This thesis is an assemblage(1) 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 borderland(2), 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-ethnographical(3) 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(4). 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.
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“on the other side is the river
and I cannot cross it
on the other side is the sea
I cannot bridge it”
(Parra, cited by Anzaldua, 1987, p.139)
### b o r d e r s
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.
![Front-facing camera at self-counter in LIDL]
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).
#### c o n d i t i o n a l h o s p i t a l i t y
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)
#### w a i t i n g
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”(6) 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.
#### “ t h e r i g h t t o h a v e r i g h t s ”
(Arendt, as cited by Khosravi, 2010, p.121)
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)
“…(9) I 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 *(10) 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 IND(11). 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."
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### b u r e a u c r a c y a s i m m a t e r i a l b o r d e r
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. It is as if they could never manage to eventually arrive and shelter their lives within the desirable “there”(12). “In these bordering processes, we can detect the “coloniality of asylum”(13) (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). 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.
#### h i g h e r e d u c a t i o n ‘s e x p a n d i n g b u r e a u c r a c y
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.”, (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.
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“t h e r e i s n o
D O C U M E N T
o f
c i v i l i s a t i o n
w h i c h i s n o t
a t t h e s a m e t i m e
a d o c u m e n t
o f b a r b a r i s m”
-Walter Benjamin-
(Pater, 2021)
#### t h e d o c u m e n t
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.
#### b u r e a u c r a c y a s t e x t u a l i n s t i t u t i o n
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.
#### t h e m y t h o f u n i v e r s a l i t y
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(14) 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)
#### m a t e r i a l i t y - u n d e r l y i n g v i o l e n c e
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”, (Roland 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 them(15). Bureaucracies are not stupid inherently rather they manage and coerce processes that reproduce docile and stupid behaviors.
[ The birthday biscuit that Chae made, re-creating the Dutch government form ]
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### v o c a l a r c h i v e s – t a l k i n g d o c u m e n t s
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 speech(16) 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.
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.
[ The linguistic experiment of the Quality Assurance Questionnaire Document ]
#### 2.
Title: “Department of Bureaucracy and Administration Customs Enforcement”
When: November 2023
Where: Leeszaal(17)
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.
[ Participants, during Leeszaal event, are waiting in a queue (18) to collect the application forms and sign1 ]
[ One of the forms that the audience had to fill out during the Lesszaal event ]
#### 3.
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 vosk(19) 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).
[ Part of the A6 booklet of the transcription of the passport readings session ] x2
#### 4.
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.
[ A6 booklet of the first chapter of the “theatrical” scenario created out of the Postal Address Application documents and performed by XPUB peers ] x2
-----------------------------------------
### (instead of) c o n c l u s i o n
#### (next chapters of the case with reference number A.B.2024.4.03188)
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.
[ Part of A6 booklet scenarios of the next chapters of my bureaucratic story aimed to be performed ] x2
-----------------------------------------
#### “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”(20)
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.
### s i d e n o t e s
1. I 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.
2. I use the word borderland to refer to Greece as a (mostly) transit zone in the migrants’ and refugees’ route towards Europe.
3. I 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.
4. “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)
5. Working title of the project
6. For further reading: https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/
7. One of the tactics for regulating or preventing the so-called unproductive hospitality is border control checks. According to the website of the Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands, “the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (RNLM) combats cross-border crime and makes an important contribution to national security. Checks are still performed at the external borders of the Schengen area. In the Netherlands, this means guarding the European external border at airports and seaports, and along the coast. By participating in Frontex, the European border control agency, the RNLM makes an important contribution to the control of Europe’s external borders in other EU member states. There is one single EU external border.” (Border Controls, 2017)
8. I would like to refer to the practice of Harragas introduced by my friend Rabab as a counter-act of dealing or breaking or burning the multilayered borders. The burners or Harragas is a term alluding to the migrants’ practice of burning their identity papers and personal documents in order to prevent identification by authorities in Europe. Crucially this moving out is in defiance of the bureaucratic rules and their elaborate visa systems. Those who engage in harraga, ‘burn’ borders to enter European territories. “They do not, however, burn the bridges to the people and places they depart from. To these, they keep all kinds of links. For, as they burn borders, they don’t move away from their place of origin. Harraga is about expanding living space” (M’charek, 2020).
9. 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.
10. “*” means undecipherable
11. Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst - Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service
12. I am referring to the desirable potential destinations of migrants and refugees corresponding mainly to Global North countries.
13. 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.
14. “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)
15. I 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.
16. I 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.
17. Community Library in Rotterdam West
18. I was thinking of queues as a spatial oppressive tool used often by (bureaucratic) authorities. The naturalized image of bodies-in-a-line waiting for “something” to happen at “some point” under the public gaze in an efficiently defined area.
19. Vosk is an offline open-source speech recognition toolkit
20. US Immigrant Rights Movement Slogan (Keshavarz, 2016)
-----------------------------------------
### r e f e r e n c e s
Agamben, G. (2000) Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands - la Frontera: The new mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
Austin, J. L. (1975) “lECTURE VII”, in How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, pp.83-93.
Barthes, R. (1983) Fashion system. Translated by M. Ward and R. Howard. Hill & Wang.
Border controls (2017) Defensie.nl. Available at: https://english.defensie.nl/topics/border-controls
Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). "Governing Asylum without 'Being There': Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of the State." *Social Sciences*, 12(3), 169. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]
Butler, J. (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London, England: Routledge.
Cretton, V., Geoffrion, K. (2021). “Bureaucratic Routes to Migration: Migrants’ Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration Intermediaries”, University of Victoria
Cunningham, J. (2017), “Rhetorical Tension in Bureaucratic University”, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Graeber, D. (2015) The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing
Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines. London, England: MIT Press.
Introduction days (2021) Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Available at: https://www.rotterdamuas.com/study-information/practical-information/international-introduction-days/Tuberculosis-test/ (Accessed: April 8, 2024).
Keshavarz, M. (2016) Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.
Khosravi, S. (2010) “illegal” traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders. 2010th ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Khosravi, S. (ed.) (2021) Waiting - A Project in Conversation. transcript Verlag.
M’charek, A. (2020) “Harraga: Burning borders, navigating colonialism,” The sociological review, 68(2), pp. 418–434. doi: 10.1177/0038026120905491.
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.
Vulnerable Interfaces is a catalogue of work producted within the context of the Master of Arts in Fine art and Design: Experimental Publishing (XPUB) at the Piet Zwart Insititute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.
Special thanks goes to the XPUB staff whose expert help and guidance helped.
More information available at vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl
### Course Director of XPUB
Michael Murtaugh
### Administration
Leslie Robbins
### Course tutors
Manetta Berends, Joseph Knierzinger, Michael Murtaugh, Steve Rushton, Kimmy Spreeuwenberg
Ada, Aglaia, Stephen and Irmak Suzan (XPUB graduates year 2022-2024)
### Print run
200 copies
### Printed and Bound at
Publication Station, Willem De Koonig Academy, Rotterdam
### Paper
Clairefontaine, dune (80g/m3), *cover paper*
### Typefaces
Platypi by David Sargent.
### 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. That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to do the miracle of one only thing.
### Digital Tools
This book was created with the help of a collection of\
not-so-small and extremely sharp open source tools, to name a few: paged.js, pandoc, pdfimpose, pdftk, and our darling demon Inkscape. So was the world created. From this are and do come admirable adaptations where the means is here in this.
### Printing and Binding
Just lil' old us.
### Typeface
Consolation by us (available under the SIXX licence).
Immajer Simlish by inkandchaos (licence information unknown).
Work Sans by Wei Huang (available under SIL OFL).
That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished and ended.
Paged.JS, Git, Etherpad.
### Licensing Information
This publication is free to distrubite 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 xpub.nl/vulnerable-interfaces/license
### Postal address
Piet Zwart Institute,
Master of Arts in FIne Art and Design: Experimental Publishing,
P.O. Box 1272,
3000 BG Rotterdam
### Visiting address
Wijnhaven 61,
4th floor,
3011 WJ Rotterdam,
the Netherlands
### XPUB
XPUB is the Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing of the Piet Zwart Institute. XPUB focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks. XPUB’s interests in publishing are therefore twofold: first, publishing as the inquiry and participation into the technological frameworks, political context and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, how these are, or can be, used to create publics.
Experimental Publishing is some experiences or feelings of being in xpub for two years.
Hello. We're four students of Experimental Publishing (XPUB). We made this catalogue for you, we made it for ourselves. It's all the work we made from 2022 to 2024, during our Master's programme at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. This book contains our theses and graduation projects. Following the projects, you will find the documentation of three Special Issues that were published during our first year of XPUB.
(could this be clearer?)
Act 1.
Scene 1.
In Do you ever dream about work?, Stephen Kerr talks with graphic designers about their work and how they feel about it. His thesis ? documents these discussions and puts them in context of the spiritual traditions of modernism.
Internal. A reader holds a book in their hands. The first page of the book is opened, the reader holds it to their face and smells the paper, touches it. The book touches them back.
Talking Documents, made by Aglaia Petta, are performative bureaucratic text inspections that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. The graduation project holds hands with the written text Performing the Bureaucratic Border(line)s which attempts to unleash intuitively a conversation concerning the entangled relation between material injurious borders and bureaucracy.
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.
Ada made like a thing called Backplaces. Before that she wrote about it in a text called <?water bodies>. Its about people on the internet.
the reader:
Interfaces?
Wink, is a web platform made by Irmak Susan Erta?, a creative writing and reading toolkit that enables children to make their own stories or read the stories they want from the existing library. The text Fair Leads expands on the concepts of interactive fiction using knot theory practices.
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.
Paragraph about common ground. performance, storytelling, words, memory feeling, loss, reflection, Intimacy, experience, narrative and memory, the public and the private. Memory (for example, and other themes), how it appears in the four projects. The written and spoken word as materials and actions that exist in society, technology, people. We care about this because (whatever goes here is important). The personal element in each project.
the reader (confused):
What do you mean a collection, like a catalogue?
XPUB is the Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing of the Piet Zwart Institute. XPUB focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.
XPUB’s interests in publishing are therefore twofold: first, publishing as the inquiry and participation into the technological frameworks, political context and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, how these are, or can be, used to create publics.
the book:
Yeah I guess. I weave the words and the works we created during...
Experimental Publishing is some experiences or feelings of being in xpub for two years.
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.
<p>Another thing that came out of our first two sessions was the <em>One
Sentence Ritual</em>. Each week for six weeks in a row, we wrote down a
ritual of our own and took turns performing the ritual from the list.
Coffee fortune-telling, hard drive purifications, collective eating,
sound meditations, and talking to worry dolls made us reflect on the
content of the week and our lives.</p>
<p>:::::</p>
<divid="content"><h1id="console-special-issue-xx">Console: Special Issue XX</h1>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Console box with instruction book, games and ritual objects, produced in an edition of XX." />
<imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="SIXX Licence reading ceremony at Page Not Found. The copyleft licence for this object included (in additional permission 4b) a term specifying the ritual absorption of intellectual property." />
<imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Screenprinted book cover, from The Upside Down Oracolotto card." />
<imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Fiction Friction gameplay at Page Not Found" /></p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Oracolotto readings at Page Not Found." /> <imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Wheel of Fortune healing exercise at Page Not Found." /> <img
<p>Another thing that came out of our first two sessions was the <em>One
Sentence Ritual</em>. Each week for six weeks in a row, we wrote down a
ritual of our own and took turns performing the ritual from the list.
Coffee fortune-telling, hard drive purifications, collective eating,
sound meditations, and talking to worry dolls made us reflect on the
content of the week and our lives.</p>
<p>:::::</p>
<divid="content"><p>z— title: tty special issue 21 author: Stephen</p>
<hr/>
<h1id="tty-special-issue-21">TTY: Special Issue 21</h1>
<p>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!!</p>
<p>Amiri Baraka, Technology & Ethos,
http://www.soulsista.com/titanic/baraka.html</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="An inscription performance using the TeleType Model 33 and a 40m stairwell." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="A reading and writing of poetry using pedestrians and vinyl quotes." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Gesture Glossary (screenshot or gif? maybe several): how a body language is documented, how it expands, how it is capable of creating or enhancing identities." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"alt="It would have been better to fuck."/>
<imgsrc="imagename.png"alt="maybe an image at the telecom museum"/>
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Wiki strike screenshot: embedding hidden comments in a wiki to highlight the invisible labour, to provide comprehensive details about our intentions and the underlying ideas while maintaining the wiki’s regular functionality." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Hey Babe arduino based telephone experience. Callers can listen to love stories, excerpts from conversations at the Houweling Telecom Museum, Rotterdam, parts from the documentary The Phantom of the Operator and a collective reading experience on binary systems, time, worms and pebbles." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="I’ve fallen in love with you and I have no idea what to do about it. Phone cards inviting participation in “Hey Babe”. Someone holding it in the street?" />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Encoding Convertor: the wacky world of character en-coding." /></p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Overlap screenshot (or is there an image from when we were working on it in the MD room?) We have a bag full of planets, stars, our favorite moments, darkest fears, best intentions and worst feelings. Our bag is now in the middle, its ready for you to discover and see the networks of our minds, make knots in the middle or intervene with what we call is a collective memory of few xpubbers." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Hexalogue booklet. A conversation for six voices is encoded and documented in a script." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Hexalogue reading in Constant, Brussels." /> <img
do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does
“graphic design” even mean?!????!!1!?</h1>
<p>I cut my thumb so every time I type i can feel it in my nerve
endings. Not true, it’s my left thumb so I don’t type with it. Not true,
I feel it anyway. Why are most of the function keys on the left of the
keyboard. What’s so functional about pressing buttons. Stephen Kerr is a
designer and musician based in. Have you ever loved an instrument? The
Ctrl key broke like four times since I moved here. I have one more
replacement because I bought a bunch of them but at some point I gave up
and use an external keyboard. I dunno I’m more confused than ever. It
was something to do with dreams and working. It’s the middle of the
night I’m writing this on my phone. If I had a dream this is when I
would be writing it. The memory is fuzzy: either I don’t remember or it
didn’t make sense in the first place. It was something to do with
fuzziness and memory no wait. Phones don’t have keyboards in real life
third doesn’t make sense. I’m trying to type but I don’t think I can get
it on the way to the office for the weekend and I think it was a good
idea to do it and I was thinking about you and I was thinking of you and
the kids in the morning and I was thinking about you and I was in the
same place as a friend of mine and I was in the car park and we were in
the car park and we were in the car park and we were in the car park and
we were in the</p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="The result of a tool that connects musical instruments to a pen plotter, using an arduino module. I created this tool to cross the boundary of “graphic design” as a discipline separate from music." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="A performative tool that measures the laziness of the designer as they work and graphs it on a pen plotter. The less the designer uses the mouse, the longer a line the pen plotter will draw." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="A performative autoethnographic research of graphic design practices, in this case answering emails using Google’s Gmail service. Leeszaal, Rotterdam West, November 7th 2023" />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Collective performative dream re-enactment at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. February 5th 2024." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Collective performative dream re-enactment at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz, Austria. March 11th 2024." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Keyboard of things designers have said." /> <img
src="imagename.png"
alt="keylogging research, recording the buttons a graphic designer presses while working" />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="do you ever dream about work? online research" /></p>
<p>An investigation into the practices and ideologies of graphic design
in 2023–24 though practice-led artistic research and ethnographic
methods. I held graphic design in my hands using ethnography, toolmaking
and performance as research methods. I examined how a designer spends
their time in everyday life, this designer, me, as well as you, what are
we doing? What are our worldviews, belief systems, mythologies and
ideologies?</p>
<p><em>What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and
what does “graphic design” even mean?!????!!1!?</em> is an assessment of
what the term “graphic design” means to its practitioners today. Through
experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of
reflexive tools, the project highlights and questions the boundaries
that exist around this apparent category. The research focuses on my own
practices as well as other people and groups that identify with “graphic
designer” as a label. The research was both conducted by and shared with
interested parties in the form of the tools themselves, as well as a
series of performances. There is no strict distinction between the
research and its publication. The tools were released in an iterative
cycle throughout the process of the project, and the research is
conducted through the performative use and development of these
tools.</p>
<p>This research is carried out in three intersecting methods:
experimental ethnographic research, reflexive tools, and performative
research. Keylogging, performance of personal work habits, interviews
about the manual work of “immaterial labourers”, and dream analysis are
combined in order to uncover less obvious and less discussed aspects of
what a designer is and does in their daily life, as entry points to
their worldviews, belief systems, mythologies or ideologies. The methods
were developed in an iterative process that reflected on findings from
the previous prototypes. The research took into account its own
publication as part of one process.</p>
<oltype="1">
<li><p>Experimental ethnographic research methods: I documented my own
practices as a graphic designer for nine months. Sometimes based on
technical observations of my interaction with my tools, primarily my
laptop computer and the software on it. I conducted interviews with
designers. I recorded the interviews. I had prompts to open the
discussion such as reading material and weird tools to try with them. I
will carry out auto-ethnographic research using experimental methods
such as mouse tracking and unusual annotation methods. I shared the
results of this research as a series of interactive publications (tools)
with a small but selected audience of people who are involved in these
processes and who would benefit from it.</p></li>
<li><p>Reflexive tools: Software and hardware tools that explore the
boundaries of “graphic design” as a category. For example at the
boundaries between graphic design and other disciplines. At the
boundaries between work and play, or between design and art. These tools
malfunction in order to explore what it even means to be working. The
tools aim to highlight what a graphic designer does by interacting with
their user in ways that the designers standard tools do not (for example
an interface to connect musical instruments to the designers workflow),
or conversely by amplifying how the designer usually interacts with
their tools (for example a keylogger to celebrate and focus on the use
of the keyboard). The tools are digital in nature and involve software
and hardware interventions into the graphic designers work.</p></li>
<li><p>Performative research: I see all the methods above as having a
performative element. For example the ethnographic-slash-performative
act of answering my emails on a large screen in front of an audience,
research which was carried out as part of this project at Leeszaal,
Rotterdam West on November 7th 2023. By showing directly the work
practices of graphic designers to an audience, or their interaction with
the tools mentioned above, I am publishing through performance the daily
activities of designers and my aim is to show these practices without
the conventional lenses they are seen through. To be contrasted for
example with how graphic design is presented on behance.net or in a
bookshop, this performative approach will highlight the mythologies and
practices of the graphic designer.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I made this to explore why designers make design, based on Clifford
Geertz’s ideas of why humans make culture: “to affirm it, defend it,
celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it” (Geertz, 1973). This
exploration will also involve less constructive actions like
participating, dissociating, questioning, protesting, destroying and
disregarding. There is a disconnect between the narratives about
“graphic design” and the effects it is known to have on its audiences,
practitioners, and society in more general terms. I am attempting to
“loosen the object” of graphic design (Berlant, 2022), to make the
definition less defined and maybe more useful or easier to engage with.
This shit could be better. Its urgent for the people being exploited by
it, to break the inequalities it serves to maintain, to expose what it
hides, to improve things that are definitely working but not in a good
way. Design can hide and reproduce inequalities in its output and also
dominate workers in its practices. This research starts primarily from
the bodies and actions of the practitioners so will primarily engage
# What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!?
I cut my thumb so every time I type i can feel it in my nerve endings. Not true, it's my left thumb so I don't type with it. Not true, I feel it anyway. Why are most of the function keys on the left of the keyboard. What's so functional about pressing buttons. Stephen Kerr is a designer and musician based in. Have you ever loved an instrument? The Ctrl key broke like four times since I moved here. I have one more replacement because I bought a bunch of them but at some point I gave up and use an external keyboard. I dunno I'm more confused than ever. It was something to do with dreams and working. It's the middle of the night I'm writing this on my phone. If I had a dream this is when I would be writing it. The memory is fuzzy: either I don't remember or it didn't make sense in the first place. It was something to do with fuzziness and memory no wait. Phones don't have keyboards in real life this doesn't make sense. I'm trying to type but I don't think I can get it on the way to the office for the weekend and I think it was a good idea to do it and I was thinking about you and I was thinking of you and I was thinking about you and I was in the same place as a friend of mine and I was in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the studio and we were in the
"A sane person", says Zeno, "doesn't analyse himself, doesn't look in the mirror"
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2024-06-06 15:52:39,443 - '\x03'
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2024-06-06 15:52:54,363 - '\x16'
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2024-06-06 15:53:00,530 - 'k'
2024-06-06 15:53:00,626 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:53:00,890 - 'y'
2024-06-06 15:53:01,370 - 'l'
2024-06-06 15:53:01,546 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:53:01,754 - 'g'
2024-06-06 15:53:01,882 - 'g'
2024-06-06 15:53:01,994 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:53:02,162 - 'r'
2024-06-06 15:53:02,778 - '.'
2024-06-06 15:53:03,146 - 'j'
2024-06-06 15:53:03,394 - 'p'
2024-06-06 15:53:03,562 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:53:03,818 - 'g'
2024-06-06 15:53:05,569 - Key.ctrl_l
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2024-06-06 15:53:07,228 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:53:07,250 - '\x18'
2024-06-06 15:53:08,753 - Key.enter
2024-06-06 15:53:08,881 - Key.enter
2024-06-06 15:53:08,937 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:53:09,058 - '\x16'
2024-06-06 15:53:10,218 - Key.up
2024-06-06 15:53:10,441 - Key.backspace
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2024-06-06 15:53:11,777 - Key.enter
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2024-06-06 15:53:31,809 - 'z'
2024-06-06 15:53:32,090 - 'e'
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2024-06-06 15:53:32,753 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:53:38,450 - Key.space
2024-06-06 15:53:38,713 - 'q'
2024-06-06 15:53:38,858 - 'u'
2024-06-06 15:53:38,937 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:53:39,082 - 't'
2024-06-06 15:53:39,129 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:53:39,201 - Key.enter
2024-06-06 15:53:44,858 - 'w'
2024-06-06 15:53:44,953 - 'i'
2024-06-06 15:53:45,129 - 'k'
2024-06-06 15:53:45,250 - 'i'
2024-06-06 15:53:48,817 - Key.enter
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2024-06-06 15:53:55,513 - '\x06'
2024-06-06 15:53:56,418 - 'z'
2024-06-06 15:53:56,642 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:53:56,882 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:53:56,946 - 'o'
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2024-06-06 15:54:09,010 - 'A'
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2024-06-06 15:54:09,778 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:09,842 - 'a'
2024-06-06 15:54:10,026 - 'n'
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2024-06-06 15:54:10,754 - 'e'
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2024-06-06 15:54:11,281 - 's'
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2024-06-06 15:54:11,538 - 'n'
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2024-06-06 15:54:18,058 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:18,130 - 'a'
2024-06-06 15:54:18,314 - 'y'
2024-06-06 15:54:18,394 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:19,242 - Key.space
2024-06-06 15:54:19,409 - Key.shift
2024-06-06 15:54:19,634 - 'Z'
2024-06-06 15:54:19,866 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:20,034 - 'n'
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2024-06-06 15:54:28,090 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:54:28,218 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:28,322 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:28,394 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:54:28,897 - "'"
2024-06-06 15:54:28,978 - 't'
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2024-06-06 15:54:29,274 - 'a'
2024-06-06 15:54:29,418 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:54:29,522 - 'a'
2024-06-06 15:54:29,850 - 'l'
2024-06-06 15:54:30,090 - 'y'
2024-06-06 15:54:30,241 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:30,394 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:30,609 - Key.space
2024-06-06 15:54:30,930 - 'h'
2024-06-06 15:54:31,002 - 'i'
2024-06-06 15:54:31,137 - 'm'
2024-06-06 15:54:31,322 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:31,458 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:31,633 - 'l'
2024-06-06 15:54:31,730 - 'f'
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2024-06-06 15:54:34,585 - Key.space
2024-06-06 15:54:34,834 - 'd'
2024-06-06 15:54:34,954 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:54:35,090 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:35,170 - 's'
2024-06-06 15:54:35,298 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:54:35,898 - "'"
2024-06-06 15:54:35,954 - 't'
2024-06-06 15:54:35,978 - 't'
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2024-06-06 15:54:36,546 - 'o'
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2024-06-06 15:54:36,730 - 'k'
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2024-06-06 15:54:37,090 - 'n'
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2024-06-06 15:54:37,482 - 'h'
2024-06-06 15:54:37,586 - 'e'
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2024-06-06 15:54:37,874 - 'm'
2024-06-06 15:54:38,017 - 'i'
2024-06-06 15:54:38,233 - 'r'
2024-06-06 15:54:38,562 - 'r'
2024-06-06 15:54:38,898 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:54:39,210 - 'r'
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2024-06-06 15:54:40,594 - '"'
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2024-06-06 15:54:44,257 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:54:44,466 - '\x13'
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2024-06-06 15:54:48,706 - 'g'
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2024-06-06 15:54:48,914 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:54:49,034 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:49,140 - 'r'
2024-06-06 15:54:49,570 - 'a'
2024-06-06 15:54:49,786 - 't'
2024-06-06 15:54:49,866 - 'e'
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2024-06-06 15:54:52,162 - 'p'
2024-06-06 15:54:52,649 - 'y'
2024-06-06 15:54:52,970 - 't'
2024-06-06 15:54:53,082 - 'h'
2024-06-06 15:54:53,122 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:54:53,265 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:54:53,817 - Key.space
2024-06-06 15:54:54,410 - 'g'
2024-06-06 15:54:54,442 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:54,609 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:54:54,714 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:54,810 - 'r'
2024-06-06 15:54:55,073 - 'a'
2024-06-06 15:54:55,202 - 't'
2024-06-06 15:54:55,306 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:54:55,809 - '-'
2024-06-06 15:54:56,465 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:54:58,945 - Key.enter
2024-06-06 15:55:06,353 - Key.alt_l
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2024-06-06 15:55:10,985 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:11,492 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:11,523 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:11,554 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:11,586 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:11,630 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:11,642 - '\x12'
2024-06-06 15:55:15,457 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:15,730 - '\x06'
2024-06-06 15:55:16,210 - 'z'
2024-06-06 15:55:16,434 - 'e'
2024-06-06 15:55:16,626 - 'n'
2024-06-06 15:55:16,714 - 'o'
2024-06-06 15:55:20,953 - Key.alt_l
2024-06-06 15:55:21,049 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:55:22,681 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:55:22,881 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:55:23,113 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:55:26,001 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:26,338 - '\x03'
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2024-06-06 15:55:28,267 - Key.ctrl_l
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2024-06-06 15:55:28,330 - '\x1a'
2024-06-06 15:55:28,665 - Key.ctrl_l
2024-06-06 15:55:28,834 - '\x18'
2024-06-06 15:55:29,441 - Key.alt_l
2024-06-06 15:55:29,545 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:55:29,945 - Key.tab
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2024-06-06 15:55:30,561 - Key.tab
2024-06-06 15:55:33,281 - Key.cmd
2024-06-06 15:55:33,617 - 'e'
An investigation into the practices and ideologies of graphic design in 2023–24 though practice-led artistic research and ethnographic methods. I held graphic design in my hands using ethnography, toolmaking and performance as research methods. I examined how a designer spends their time in everyday life, this designer, me, as well as you, what are we doing? What are our worldviews, belief systems, mythologies and ideologies?
*What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does "graphic design" even mean?!????!!1!?* is an assessment of what the term "graphic design" means to its practitioners today. Through experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of reflexive tools, the project highlights and questions the boundaries that exist around this apparent category. The research focuses on my own practices as well as other people and groups that identify with "graphic designer" as a label. The research was both conducted by and shared with interested parties in the form of the tools themselves, as well as a series of performances. There is no strict distinction between the research and its publication. The tools were released in an iterative cycle throughout the process of the project, and the research is conducted through the performative use and development of these tools.
@ -20,12 +423,3 @@ This research is carried out in three intersecting methods: experimental ethnogr
I made this to explore why designers make design, based on Clifford Geertz's ideas of why humans make culture: "to affirm it, defend it, celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it" (Geertz, 1973). This exploration will also involve less constructive actions like participating, dissociating, questioning, protesting, destroying and disregarding. There is a disconnect between the narratives about "graphic design" and the effects it is known to have on its audiences, practitioners, and society in more general terms. I am attempting to "loosen the object" of graphic design (Berlant, 2022), to make the definition less defined and maybe more useful or easier to engage with. This shit could be better. Its urgent for the people being exploited by it, to break the inequalities it serves to maintain, to expose what it hides, to improve things that are definitely working but not in a good way. Design can hide and reproduce inequalities in its output and also dominate workers in its practices. This research starts primarily from the bodies and actions of the practitioners so will primarily engage with the effects on and by these bodies.
