Difference between revisions of "ULB presentation"

Revision as of 18:11, 12 April 2006

Evolution through homepage

• Evolution of Constant parallels the evolution of its website and the different datastructures produced during this evolution.
• Constant?# Constant is a non-profit association, based and active in Brussels since 1997 in the fields of feminism, copyright alternatives and working through networks.

1. Constant develops radio, electronic music and database projects, by means of migrating from cultural work to work places and back again.

• We want to discuss an approach to datastructure which is not pre-planned, which is organic and that reorganises itself within 'chaos'. Which is learned by doing rather than learned and applied. Which allows for experiment and follows the life of an organisation through its changes rather than through its fixed image.

Leaflet era

Constants'homepage 2000

• 1999-mid 2003
• ref: http://www.archive.org
• top categories correspond to organised events in 'real space'
• events are organised by a central team
• one webdesigner and not part of the team
• all content is static
• produced with proprietary software(dreamweaver) and using commercial plugins(quicktime, realplayer, flash)

Site as production/publication space

Constants'homepage 2002

• mid 2003 - mid 2005
• ref:http://web.archive.org/web/20050324060205/www.constantvzw.com/index.php
• top categories are lower on the page and the feeds of the different weblogs take precedence.
• weblogs as private spaces of connected souls. An image randomly pulled out of the weblogs appears on the homepage. And links directly to a blog index page.
• Own server -> cyberfeminism
• Free software -> copy.cult
• Dynamic content
• In house webdesigners + programming -- selfthaught
• DIY

Site as project space

Urban(e)(istiques) Anomalie(ën)(s)

• ref:http://www.constantvzw.com/westenberg/
• weblogs that started as publications become projects that are 'produced' in real space.
• weblogs as projects scratchpad
• example of Urban... that turned into our collaboration with Peter that influenced VJ9 and will continue in Routes and routines.

Projects have their own archiving mechanism

Cuisine Interne Keuken

• ref:http://www.constantvzw.com/cuisine
• Cuisine Interne, the structure of the project is a list of questions
• The project is thought of by understanding what is a database.
• A culinary jukebox of some sorts

"We mean what a works, an organisation is made of: the components ingredients, the tools utensils, workplace, and work and creation processes recipes"

The Cuisine Interne Keuken project was initiated in 2004 at Jonctions/Verbindingen 7, a yearly festival around art, technology and ethics organised by Constantvzw, Brussels. We selected 15 questions around the ingredients and recipes of cultural work. Some of these questions are quite straightforward, and some leave more space for interpretation or even evasion. The idea is to put practice, tools and conditions at the same level, so to question their interrelation.

Cuisine Interne Keuken started out of the desire to render visible the internal organisation of the cultural world we work in, with its written and unwritten laws, decision making processes and value systems. In our thinking about interdisciplinary cultural practices, we did not want to leave out the question of economy.

We started out by simply interviewing each guest to the Jonction/Verbindingen festival but after a while we found ourselves branching out to other contacts or people we met at conferences and lectures. The list of people interviewed therefore forms in a way the internal kitchen of the organisation Constant itself, and continues to expand and change.

Using the same set of questions over and over again helped us to focus a series of intimate conversations, and allowed a chain of interviewers in different settings and in multiple languages to bring their own background to the discussions. As a result in some cases answers were combined, questions not asked, or questions not answered but these 'flaws' actually became a marker of a rich and multi-layered process of research.

With more than 35 interviews soon accessible on this site, Cuisine Interne Keuken combines the rigor you might expect from an anthropological survey with the intimacy of private conversations. The adaptation of cooking language forms a deliberate move away from a more sensational "look behind the scenes", and from efficiency driven or technocratic terms in which design and art practices are mostly described in, if at all. It smells, it's messy, tickles the taste buds, fills the stomach but there's always a lot of dishes too. We offer them here to you for consulting, remixing, inspiration, learning and listening pleasure: a culinary jukebox of some sorts.

Living archive

Mixing Past and Present

Constants'homepage 2006

• past and present are together on the homepage

View points

A view point by Kris Rutten

harvesting/mining the website

The dictionary of terms used by the search engine

• using the search as a dictionary