Tooling
Tooling
Situating 'tools' within hyrbid collective practices
‘Tools’ can have different meanings. For instance 'tools' may refer to pedagogical tools and tools for collaboration. 'Tools' may also refer to digital tools, software or hardware that we, as designers, artists, technologists and organizers interact with, on a daily basis. In the contributions to this toolkit both meanings are relevant and inform each other. Tools have been used and further developed within experimental learning environments, such as workshops and hack events. In turn, collective learning formats, prompts, how-tos and workshop scripts evolved along with using and building experimental, DIY software and hardware.
Folks involved with the H&D collective tends toward free/libre and open-source tools, because the accessibility of source code offers possibilities for using, copying, studying and changing, thus learning from and with technology.[1]
According to the Free Software Foundation, ‘free’ is defined as liberty, as “free from restriction, not as ‘free of charge.’”[2]
The collective aspects of free and open-source software are expressed through particular licenses and through documenting and publishing of source code on platforms for distributed version control and source code management such as Github and Gitlab. H&D has explored these principles in and outside of the domain of computer programming.
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In this toolkit you will find external links – little ant helpers residing on a leave that indicate there are resources to be found elsewhere – such as code repositories, how-to's, scripts or instruction manuals. Besides providing useful resources the ants are also a reminder that the tools, practices and experiments in this toolkit are connected to various other contexts and practices and that none of these proposal are made from scratch but build forth on the labor of various communities.
For instance there are certain open-source tools that H&D accumulated around organizational activities, such as the real-time chat app Zulip [4], the web spreadsheet tool Ethercalc [5] to create overviews for budgets and plans or the real-time collaborative note taking tool Etherpad.
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As free and open-source projects, these tools are used by many collectives and individuals who put them into practice across various contexts. For H&D, such tools are enmeshed with organizational routines, with other technical systems and are also connected to other communities of toolmakers and users.
Furthermore, H&D builds and works with digital tools that are situated in the realm of experimental publishing and graphic design. These include self-made publishing tools such as ChattyPub,[7] Momentary Zine,[8] and the Heartbeat-to-print tool.[9] In experimenting with design and publishing tools, H&D draws inspiration from other collectives and individuals, such as the Brussels-based collective Open Source Publishing[10] and ‘Constant Association for Art & Media’,[11] the Rotterdam-based collective Varia,[12] the Amsterdam-based collective fanfare,[13] the publishing practice of Vienna-based artist Eva Weinmayr,[14] or the embodied publishing practices of Rotterdam-based designers Amy Suo Wu and Clara Balaguer.[15] In addition, the knowledge and practices
evolving from educational environments are encapsulated by the student-led interdepartmental initiative PUB at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam[16] or the experimental publishing program XPUB at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam,[17] as well as the digital and hybrid publishing research groups of the Institute of Network Cultures.[18]
(Some excerpts of this text come from: A.Groten "Figuring Things Out Together: On the Relationship Between Design and Collective Practice," PhD Diss., Leiden Universtity, 2022)
Resources
Dig in H&D's Wiki-to-print experiments. The interesting thing about web to print and more specifically utilizing Mediawiki as a CMS in that context, it facilitate the co-creation and management of publications and traces editing histories. There is a whole community of designers and developers out there building forth on each others work. This take on the wiki-to-print workflow builds forth on the work of folks at ConstantVZW, OSP, Varia and Titipi.
Check out this other take on web-to-print called CC (creative crowds) – a server for publishing experiments that emerge around Rotterdam-based collective space Varia to better understand how different ways of working are shaped by (and shape) different realities.
If you are interested on other – non-wiki related publishing experiments of H&D feel free to visit this incomplete tool compendium on the H&D website
- ↑ Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), xi.
- ↑ “The Free Software Foundation is dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, understanding and modification of software. The word “free” in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbours, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.” GNU Bulletin 1, no. 1, (1986), https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull1.txt, last accessed May 2022.
- ↑ In his dissertation “Sandbox Culture: A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production” Aymeric Mansoux wrote about the ways in which principles of free and open-source have been interpreted and actualized in free and open-source software on art and culture since the late nineties. Aymeric Mansoux, “Sandbox Culture: A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production” (PhD diss., Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London,2017).
- ↑ https://zulip.com/
- ↑ Documentation of the Ethercalc instance hosted by H&D: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools/p/H%26D_Ethercalc, last accessed May 2022.
- ↑ Documentation of the Etherpad instance hosted by H&D: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools/p/H%26D_Etherpad, last accessed May 2022.
- ↑ ChattyPub documentation can be found at: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools/p/Chattypub https://chatty-pub.hackersanddesigners.nl/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Momentary Zine documentation can be found at: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools/p/Momentary_Zine, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Documentation on the Heart-beat-to-print tool can be found at: https://hackersanddesigners.nl/s/Tools/p/Heartbeat-to-print, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of Open Source Publishing: http://osp.kitchen/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of Constant Association for Art and Media https://constantvzw.org/site/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of Varia—Center of Everyday Technology: https://varia.zone/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of fanfare: https://fanfarefanfare.nl/ http://fanfareinc.world/colophon, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of Eva Weinmayr: http://evaweinmayr.com/work-categories/ publishing/ http://andpublishing.org/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Lecture and workshop by Clara Balaguer about ‘’Publishing as Bloodletting,’’ https://www.kabk.nl/agenda/studium-generale-lecture-clara-balaguer https://pub.sandberg.nl/sessions/pub-e-pub-4-session-3-publishing-as-bloodletting-w-clara-balaguer. Example of Amy Suo Wu’s ‘embodied publishing’ practice: “garments [that] are experiments in embodied publishing, spectral publishing, navel expanding, and ghostwriting” https://amysuowu.net/content/dear-ursula https://amysuowu.net/content/shapeshifty-0, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of the student initiative of the Sandberg Instituut, PUB https://pub.sandberg.nl/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Website of the Piet Zwart Experimental Publishing Master: https://www.pzwart.nl/experimental-publishing/, last accessed March 2022.
- ↑ Joe Monk, Miriam Rasch, Florian Cramer and Amy Wu, eds., Hybrid Publishing Toolkit: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/from-print-to-ebooks-a-hybrid-publishing-toolkit-for-the-arts/, last accessed March 2022.