Con-figuring With Others

Talk/discussion @ Kulturverein zur Schießhalle
Wednesday 26 Nov
18:00 ‑ 20:00

Project Description

What if we shift our thinking about "tool making practices" towards a practice of "configuring with others"? What shifts? And what stays the same? How does this emphasize the entangled mode of distributed collaboration that emerges when you start to build tools on top of a range of existing ones? Who do you configure with? How? And where do frictions emerge?

Tool making has formed a vibrant subculture within the field of design in which designers make tools that change the way they work. These custom made design tools shift who you can collaborate with and how, but also who you are relying on in terms of underlying infrastructure. They are built on top of many different pieces made by a whole range of tool makers, often published as Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Because of this, tool making is not "just" a sub-culture within the field of design. Instead, it operates as an open ended and cross-disciplinary practice, that crosses paths with a range of other fields and cultures, such as software development and server administration but also collective work and self-organisation. Practices and cultures from which designers both learn and diverge from.

In this panel we will present our own tool practices, how they relate to others and whom those others are that we configure our tools with.

Creative Crowds CC

Artist Bio

Creative Crowds (CC) is a shared server for FLOSS publishing experiments to explore how different ways of working are shaped by (and shape) different realities. CC is currently maintained by Simon Browne(AU) and Manetta Berends(NL) from Rotterdam.

Online Links

web: https://cc.practices.tools
fedi: https://post.lurk.org/@simoon

Francesco Luzzana (Kamo)

Artist Bio

Kamo is a digital media artist currently based in Rotterdam. He develops small situated software, often with a visual and performative output. He has a sweet spot for programming drawing tools, and interactive situations with the audience.

Open Source Publishing

Artist Bio

OSP is a graphic design collective based in Brussels. We work on typography, websites, web-to print tools and plotters. We exclusively use free and open source software (F/LOSS). Through our projects we question software as cultural objects and modes of collaboration between graphic designers, artists, cultural institutions and schools. We question the influence and affordances of digital tools through the practice of (commissioned) graphic design, teaching and applied research.

Doriane Timmermans(BE)
Vinciane Daheron(FR)
Simon Browne(AU)

Online Links

web: https://osp.kitchen/