of Multimodality in Increasing Motivation and -Collaboration among 4th CSE EFL Students (no date).
-Turkle, S. (ed.) (2014) Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT -Press.
-Urton, M. M. &. (2018) The khipu code: the knotty mystery of the -Inkas’ 3D records, aeon. Available at: https:// -aeon.co/ideas/the-khipu-code-the-knotty-mystery-of-the-inkas-3d-records.
-Vega, N. (2022) Codes in Knots. Sensing Digital Memories, The Whole -Life. Available at: https://wholelife.hkw.de/ -codes-in-knots-sensing-digital-memories/.
-Thank you Marloes de Valk, for your enlightening feedbacks and ideas. -Thank you Michael Murtaugh, Manetta Berends, Joseph Knierzinger, Leslie -Robbins and Steve Rushton for sharing your time and knowledge with me -throughout these years.
-Thank you XPUB friends for funny, hectic and memorable moments we -made together.
-Thanks to my family and especially Kemal, my brother, who supported -me in my studies and encouraged me to do better, always…
-So long and thanks for all the fish!
-Wink is a prototype for an interactive picture book platform. This -platform aims to make reading into a mindfull and thought provoking -process by using interactive and playful elements, multiple stories -within one narrative and sound elements. Especially today where -consumerism and low attention span is a rising issue especially amongst -young readers, this was an important task to tackle. The thought of Wink -emerged to find a more sustainable and creative way of reading for -elementary school children.
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-Working as a children’s literature editor for years, I came to a -realisation that picture books were turning into another object that -kids read and consume on daily basis.
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-Teachers and parents were finding it difficult to find new books -constantly or were tired of rereading the same book.
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As a young person in the publishing sector, I believe there should be -more options for children as there is for adults; such as ebooks, -audiobooks etc. But moreover a “book” that can be redefined, reread or -be interacted with… So I revisited an old story I wrote, translated to -English and called it, “Bee Within”.
-Bee Within, is a story about grief/memory and it is based on my -experiences throughout the years. I erased it, rewrote it, edited it, -destroyed it multiple times over the past years; simultaneously with new -experiences of loss. In the end, I believe the story turned out to be an -ode to remembering or might I say an ode to not being able to forget or -an ode to the fear of forgetting which I now think is a great and sweet -battle between death and life. I think it is an important subject to -touch upon, especially for children dealing with trauma in many parts of -the world.
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-Over the past two years, experimenting with storytelling techniques, -interactivity options and workshops with children and adults, around -reading and doing various exercises on Bee Within, I improved the story -to be a more playful and interactive one which can be re-read, re-played -and eventually re-formed non digitally to be reachable for all -children.
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-Stephen Kerr
-⊞
-Thesis submitted to the Department of Experimental Publishing, Piet -Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, in partial fulfilment of the -requirements for the final examination for the degree of Master of Arts -in Fine Art & ⊞: Experimental Publishing.
-Adviser: Marloes de Valk
-Second Reader: Joseph Knierzinger
-Word count: 7828 words
This symbol represents design in this writing in an attempt to avoid -the assumed meaning of the word and examine it as something unknown, to -mystify it, to examine its structure. The label ⊞ is a functional part -of a belief system involving order, structure, and rationality and I -want to break it. Removing the label is part of loosening the object, -making it avilable to transition (Berlant, 2022).
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-This document is a collection of fragments exploring beliefs about -labour in the creative industries, in particular graphic ⊞. Each -fragment focusses on the social, cultural, political, spiritual or -religious aspects of these beliefs through an ethnographic lens. They -record, celebrate and question the meaning that ⊞ers give to their -actions and how those meanings affect the world they live in. And it’s -about how ⊞ers feel when we live with these beliefs: we feel a bit funny -and I want to talk about it.
-I use various modes of address and different lenses to further -fragment the definition of ⊞. The origin of the word thesis is to set or -to put, but I am trying to show you something liquid that can’t be -placed but shimmers and disappears through the sand. I document some ⊞ -activities, in my own work and the work and writings of others who -identify with the label of ⊞er. The writing dissolves and reintegrates -definitions of ⊞ from different voices to show the multiplicity of -beliefs from practitioners, and to explore what it means to acknowledge -these beliefs beside eachother: the tensions and harmonies, some -lineages and some breaks. What is going on here in this thing we call -⊞?
-This is a collection of stories about living life with particular -working conditions, located at certain points in social, economic and -cultural webs. In my practice-based research I gather and tell these -stories through (auto)ethnographic methods: documenting how ⊞er’s work, -conducting interviews, improvising communal performances and exploratory -tool-making. This document collates and reflects on this research.
-The precarity of working in the creative industries, in particular as -a freelancer or within a small studio, induces anxiety. There is a -belief that the ⊞er as freelancer is empowered by their autonomy, but in -fact the ⊞er as worker is trapped by it. ⊞ is work and this work is -believed to be inherently good. Work in our society is understood as “an -individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation” which -shapes the worker’s identity in positive ways (Weeks, 2011). The ⊞er -believes they are a skilled or talented worker, someone who possesses -spatial awareness, time management skills, and the capacity to carry out -work effectively and efficiently.
-⊞ers are entangled in the Protestant religious underpinnings of the -European work ethic (Pater, 2022). ⊞ is seen as a vocation which -expresses and creates the ⊞er’s identity, and the process or its results -make a valuable contribution to society. People understand the world and -interact with it smoothly, thanks to the work of ⊞ers. ⊞ers pick the -right materials to save the planet and increase efficiency and whatever -else it is people find important. But the ⊞er becomes anxious despite -meeting these goals and becoming this person. In reality, the ⊞er is a -bot, the ⊞er is software. Value is extracted from their time, creativity -and expertise which makes them stressed. ⊞ers are a creative cloud, a -service to be tapped into, a cpu being run too hot. There is something -to be learnt from the revelation that being replaced by machines proves -we were being treated as machines all along.
-There was a belief that ⊞ could be a crystal goblet (Warde, 1913), -something unbiased, clear and, in more recent versions of the theory, -serving the context it fits within. But the foundations of this belief -in functionality and rationality dont seem to come themselves from -something functional or rational.
-De Stijl members, such as Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg -(Figure 6), in their 1917 manifesto described a “new consciousness of -the age […] directed towards the universal”. There was a drive towards -universal standardisation or pureness of culture from the rich white -men. Purity is a concept that turns up a lot in Mondriaan’s writings, eg -Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art (1917). They claimed a shared -spirit was driving this universalisation. A later paragraph of the -manifesto is translated into english as:
-In this translation it appears the authors believed in an emerging -consciousness of the age, something collective which would bring an -international unity. The members of De Stijl were neither aligning -themselves with the capitalists or socialists but believed in an inner -connection between those who were joined in the spiritual body of the -new world (De Stijl, Manifesto III, 1921). The word intellectual, or -geestelijk in the original Dutch, can also be translated as “spiritual, -mental, ecclesiastical, clerical, sacred, ghostly, pneumatic”. The -choice to translate as intellectual seems to be the most rational -interpretation of this sentence, an effort to make the theories of De -Stijl appear more materialist without the spiritual element. Compare -with this translation:
-In this translation it is clearer that the members of De Stijl saw a -link between the effects of what they made materially and their attempts -to be fighting spiritually against the domination of individualism. I -care about this story because of how it contextualises contemporary ⊞ -practice. Is contemporary ⊞ practice still involved in this spiritual -battle? Did the new consciousness of 1917 survive the past century, did -it procreate? Can aesthetics have generational trauma? William Morris, -Constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, International Style, International -Typographic Style, Swiss Style, then what happened. Modernist artists -had spiritual beliefs, and again I care about these people from a -hundred years ago because of the effect they have on the present.
-Imagine I could trace this thought from Mondriaan all the way to -myself, wow, cool thesis. Swiss style became corporate identity ⊞ and -encouraged minimalism in ⊞. 21st century Flat ⊞, such as Metro ⊞ -language from Microsoft and Material ⊞ (Google, 2014), claim direct -descendance from the International Typographic Style and that pretty -much brings us up to date. I wonder about the use of the word Material -in Google’s ⊞ strategy, I wonder about the ghostly absence of the -geestelijk fight of De Stijl. Is Google’s choice of name another -example, as with the subtle change in the translation above, that the -spiritual element is no longer as important a part of the ⊞er’s -worldview as it was a hundred years ago?
-Conor Clarke is a Director of ⊞ Factory, independent Irish ⊞ -agency based in Dublin. His work has featured in international -publications such as Who’s Who in Graphic ⊞, Graphis, Novum -Gebrauchsgrafik, and the New York Art Directors Club Annual. He was the -recipient of the Catherine Donnelly Lifetime Achievement Award for his -contribution to ⊞ in Ireland and is the Course Director of ⊞ West, an -international summer ⊞ school located in the beautiful village of -Letterfrack on the West Coast of Ireland. (⊞west.eu, 2023)
-Why not choose a spiral or a circle if you dream of ⊞ers as shamans?
-Why the grid of squares? There are strong links beween ⊞ and
-mathematics, Josef Muller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems (Figure 2)
-for example or Karl Gerstner’s ⊞ing Programmes (1964). I read
-these ⊞ theorists as you might comparatively read religious texts. What
-were or are the beliefs of the authors and their audiences?
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These texts present a worldview where ⊞ can be mathematical, -objective or problem-solving. In Muller-Brockman’s text the focus is on -the formal qualities of the ⊞ in particular the use of grids and -typographic systems. Gerstner’s focus is more on the effect of the ⊞, -and the ability of ⊞ to solve a problem. Rationality and creativity are -presented as proportional to eachother. He makes space for the -intellectual by pushing aside feelings.
-The graphic ⊞er is presented as a functional actor in society who -makes the world better. Gerstner seems to be implying that creative ⊞ -comes from following the intellect and some rational cause and effect -process. I find it interesting that ⊞ claims this rational basis in the -same historical period when science and mathematics, its supposed -foundations, became much less rational and predictable, for example in -chaos theory. It makes me think that the rationality serves some other -purpose.
-Why do ⊞ers believe in using a grid to present the written word, and -where did this belief come from and how did it develop? It can be -materially traced back to Guthenberg and metal type but that’s boring. -Magic squares have been used in astrology books and grimoires throughout -history (Figure 3). French poet Stéphane Mallarmé is sometimes quoted as -a precursor to modernist typography (Muller-Brockmann, 1981). Why did -Steve McCaffrey include the manifesto of De Stijl with CARNIVAL -(1973)? De Stijl is best known for its painters and architects, and -theories from both of these fields affected later ⊞ theories. But they -also were poets and had literary theories similar to the german -expressionists. Man’s attempt to find oneness with the whole of creation -through a cosmic hybris.
-The developments of the written word and its relationship to form in -the 20th century is very much a part of the history of ⊞. I care about -this story because it affects contemporary practitioners. I believe -there is something magical in graphic composition and the layout of -typography, something that can’t be grasped in the words alone. They’re -non-canonical for ⊞ers but how have people who put words on pages like -Mallarmé and McCaffrey influenced my beliefs about the written word? -What makes one thing fit in the category of art, another ⊞ and yet -another concrete poetry?
-This autoethnographic annotation attempts to really miss as many -cultural and technical cues as possible. It’s watching the ⊞er, me, and -being totally mystified by their behaviour.
-I wasn’t trying to generate longing, I was trying to make an annual -report. It was a corporate job I was working on, a nice one to have -because it’s fairly well paid and not too complicated. A bit boring and -kinda repetitive, but you can just put your headphones on and get stuck -into it. I was pretty happy with the results in the end, but for sure -not the type of work you’re supposed to be proud of as a ⊞er.
-And of course Piet Zwart’s (Figure 8) famous electrical cable -catalogues. ⊞ is just work, chill. Is a ⊞er a user or a server? Maybe ⊞ -is an example of our general belief in this dichotomy not quite making -sense or fitting reality. The ⊞er is working for whom? Themselves? Their -clients?
-This quote relates to freelancing generally in some way, and -deconstructing the work or worker. Are workers things? Yeah, kinda. ⊞ers -don’t have super powers, contrary to some beliefs within the industry. -For example on what⊞cando.com it is suggested that we should “re⊞ -everything!”. Let’s actually not do that. ⊞ers are mostly just humans -working on computers like so many other bots. ⊞ers try to create -clarity, to assign meaning and understand: “Confusion and clutter are -failures of ⊞, not attributes of information” (Tufte, 1990, p.53). What -if the sounds of my fingers and my keyboard are not noise but music: we -are quasi-robots and maybe its good to listen to our little Taylorist -finger tappings and see what else is being said.
-Distinctive Repetition is an award-winning graphic ⊞ studio based in -Dublin, Ireland. Principal ⊞er and Institute of Creative Advertising and -⊞ past-president, Rossi McAuley, is joined in this interview by ⊞ers -Jenny Leahy and Ben Nagle. This interview was carried out around a table -with the interviewer in the bottom right corner (◲) and the three -members of the studio in the other three seats.
-Before meeting them in person, I mailed a small booklet to the
-interviewees entitled Enthusiasm to give context to the
-conversation. The word enthusiasm originally meant inspiration or
-possession by a god. The booklet recounted three mystical dreams René
-Descartes had which he credited as a moment of inspiration or enthusiasm
-that influenced his later work on rationalism, and related to his work
-on geometry and grids (Figure 4). As well as the content of the dreams,
-the booklet described their relevance:
-
Descartes felt that interpreting his dreams was an appropriate method -to develop a rational theory of skepticism, which led to some of the -philosophical foundations of modern scientific and mathematical -theories. The booklet also drew parallels with Martin Luther’s -scrupulous doubt, “Only God and certain madmen have no doubts!”. Like -Descartes, Luther’s new theories helped to give the basis for the -structure of thought for the following centuries. These stories were -presented together to direct the focus of the conversation towards -belief, rationalism and grids. The fact that rationalism is a belief -system, as pervasive as it may be, and suggestively hinting through its -relationship with grids that there -is a relationship with ⊞.
-They seem so sad it hurts to hear them talk about the oozing. Are you -supposed to put jelly in the fridge, it just needs time to settle right? -My nana used to put the jelly in the freezer. There’s an instability in -how they talk in the interview for sure, or more a desire for stability. -Was it ever stable? Do you really want it to be? Its gooey and not the -way it should be but its still jelly and thats fun and its probably -delicious. Their hands are there as something that is for grasping and -jelly is there as something that can’t be grasped. Is it terrifying, are -they resigned to it?
-I can’t explain the angst they are feeling but I can describe it -because I’ve felt it too. It feels like I’m having a heart attack. It -feels like I’m about to black out. It got to a stage where I couldn’t -talk to other people without being completely frozen jelly. It is the -feeling of lists and lists and lists. It’s the feeling of never -resolved, all the time. We believe we are busy and under pressure and -struggling to survive. That makes us anxious and stressed.
-The grids are not being used, the grids are useless. Drawers full of -them, all useless. Whats the point of sitting here in this studio. They -dont fit, they dont make sense, they’re trying to order something that -can’t be ordered. Or possibly shouldnt be ordered, the ordering is -misplaced and there is a human urge to stop, just stop.
-Adolf Loos was a modernist architect whose writings such as -Ornament and Crime in 1910 influenced modernist ideals of -functionalism and minimalism. He rejected ornament and favoured the use -of good materials which showed “God’s own wonder”. I wonder what is the -relation of Loos’ ideas to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the -Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1905) that was published five years -earlier. Work as a duty which benefits the individual and society as a -whole, do ⊞ers still believe this today? I like taking Loos’ quote out -of context here, instead in the context of the feelings of the -interviewees, revolting the supposedly modern cause they are working -with.
-But also Loos was found guilty of pedophelia and it feels kind of -aggressive to include his voice here at all. This is part of the point -of what I’m getting at: there’s this tradition of ⊞ and so many parts of -it make me uncomfortable or really disgusted and I don’t know what to do -with all that. I just wanted to go to art school and draw circles and -maybe thats the problem and sure simple materials are pretty, but yeah -jelly is exactly what it feels like, you’re right.
-Graphic ⊞ is often performed by paid professionals in what is known -as the creative industry: as a profession and an activity, ⊞ is -considered to be creative. There are some positive preconceptions about -the creative industry and what it does, but I see it as an assimilation -of cultural activity into a neoliberal economic framework. Creativity in -this context is used to reproduce the status quo and and grow capital -(Mould, 2018). But maybe we can profit from examining the margins -created by this terminology: ⊞ is less functional than it seems. People -in creative jobs are stressed and this is reflected in their dreams. -Workers have rights and those rights are systemically undermined. Being -self employed or part of an independent studio brings anxiety and -challenges. Some ⊞ers try to structure the world around them and like -things to be neat and tidy, which makes us uncomfortable existing in -precarious work conditions.
-The Roman grid was a land measurement method used in the Roman -colonies for example in the Po Valley (Figure 7). With a surveying tool -called the groma, the colonisers would divide the land from north to -south and east to west, resulting in a square grid of roads and land. At -Orange, France, a cadaster has been found which shows the division of -land in a geometric way, helping the colonisers to privatise the land -and allocate it to roman veterans (Figure 1). The name groma, as well as -referring to the surveying tool, describes the central point of the -grid, the origin. Is making grids just a way to control and colonise? Do -all grids have origins? In Descartes’ use of the grid there was also an -attempt to order and structure chaos:
-A part of the belief systems of ⊞ers is that the world is chaotic and -their role is to order it or even simplify it. This belief may be -inherited from a wider cultural belief of the same general drive: to -order and simplify. Humans try to make sense of the world. ⊞ers make -sense of ⊞ briefs and structure them into something understandable to an -audience or target market.
-Is there an answer to this question, do they know the answer to this -question? I get the impression they have a gut feeling about the answer -but are afraid of it.
-When reviewing the AIGA Next conference in Denver Colorado, 2008, ⊞ -critic Adrian Shaughnessy tells a joke:
-This joke is funny because in the setup where it is easy to tell them -apart, the reader should assume the beer fans are drunk and therefore -raucous, misbehaving or maybe just having a lot of fun. But then he -unexpectedly suggests that they were in fact more serious than the ⊞ers. -This gives the reader a problem to address: is he claiming the ⊞ers were -even more outrageous than what we assumed of the beer fans, or the beer -fans were in fact taking their own conference seriously? As both seem -unbelievable the true funniness of the joke hits home in it’s implied -meaning: ⊞ers are boring as fuck.
-⊞ers interact with the computer through keyboard and mouse usage. -Compared to other computer users, my interaction involves lots of -pressing of function keys, something common with other technical -computer users and not so much with other creative workers. What is -creative in the repetitive and low level operation of a computer? Is a -pianist creative? What’s the difference, I think they are being creative -in different ways. ⊞ers and other specialists like video editors or -photo colourists are using a computer as a tool, the musician is -performing on an instrument. Maybe this distinction doesn’t have to be -so clear though. I am questioning this here because I think there is -some fairly complicated belief system about artists and their tools that -has had an effect on ⊞ers. ⊞ gives itself a history of conflict and -harmony between artisans and industrialisation, for example in Bauhaus -founder Walter Gropius claiming William Morris as a precursor (Bayer, -1975).
-I think it is important to show that ⊞ers are workers with tools, -their repetitive tasks are a form of labour as are their creative -processes. In the annotation opposite my aim is to mystify the manual -and digital labour, rather than demystify the creative ideation -part.
-Following this annotation I made a digital tool to record all -keystrokes on my computer. Then I printed them out with a pen plotter to -celebrate the labour that had taken place. It took several hours to plot -the keylogging data from just a few minutes of the ⊞er’s labour.
-Like many other ⊞ers, I was trained to only use Adobe products. I try -to switch to open source alternatives because I believe in using -software developed and maintained by a community rather than a private -company, and as a worker believe I should be in control of my tools. In -this annotation, I was trying to ⊞ and export a single page document in -LibreOffice, an open source desktop publishing software. The -documentation reflects on my frustrations and struggles to switch to a -workflow that relies less on proprietary software for print ⊞.
-Proprietary software from big mean tech corporations is based on a -model of society and economy where a few people own things and everybody -else has a hard time. I believe the internet gives an opportunity for -knowledge (including software code) to be shared. I like the idea of -modifying my tools, this is easier technically and legally with open -source software. I would prefer my tools to be developed by me and my -peers. These are some of my beliefs as a ⊞er about my work and my tools. -They’re a bit idealistic but also optimistic in a good way.
-Transitioning to open source software sucks. I spent years learning -other tools and its like starting all over again. There is a dual -commitment in my beliefs about how my tools should be built and my -desire to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. My action of -fumbling with open source programs reflects my belief that they are -worthwhile, and my action of still using Adobe Acrobat Pro reflects my -belief that there are better things to do with my time than restarting -software when it crashes again. Some parts of graphic ⊞ have become so -entangled in capitalist ways of working, it can be immobilising to try -to act without engaging with the icky parts. Our dependencies on -ecosystems of tools and workflows are not enforced, but it can be -difficult to exist outside them, or more specifically, beside them.
-It’s so obviously not true. The conflict of wanting to change my
-workflow with wanting to complete my work tasks efficiently doesn’t keep
-me up at night, but it is important to me and other ⊞ers. Open source ⊞
-software is unreliable and unstandardised, it takes longer to do things
-and then when they are nearly done the program crashes and I’ve lost all
-my work. The standards of open source software have not been widely
-embraced by the ⊞ community. To fit into a workflow with peers you have
-to use Adobe products. Even web ⊞ers who engage with open standards can
-find the need to work with proprietary software, because these tools are
-deeply integrated into the workflows of their peers. Can you send me
-that in a normal file format please, I can’t open it.
-
Similarly to the software changes, this documentation of my practice -sees me choosing open source fonts. I’m really ambivalent about this. I -do like the idea of being able to modify a font when needed, but I have -done so regardless of whether the font licence allows it. I’m more -comfortable ethically with a font being open source. Buying fonts is -expensive for freelancers and small studios, and open source fonts are -more commonly free of charge. Many ⊞ers pirate fonts rather than buy -them, or are locked into a font subscription. In Adobe software, Adobe -subscription fonts don’t load unless a connection to the creative cloud -is verified.
-For my work, fonts are also a tool, one that I need to practice with
-and one that needs to be suitable for the job. So changing font is a
-little like a ceramicist changing clay. Work Sans is good for online use
-because Google Fonts serves it as a web font for free, the open source
-font I want to use is served most reliably by a large corporation I have
-issues with. This balancing act of practical considerations and
-idealistic beliefs is kind of ironic and reminds me again that my values
-can be inconsistent and to me a bit funny.
-
-The use of fonts as tools is full of tensions from ⊞ers’ belief systems.
-Like many ⊞ers, I want to use open source fonts. I also want to use
-fonts that will load quickly from a content delivery network for web
-projects. I also want fonts to be cheap and well made and I am
-interested in fonts that are free. The internet is full of illegal and
-pirated copies of fonts that are not supposed to be free of charge. I
-sometimes receive or am asked to send font files outside of their
-licence. I dont have a huge amount of respect for some of these
-licences. But at the same time font ⊞ers are my friends and colleagues,
-I have ⊞ed fonts. What does a ⊞er’s actual use of fonts say about their
-beliefs around copyright? Do ⊞ers believe in intellectual property? What
-value do ⊞ers, specifically typographers, see in their work and that of
-their close peers, the font ⊞ers, and how does copyright relate to these
-values?
Hey Conor, hope you’re keeping well these days? I’ve been going -through the interview from back in December and was wondering if you -would mind me including this piece in my thesis:
-I guess the thesis has become a lot about ⊞ers and the beliefs they -have about their work, and its effect on the world around them. I was -really interested in your answer to this question because I think it -shows something a lot of other ⊞ers including me feel too; some desire -to structure the world around us, to have things be resolved, organised, -fitting together. And not just a desire but maybe even a belief that -this is really what our job is for? Maybe I’m reading too much into it, -but to me this maybe hints at part of the reason we’re am drawn to a -field like graphic ⊞? Curious to know what you think.
-And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im -totally fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.
-Thanks,
-Stephen
Yo ◱, hope all’s good with you these days?
-I’ve been piecing together the interviews from December and I’d love -to include this section about your dream if that’s alright with you? It -seems to get at something I feel as well: this system that we’ve built -up and these drawers full of grids, sometimes there’s an angst or -unresolved feeling that they’re not going to work, they dont fit as an -answer to the problem.
-For me I think it might be something to do with order and chaos if -that doesn’t seem too much of a stretch, I’ve this need to structure -things and fit them in a form, and the dream seems to get at that fear -that it’s not going to work. The grid is solid but reality turns out to -be jelly at best, but very often custard and little bits of tinned -strawberry and soggy sponge.
-I assumed the dream is about the pressure or anxiety of running a -studio? I wonder for you, do you see it more relating to the work itself -or the management around that, or are these things that you consider -separate from eachother? I’m curious to know if you think of it the same -way, or maybe it’s something else to you and I’m projecting :)
-And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im -totally fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.
-Thanks,
-Stephen
Hey ◳, hope youre good!
-I’m thinking of putting this section of the interview we did back in -december in my thesis. Is that ok with you? I want to include it because -I think it really captures some emotions that ⊞ers feel quite often, -some stress or anxiety or an attempt to grab onto something more stable. -But I also find it really interesting that you were talking about jelly -slipping through your hands, any idea why you didn’t say sand or mud or -gold but jelly? To me it seems like a fun and cute material to pick, -even though its a bit lumpy and maybe even kinda gross sometimes.
-I’ve been really interested in foods made of gelatin recently and -there’s something so mesmerising about them even though they’re never -the most appetising, and for sure unnatural or over-processed. Maybe you -just said it off hand, but it makes sense to me as well about being a -⊞er in some way? Something enjoyable and lovable about the jelly despite -its weird unnatural wiggliness. Really interested to know if you have -any thoughts or maybe you meant something completely different.
-And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im -totally fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.
-Thanks,
-Stephen
The title of this document, ⊞, was borrowed from the mathematical -theory of free probability where it symbolises free additive -convolution, a way of relating terms that is more nuanced than -traditional ideas of cause and effect. In the fragmented look at ⊞ in -this document, which we’ve reached the end of now, I hope to have done -something similar: a convoluted addition, freely placing things together -to be held for a moment.
-⊞ involves a wide range of activities; typing, drawing grids, -communicating with other specialists, quoting, drinking coffee, working -out of office hours, having panic attacks, arguing, building myths, -personal expression, keyboard shortcuts, dreaming, rubbing paper and -exhaling, tilting your head and looking at the screen. We have examined -when and how these actions happen, and more importantly, why they do, -according to the ⊞ers carrying them out.
-These stories were gathered through various modes of describing, -listening and understanding. It is important that these are different -from conventional ways to frame the discipline, as I think a shift in -viewpoint is needed. So not “⊞er as Author” (Rock, 1996), “⊞er as -salesperson” (Pater, 2021) but instead ⊞er “sitting at the machine, -thinking” (Brodine, 1990) or “⊞er without qualities” (Lorusso, 2023). -The fragments have been situated and subjective rather than objective, -they have been outside of categories because the categories are broken -anyway.
-Last night I dreamt I was standing on a hill in the Swiss Alps and -you were there and all of our friends and the hill was covered in little -fields but not like a grid like lots of different shapes and sizes and -the sky opened in two and a ring of light so bright it nearly blinded me -came out of my chest and yours and they all merged into eachother and -everyone opened their mouths to sing and the air was filled with so many -sounds and one ⊞er walked up to me and smiled and said
-“I dunno, I’m more confused than ever”
and they said
and then you said
“a funny feeling its a bit weird”
“I’m just trying to touch it gently and acknowledge it”
“live the gap between where you are and where you could -be”
and then I was them and you were me and we laughed and fell over and -the hill turned into a bright pink jelly ocean the whole sky was this -sort of green-blue and we all surfed wobbly waves and some people’s -surfboards were Quiksilver and some they had built themselves from a git -repository but the sun was a walnut and it was definitely moving but I -couldnt tell was it rising or setting but it didn’t matter to us the -surf was great and everything smelled like magnolias.
-Thanks to Ada, Aglaia, Ben, Chae, Conor, Irmak, Jenny, Joseph, kamo, -Leslie, Manetta, Marloes, Michael, Rossi.
-Bayer, H. et al. (1975) Bauhaus, 1919-1928. New -York: Museum of Modern Art.
-Berlant, L. (2022) On the Inconvenience of Other People, -Durham: Duke University Press.
-Brodine, K. (1990) Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking: -Poems. Seattle: Red Letter Press.
-creativechair (2018) ‘Michael Bierut’ [Interview], Creative -Chair. Available at: creativechair.org/michael-bierut (Accessed: 15 -April 2024).
-Design West (2024) Design West. Available at: -designwest.eu (Accessed: 16 April 2024).
-Driessen, C. P. G. (2020). Descartes was here; In Search of the
-Origin of Cartesian Space’. In R. Koolhaas (Ed.), Countryside, A
-Report (pp. 274-297)
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-Gates, B (2004) Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software
-Architect, Microsoft Corporation [speech transcript] University of
-Illinois Urbana-Champaign February 24, 2004 Available at:
-web.archive.org/web/
-20040607040830/https://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2004/02-24UnivIllinois.asp
-(Accessed: 13 April 2024)
Gerstner, K. and Keller, D. (1964) Designing Programmes. -Teufen (AR): Niggli.
-Google (2014) Introduction, Material Design. -Available at: m1.material.io (Accessed: 16 April 2024).
-Hu, T.-H. (2024) Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an age of -disconnection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
-The Idea of the Book (2024) CARNIVAL: the first panel
-1967–70 [book description] Available at: theideaofthe
-book.com/pages/books/529/steve-mccaffery/carnival-the-first-panel-1967-70
-(Accessed: 13 April 2024)
Loos, A. (2019) Ornament and Crime. London: Penguin.
-Lorusso, S. (2023) What Design Can’t Do: Essays on design and -disillusion. Eindhoven: Set Margins.
-Mondriaan , P. et al., (1917) ‘Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art’, -De Stijl, Nov.
-Mould, O. (2018) Against Creativity. London: Verso.
-Müller-Brockmann, J. (1981) Grid systems in graphic ⊞. -Stuttgart: Hatje.
-Pater, R. (2021) Caps Lock. Amsterdam: Valiz.
-Rock, M., (1996) The ⊞er as Author. Available at: -2x4.org/ideas/1996/⊞er-as-author (Accessed: 16 April 2024).
-Shaughnessy, A. (2005) How to Be a Graphic ⊞er, without Losing -Your Soul. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.
-Shaughnessy, A. (2013) Scratching the Surface. London: Unit -Editions.
-Tufte, E (1991) The Visual Display of Quantitative -Information. Cheshire: Graphics Press.
-Van der Velden, D., (2006) ‘Research & Destroy: A Plea for ⊞ as -Research’, Metropolis M 2, April/May 2006.
-Van Doesburg, T. et al. (1917) ‘Manifesto I’, De Stijl, -Nov.
-Van Doesburg, T. et al. (1921) -‘Manifesto III’, De Stijl, Aug.
-Warde, B. (1913) ‘Printing Should be Invisible’ The Crystal -Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography, London: The Sylvan Press.
-Weber, M., (1905) “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of -Capitalism”, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften 20, no. 1 (1904), -pp. 1–54; 21, no. 1 (1905), pp. 1–110.
-Reading an email in a dream and you can hear the voices of every word -you read. Or the one where you’re on a computer working, frantically -typing, late, stressed, rushed. What about that dream where you had no -idea how to do your job, everyone is going to know you’re a fake. In -this project I have made spaces for us to share our dreams about labour, -and through that allow conversations about our work, our working -conditions, and the feelings we’re left with when we fall asleep each -night.
-For the past year I have spoken with designers, artists and makers -finding out how they spend their time in everyday life, what they -believe and how they feel. In our dreams we feel the weird bits the -most: hmm a bit uncomfortable, ooh that gave me a fright, aah so, so -sad. Through performances, online tools and storytelling, I want to hold -these dreams together, to unite our experiences. Online I have made tools to gather -stories and tools to tell them. I have facilitated group dream re-enactments (a few times), using felt dolls to share our night time -theatre.
-stephen kerr is a graphic designer or a musician or a very weird -and long dream.
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- - - - - - - - - -Special Issues are publications thrice released by first-year XPUB -Master’s students. Each edition focuses on a specific theme or issue. -The themes tie to external events and collaborations. Students and staff -work together to explore these themes, rethinking what a publication can -be. Each edition culminates in a celebratory release party.The -structure, tools, and workflows are reset every trimester. This reset -allows roles to rotate among participants and fosters an adapting -learning environment. It provides a space to experiment beyond -traditional collaborative methods.
-Our inaugural Special Issue was number 19, in collaboration with -Simon Browne. Garden Leeszaal was a snapshot of Leeszaal Library through -the metaphor of gardening. During the release, we invited participants -to engage with the library’s discarded books. We pruned, gleaned, and -grafted the books using pens, pen-plotters, scissors, and glue. Then we -harvested a book of our collective work. Garden Leeszaal was an open -dialogue. It was a tool for collective writing, a group-made collage, -and an archive. For us, being a gardener meant caring for the people and -books that formed the library.
-The following Special Issue was number 20, assisted by Lìdia Pereira -and Artemis Gryllaki. Console was 20 hand-made wooden boxes. It was an -oracle and an emotional first aid kit to help you help yourself. It -invites you to delve into its contents to discover healing methods. -Console offers refuge for dreams, memories, and worries. It guides you -to face the past. You will then meet your fortune and gain a new view -through rituals and practices. It prompts everyday questions with -magical answers, asking: Are you ready to play?
-Our last special issue was number 21. TTY was guided by kubernētēs -Martino Morandi and weekly guest collaborators. We started with a Model -33 Teletype machine, the bridge between typewriters and computer -interfaces. Through guest contributions, we explored the intersection of -historical and contemporary computing. The Special Issue evolved into an -ever-changing “Exquisite Corpse Network” chasing weekly publications. -Along the way, we created gestures, concrete vinyl poetry, phone -stories, and much more.
- -Public libraries are more than just access points to knowledge. They -are social sites where readers cross over while reading together, -annotating, organising and structuring. A book could be bound at the -spine, or an electronic file gathered together with digital binding. A -library could be an accumulated stack of printed books, a modular -collection of software packages, a method of distributing e-books, a -writing machine.
-In the Special Issue 19, How do we library that? or alternatively -Garden Leeszaal, we started re-considering the word “library” as a verb; -actions that sustains the production, collection and distribution of -texts. A dive into the understanding structure of libraries as systems -of producing knowledge and unpacking classification as a process that -(un)names, distinguishes, excludes, displaces, organizes life. From the -library to the section to the shelf to the book to the page to the text. -The zooming in and zooming out process. The library as a plain text.
-Like community gardens, libraries are about tenderness and -approachability. However, does every book and each person feel welcome -in these spaces? Publications are empty leaves if there is no one to -read them. Libraries are soulless storage rooms if there is no one to -visit them. People give meaning to libraries and publications alike. -People are the reason for their existence. People tend to cultivate -plants. Audiences tend to foster content. The public tends to enrich the -context. Libraries as complex social infrastructures.
-
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-The release of the Special Issue 19 was a momentary snapshot of the -current state of a library seen through the metaphor of gardening; -pruning, gleaning, growing, grafting and harvesting. Garden Leeszaal is -an open conversation; a collective writing tool, a cooperative collage -and an archive. We asked everyone to think of the library as a garden. -For us, being a gardener means caring; caring for the people and books -that form this space.
-During the collective moment in Leeszaal people started diving into -recycle bins, grabbing books, tearing pages apart, drawing, pen -plotting, weaving words together, cutting words, removing words, -overwriting, printing, and scanning. It was magical having an object in -the end. A whole book was made by all of us that evening. Stations, -machines, a cloud of cards, a sleeve that warms up THE BOOK.
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-Console is an oracle; an emotional first aid kit that helps you help -yourself. Console invites you to open the box and discover ways of -healing. Console provides shelter for your dreams, memories and worries. -Face the past and encounter your fortune. Console gives you a new -vantage point; a set of rituals and practices that help you cope and -care. Console asks everyday questions that give magical answers.
-Special Issue XX was co-published by xpub and Page Not Found, Den -Haag. With guest editors Lídia Pereira ♈︎ and Artemis Gryllaki ♐ we -unraveled games and rituals, mapping the common characteristics and the -differences between games and rituals in relation to ideology and -counter-hegemony. We practiced, performed and annotated rituals, -connected (or not) with our cultural backgrounds while we questioned the -magic circle. We dived into the worlds of text adventure games and -clicking games while drinking coffee. We talked about class, base, -superstructure, (counter)hegemony, ideology and materialism. We -discussed how games and rituals can function as reproductive -technologies of the culture industries. We annotated games, focusing on -the role of ideology and social reproduction. We reinterpreted bits of -the world and created stories from it (modding, fiction, narrative) -focusing on community, interaction, relationships, grief and -healing.
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-why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points -of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing -machine, an “expression-scriber,” if you will, then I would have a kind -of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & -use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, -head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, -itches, I’d have magnetically recorded, at the same time, & -translated into word or perhaps even the final xpressed thought/feeling -wd not be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three -dimensional-able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard -or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A -typewriter is corny!!
-Amiri Baraka, Technology & Ethos, -http://www.soulsista.com/titanic/baraka.html
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-This issue started from a single technical object: a Model 33 -Teletype machine. The teletype is the meeting point between typewriters -and computer interfaces, a first automated translator of letters into -bits. Equipped with a keyboard, a transmitter and a punchcard -read-writer, it is a historical link between early transmission -technology such as the telegraph and the Internet of today. Under the -administration of our kubernētēs, Martino Morandi, each week hosted a -guest contributor who joined us in unfolding the many cultural and -technical layers that we found stratified in such a machine, reading -them as questions to our contemporary involvements with computing and -with networks.
-The format of the issue consisted of on an on-going publishing -arrangement, constantly re-considered and escaping definition at every -point in spacetime, a sort of Exquisite Corpse Network. It evaded -naming, location, and explanation; the Briki, the Breadbrick, the Worm -Blob. A plan to release weekly bricks was wattled by a shared -understanding of time into something more complex in structure, less -structured in complexity.
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-Initially, the week’s caretakers were responsible for collecting -materials from our guest contributions, which included lectures, -collective readings, hands-on exercises, an excursion to the Houweling -Telecom Museum, Rotterdam and another to Constant, Brussels. The -caretakers were responsible for recording audio, editing notes, -transcribing code, taking pictures, and making lunch. Meanwhile the -week’s editors were responsible for coming up with a further step in how -the publishing progressed, by adding new connections and interfaces, -creating languages, plotting strikes and cherishing memories. This mode -of publishing made us develop our own collective understandings of -inter-operation, of networked care and access, backward- and -forward-compatibility, obsolence and futurability.
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-Teletypewriters ushered in a new mode of inscription of writing: if -the typewriter set up a grid of letters and voids of the same size, -turning the absence of a letter (the space) into a key itself (the -spacebar), the teletypewriter finished it by inscribing the space in the -very same material as all other letters: electrical zeros and ones, that -were to immediately leave the machine. The Teletype Model 33, one of the -most widely produced and distributed text-based terminals in the 1970s, -introduced multiple technological concretizations that are present in -the computers of today as a sort of legacy, such as the qwerty keyboard -with control keys, the ascii character encoding and the TTY terminal -capability. We have created short-circuits that allow us to remember -otherwise technical progress and computational genealogies.
-TTY was produced in april-june 2023 as special issue 21 with guest -editor Martino Morandi, and contributors Andrea di Serego Alighieri, -Femke Snelting, Isabelle Sully, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, and -Zoumana Meïté.
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-vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl
-Special thanks goes to the XPUB staff for their expert help and -guidance: Manetta Berends, Simone Browne, Artemis Gryllaki, Jeanne van -Heeswijk, Joseph Knierzinger, Michael Murtaugh, Martino Morandi, Lídia -Pereira, Steve Rushton, Kimmy Spreeuwenberg, Marloes de Valk and in -particular Leslie Robbins for her years of inexplicable -exceptionalism.
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-Photography and illustration: Unless otherwise stated, all -photography, illustrations and other types of visualisations in this -publication are created by the same authors as the text.
-Digital tools: Writing in Etherpad. Version control in git. Design in -Inkscape. Layout in paged.js. Printing in Adobe Acrobat.
-Licensing information: This publication is free to distribute or -modify under the terms of the SIXX license as published by XPUB, either -version one of the SIXX License or any later version. See the SIXX -License for more details. A copy of the license can be found on vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl/license.
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