>Go into the kitchen and open the first drawer you come to and the odds are you'll find the wooden
spoon that is used to stir soups and sauces. If this spoon is of a certain age you will see it no longer
has its original shape. It has changed, as if a piece had been cut obliquely off the end. Part of it is
missing. We have (though not all at once, of course) eaten the missing part mixed up in our soup. It is
continual use that has given the spoon its new shape. This is the shape the saucepan has made by
constantly rubbing away at the spoon until it eventually shows us what shape a spoon for stirring soup
should be.
Wear and Tear in: Design as art
Bruno Munari, Penguin, 2009
Semiotics of the Kitchen is a feminist parody video and performance piece released in 1975 by Martha Rosler. The video, which runs six minutes, is considered a critique of the commodified versions of traditional women's roles in modern society.
Featuring Rosler as a generic cooking show host, the camera observes as she presents an array of kitchen hand utensils, many of them outdated or strange, and, after identifying them, demonstrates unproductive, sometimes, violent, uses for each. It uses a largely static camera and a plain set, allowing the viewer to focus more on Rosler's performance and adding a primitive quality.
Letter by letter, Rosler navigates a culinary lexicon, using a different kitchen implement for each step along the way. She begins with an apron, which she ties around her waist, and, with deadpan humor, journeys through the alphabet, until the last few letters. For these, U, V, W, X,Y, and Z. the implements are dispensed with and the woman's gestures and body become a signal system themselves. The Z replicates the mark of Zorro, a filmic reference, and at the end of the entire work the artist offers a shrug, somehow defusing the negative reading of the parody. The focus on linguistics and words is important, since Rosler intended the video to challenge "the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings -- the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production."
Semiotics of the Kitchen
Martha Rosler, 1975
toolbending #02
_Lignes de commande, commande de ligne
>Speech announces the action that will follow along with this antagonism, hence its power, but also
importantly speech sometimes fails or is bounced back through various attempts to resist its
determining effects. A good example of this is found in Miaden Dolar's book A Voice and Nothing
More, which begins with a description of a failure of the voice to interpellate. A command is given
loud and clear by a commander of an army to attack its enemy, but nobody acts. The command is
repeated over and over again to no effect, until someone says, "What a beautiful voice!"
#!/usr/bin/python
# A script for greeting every server on the Internet.
import iptools, httplib
for ip in iptools. IpRangeList('0.0.0.0/0');
try:
print "Greeting " + ip
ex = httplib.HTTPConnection("%s:80" % ip)
ex.request("POST", '/', "message=Hello+world!")
except:
pass
Franco 'Biro' Berardi: Data Murmur Warren Neidich, 2012
> Poster à la Sauce Hollandaise (Exercice : PleaseMakeMeDesign)
2 texts quite long, likely to have words in common
some elbow grease
some Helvetica Bold, or better: a freed equivalent.
Ingredients :
Utensils :
comm
tr
cat
sort
uniq
grep (optional)
less (optional)
enscript
ps2pdf
Steps
Turkish ± 5
Arsène Filliatreau
Extra : La machine à voix
http://www.multimedialab.be/blog/?p=%201382
toolbending #03
_ Excursion à Constant Variable
À partir d'octobre 2011 et ce pour une durée de trois ans, la superbe maison de maitre située au 80 de la rue Gallait sera occupée par Constant, une organisation pour les arts et les médias. L'usage de la maison est modulaire, les artistes qui l'investissent vous invitent chaleureusement a découvrir ce qu'ils y créent grâce au logiciel libre.
http://variable.constantvzw.org
Rencontre avec Stéphanie Villayphou = OSP <
> Recursive publics are just as concerned with the moral order of markets as they are with that of
commons; they are not anticommercial or antigovemment. They exist independent of, and as a
check on, constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike other
concepts of a public or of a public sphere, "recursive public" captures the fact that geeks' principal
mode of associating and acting is through the medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium
that a recursive public can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public
sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure that constitutes
and constrains geeks' everyday practical commitments, their ability to "become public" or to
compose a common world.
> "Enregistrez un dialogue avec un outil numérique de votre choix. Postez le
lien vers le document texte, vidéo (screencast), série de screenshots ou
enregistrement sonore sur cette page:
http://bending.titanpad.com/repository"
toolbending #05
_ Concaténez (avec Pierre Marchand)
> The shift in our relation to tools also reflects itself in the production process. It means unfolding the black box of design. Finding ways to make the process visible, opening space for collaboration and interaction. We're interested in new tools for Libre Graphics work, collaboration and intersection. How do we build new modalities and meanings for graphics, with the support and inspiration of libre? How do we imagine our practise to shape new tools?
The Libre Graphics magazine team :
Ana Isabel Carvalho, ginger coons and Ricardo Lafuente, 2012
> cat, qui vient de l'anglais « catenate », synonyme de « concatenate » (soit : concaténer) est une commande Unix standard permettant de concaténer des fichiers ainsi que d'afficher leur contenu sur la sortie standard — habituellement un terminal Unix ; le plus souvent des « shells », notamment Bash, zsh, Csh, etc.
tac est l'équivalent de cat mais affiche le contenu d'un fichier de la fin au début.
Pierre Marchand (BE/FR à contribué à des projets de logiciels libres comme <
le programme de composition Scribus, ou concocté ses propres projets tels FontMatrix, un gestionnaire de fontes, ou encore Fonzie, une application qui scanne des typographies pour créer des fichiers de fontes permettant d'avoir plusieurs glyphes pour un même caractère.
Open source fonts
Pierre Marchand
toolbending #06
_ Interrogation
> The shift in our relation to tools also reflects itself in the production process. It means unfolding the
black box of design. Finding ways to make the process visible, opening space for collaboration and
interaction. We're interested in new tools for Libre Graphics work, collaboration and intersection.
How do we build new modalities and meanings for graphics, with the support and inspiration of
libre? How do we imagine our practise to shape new tools?1
The Libre Graphics magazine team :
Ana Isabel Carvalho, ginger coons and Ricardo Lafuente, 2012
toolbending #07
_ Présentations
> (W)hen the hammer ceases to hammer, that is, we cease to be able to hammer with it, then we
become aware of it as having a specific form: "The hammer is too heavy." In other words, we only
feel the heaviness of the hammer at the moment we cannot use the hammer to perform the action:
when the hammer does not hammer. (...) The judgment about the hammer, which gives it a property
as being this or that kind of thing, still perceives the hammer in terms of what it can or should do,
even in the moment of the failure of the hammer to perform its action
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others,
Sarah Achmed, Duke University Press Books, 2004
toolbending #08
_ Drawbots ! (avec Wendy Van Wynsberghe )
> Because the tradition of art and design presuppose a material with a fixed state, our critical instinct is to reduce anything with variability to a single instance. (...) A static material forces a thought process with only one conclusion. Thus it is difficult to appreciate, and more importantly, evaluate an artistic statement of change.
"Drawbot is a drawing system (designed by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and licensed under a creative commons License) that anyone can use without having to learn electronics. It is a simple bot that mixes standard drawing materials with weighted motors and plastic cups. When the cups vibrate, they draw circles and lines depending on their overall weight and power."
> Dans le discours traditionnel des acteurs du logiciel libre, la libération de la partie informationnelle que constitue le code permet d’en prendre le contrôle : son ouverture permet son appropriation par les utilisateurs qui peuvent alors redéfinir selon leurs propres critères les modalités et finalités de leurs outils. Mais si l’ouverture du code est une invitation à s’engager dans l’élaboration de nos outils, nous nous rendons compte dans la pratique que cette affirmation évacue le fait que le contrôle se fait toujours au détriment de quelqu’un d’autre. Les programmeurs contrôlent le code ; les designers, le design ; les typographes, la typographie, etc. Dans chaque cas de figure, il faut en premier lieu pouvoir pénétrer la culture qui l’entoure, rentrer dans le cercle. Pour nous, le libre suggère avant tout la volonté d’accepter de perdre un hypothétique contrôle, de lâcher du lest. Cela signifie questionner ses certitudes, au bénéfice de recevoir en retour quelque chose de nouveau.