--- title: CONSTANT language: en --- ::: {.toc} * **Introduction** * **Program** * **ATNOFS Constant Session** * **Oral Reports on the sessions and the inserts** * Varia * LURK * hypha * esc mkl * Feminist Hack Meetings * ooooo * Marloes de Valk * Wrapping Up * **The Future of rosa after ATNOFS** * **Collective Writing Session** * **The Visual Archive Method** * **Acknowledgements** ::: # Introduction ``` *Constant Session* pressing pause and reflecting. read -n1 -r -s -p "Press any key to continue..." ``` Constant is an association for arts and media run by artists, designers, researchers and hackers based in Brussels, Belgium. Constant works to systematically create collaborative situations that engage with the challenges of contemporary techno-life. At Constant we develop projects at the intersections of art and technology in which, for us, it is important to make connections between intersectional feminisms, free software and copyleft approaches. Together they allow us to imagine webs of interdependencies, infrastructures of solidarity, poetic algorithms, conflicted data processing practices and principles for multi- and / or fuzzy authorship. \ For us, generating puzzling questions is a strategy that offers openings for profound, complex and playful research. These questions are stumbling blocks that help us realise that the technologies we are interested in are not about fluency, smoothness, optimisation and efficiency, but are instead full of assumptions and problems that demand our continuous attention.From Constant: Study, Practice and Proximate Critique. Available at: . In 2013, Constant organised a one-day meeting called "The Feminist Server Summit" between various DIY and independent server projects. Constant was interested in discussing the potential of a feminist server practice, and curious about possible approaches to it. We asked four questions to people and collectives associated with server-related projects: * Can you present a short bio of your server / service? * What gender is your server / service? * How do they deal with the law and how does the law deal with them? * How do you take care of your server / service and how do they take care of you?*Are you being served?* Constant publication, 2013. The answers and the discussions that resulted from these questions have informed Constant self-hosting practices and focus for a while. So, it only made sense for Constant to join the project ATNOFS to re-activate and re-actualise the questions, the focus, the network and the practices around self-hosting. \ :::{.timetable} ### Program | | Saturday, October 1st | |:--|:--| | 10:00 | Listening, telling | | 13:00 | Delicious vegetarian and vegan lunch | | 14:00 | Listening, telling (part 2) | | | Sunday, October 2nd | |:--|:--| | 10:00 | Discussion points
*- rosa after ATNOFS
- The publication* | | 13:00 | Delicious vegetarian and vegan lunch | | 14:00 | Collective work
*- Writing the introduction
- The visual archive method* | ::: # ATNOFS Constant Session Often with international travelling projects, the meetings are short, the content intense. The program is site and situation specific. Everybody does their own thing, the finality is a website or a publication but it's tricky to bring the whole cyclus together. ATNOFS involved a travelling server, in six locations, with six viewpoints. For the sixth session in Brussels, Constant decided to push on the brakes and try to bring the eclectic narratives together, or at least somewhat, in the same space. Also, to create room around the publication and bring on the table what has been done. For this meeting we invited Olivier Heinry, who was trained in the Flossmanuals France methodology, which consists of bringing people together for a whole week to collectively write a manual, and generally free, libre and open source software related. Inviting him worked on two levels, he was not part of any of the ATNOFS sessions, so he had an external perspective and could intervene or ask for more information if something was not clear. Olivier, as part of the choir, was a beta tester. Azahara Cerezo and Winnie Soon were also new to ATNOFS and gave very valuable feedback as to how they understood the project. They helped structure certain documentation information and they wanted to take rosa for a spin in their own time. Olivier Heinry's second contribution was introducing and executing the visual archive method: bringing the written documentation physically in the room and making live connections. He initiated this method on day two, after observing the groups who were invited and diving into rosa. On day one, we left the agenda open and decided to listen to one another converse about the other five meetings and the two parallel tracks by Marloes de Valk and ooooo. Throughout the whole project, Marloes and ooooo conducted conversations with the participants. Marloes was interested in how each session thought through the environmental impact of their infrastructure. ooooo investigated the organisation of the server related infrastructures, self-hosting and funding. Before that moment, their work and conclusions weren't seen in their entirety by the whole of ATNOFS, it was only in bits and pieces that their contributions slipped in. Each session was so very different, in intention, public and set-up. We made up a set of questions as a backbone for the report of each session. It felt good to listen. ## Oral Reports on the Sessions and the Inserts\ :::{.framed .meta} The questions for every session: - what happened in this session? - who was the session oriented towards? - what were the urgencies? - roles and perspectives? + the narration could be from different points of view / voices ( from the point of view of organisers, router, food, newcomer...)\ + it was not about generating more content but instead recapping.\ ::: Some highlights from the oral reports. The tone of the stories and their register vary widely as they slide from literal transcripts to keywords contextualised in edited sentences. Every report has a highlight made by Constant, an accentuation in the episode. These were sentences that jumped out of the narrative, they emphasise an element that is very specific to the context of the session or insert. They can also pinpoint an insight into ATNOFS in general, according to the editors of this report. ### ::Varia:: ATNOFS was an important opportunity for Varia to come up with a common language and common ground for discussions with other self-organised initiatives or collectives in Rotterdam. The groups who were implied were the ones they feel close to, not only in a digital infrastructural perspective. There was a particular desire to connect to Romanian and Greek contexts; but expanding and strengthening the network was an overall goal for ATNOFS, not exclusively for Varia. :::{.framed .meta} Question: without funding would there have been a connection?\ A: The relations were already there. But it would not have been possible in this form.\ For local groups there are also considerations about institutional funding, that they sometimes resist to. The project started with connections between people and organisations who already knew each other, were already connected in some way.\ BUT: **"It's not always interesting to visit the same ports."**The analogy of ports is used as a reference to spaces, projects, people. The sentence is a way of expressing a desire to diverge from the familiar; the network that is already known to go visit places, people, projects that are not yet part of the network. ::: From the beginning, it was important to gather a diverse (on the levels of content, practices, geographies and capacities), even frictional, network of partners. This is not always easy in EU frameworks as most of EU subsidies require match funding, meaning you have to bring a certain amount of funding next to the money you're asking for. As the Culture of Solidarity (COS) funding does not require this, it allowed organisations that are not structurally funded to take part in the consortium. However, the fact that the full amount is given only at the deposit of the report makes it hard for more precarious configurations. Here, the privileges of structurally funded organisations was made evident. Same goes for writing the applications, this demands time that is not subsidised. ### ::hypha:: Unfortunately, no hypha member was able to come to Brussels but some participants in the session were present. hypha was busy wondering how to start structuring the types of work which don't have much space in Romania, while trying to connect activism with artistic realms. :::{.framed .meta} Privacy online was central in this episode, and how to communicate safely.\ There was a day without computers, there were discussions around VPNs (Virtual private networks). They looked at the zines of PsaroskalaPsaroskala zines .. The nature of work in the hypha sessions is quite sensitive, there is a need for privacy which is very urgent, hence the focus on VPN and Tor. In the session, they looked into anarchist resources (whether foreign or Romanian) and their fragility, emphasising the necessity for safe communication channels. There is a history of repression of anarchist groups during communist times in Romania which lingers on. Right now many use Facebook. Mastodon would be a heavy load for one technical person. It's a small activist scene.\ ALSO: **"Not everywhere is it evident to work throughout a whole weekend. How do / can we justify people travelling through Europe only for two days?"** ::: Many notions of safety were discussed, but there is no ultimate (techno)solution.\ Getting people to join, making connections is a lot of work. Communication takes stable resources and energies. ### ::LURK:: Unfortunately, no LURK member was able to be present in Brussels but some participants in the workshop were in the room. Roel, Lídia and Aymeric from LURK invited grassroots collectives to work on Mastodon servers in the context of their own communities. The focus was on the already installed hometown fork of Mastodon, a version that privileges the existence of the local timeline in this federated social network. What became clear during the workshop: the weight of the moderation work, caring for the server and connecting to the community were the biggest obstacles to installing your own instance. :::{.framed .meta} There was no use of rosa and the subject of feminist servers was not directly addressed. This is probably the result of planning intricacies as the LURK workshop was fully defined in advance and happened just a few weeks after the Varia session where rosa was presented. LURK tried to use the rosa pads to write documentation, but the rosa pads were not working so they switched to Varia pads. The contingencies of a traversal feminist server! \ ALSO: **"You can't bootstrap a community from scratch."** ::: Post workshop, a Korean hometown Fediverse instance is up and running and a Georgian hub is ready to go, which is very exciting. ### ::esc mkl:: At esc mkl, there was a clear alternation between brainstorming moments and speculative writing sessions with some precise methodologies. Ideally local researchers and artists were able to attend the full two days. But it was also possible to join for shorter periods, thanks to the carefully crafted structure. Here are some post session impressions. :::{.framed .meta} The visit to mur.at was incredible. mur.at enables the networking of a wide variety of art and cultural initiatives in a (shared) virtual space. Comparable to university networks, which enable joint work in the field of science, mur.at builds an infrastructure for the field of art. They have a server room in Graz.\ To hear how mur.at finds funding and makes the project relevant for local politics is compelling. [...]\ To see the compilation of pizza boxes all in one room; touching the internet! It is strong.\ Systerserver got a real life upgrade, so much more pleasant than doing it remotely.\ [someone says they have high-speed internet]\ They don't have high-speed internet! The last one hundred metres is a copper cable. \ **"There is support from the sysadmins."** Trying to get access to the server when you arrive is always a difficult moment, this led to the audio experiment on rosa. We were wondering why it is always so hard to get access to a server? It was only at the end of the last day that it became playful. We needed another day... \ ALSO: **"It feels like rosa always needs a re-introduction."** ::: ### ::Feminist Hack Meetings (FHM):: FHM's main focus was to connect to the local context, in combination with streaming the content through another feminist server Peertube instance, the Systerserver. The need to connect to communities and address precise topics together was very urgent. There were chunks of the meetings conducted in Greek and English, to enable local anchoring to go deeper. The focus on technology became very specific when the topic of violence towards women and the notion of femicide were put on the table by WordMord. Safe spaces, online communities, encryption and publishing are important for communities in peril. The concepts of federated media were explained in a conceptual way. For example, Peertube was presented as a non-centralised way of streaming content and Mastodon was put forward for its micropublishing aspect. Both Peertube and Mastodon make it possible to choose the way you connect or not to other servers and communities. Connecting, explaining other ways of relating and creating with technology and communication was at the heart of the conversations also on day two. The lack of funding for any kind of activity, whether artistic, activist or for local infrastructures is apparent and weighs on local dynamics. FHM is a budding network, surfing on the wave initiated by Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC) in 2019 and suffering under the grinding halt of COVID-19 in the years after. ATNOFS in Athens enabled the conversation threads around feminisms and technology to be picked up again. :::{.framed .meta} Quite some people attended, it was a very diverse group, often with affiliations to XPUB, and / or the network around Calafou, age-diverse, young and old :-) \ Academics present in the session admitted doing feminist work, but they don't frame it as such.\ **"A tutor in Greece mentioned that if she would frame a course as feminist software, male students wouldn't come, so she preferred to talk about it as 'queer'."**\ Activist groups tend to refuse funding, whether public or private, because of their distrust towards institutional actors.\ Groups are supporting themselves with community work instead of funding (refusing Onassis, a private fund).\ Funding in Greece for arts is only for legal entities / NGOs, not for individual artists. ::: ### ::ooooo:: ooooo was interested in understanding all the in / visible structures (economic, social, electric and more) surrounding each of the partners' servers. They used a visual way of showing how organisations / collectives fund their infrastructure, whether the decision making is centralised or federated. The question also came up of how feminist is your server? A complicated question to answer, as to where is the beginning, where is the end? In essence there is an impossibility of being "the ultimate feminist server". The money matters combined with a necessity of server efficiency undermine certain aspects of the feminist server. Especially the aspects with regard to hierachy: who runs the server, is there a sysadmin, does someone get paid, who will be that person and why. :::{.framed .meta} How servers and their infrastructure are running in general - also the financial part of having these infrastructures up and running"a/the" feminist server(s) umbrella(s) * Are we interested in making a model around rosa? * How are we going to pay for it? * Do we want a similar model for several rosas? * Do we want to have the absolute data? * Is it about self definition? -- I am a feminist server * Or is it enough if they support feminist content? * It is not only about identifying, but also whether their ways of doing or practice are feminist We ask a lot of questions, questions are asked questions...\ This is the difference between rosa and other servers: with organisation servers, there is a lot of stuff running in the server but we cannot define everything as feminist; with rosa, we know who is around.\ ALSO: **"Not everything can be under the same umbrella."** ::: ### ::Marloes de Valk:: Marloes has interviewed the members of the consortium throughout the year to understand the ATNOFS network's approach to the environmental questions in relation to their infrastructure, including on a more personal level. Marloes looked at what stands out and what are the common points. The answers were different for everyone but there are similarities. Marloes is working on a PhD; one of the outcomes is the Damaged Earth Catalog. :::{.framed .meta} **"Instead of focusing on tools, it's the idea to look at approaches, trying to see how we're not repeating history too much."** ::: ## Wrapping up :::{.framed .meta} At the end of day one, a system was proposed to put up content proposals for the next day: * Learn more about octomode, the integrated publishing system of Markup to PDF operational on rosa, which is used to make the report. * Some people wanted to work on the introduction to the whole publication of ATNOFS. * ooooo initiated a discussion on sustainability models for servers. * Marloes de Valk was looking for planned interview time. * Olivier Heinry proposed to demonstrate the visual archive methodology. * A discussion on rosa after ATNOFS. * A discussion on the publication: about content structure: soft structure scaffolding, adaptability. ::: ![](https://piwigo.constantvzw.org/_data/i/upload/2022/10/04/20221004091254-27e118cb-me.jpg) ## The Future of rosa after ATNOFS A fragmented edited report from the group discussion. **Where is rosa going after this session?** \ Do we want to keep rosa active? rosa should be available for documentation purposes. \ Will rosa be unplugged after the deadline? rosa stays on at least until the end of the project, January 31st 2023.\ The plan for Varia is that they are including a project of virtual tours of different servers, inviting others into virtual homes.\ During the "Feminist Server Summit" in 2013, tours along servers were organised.\ **Would be nice to see rosa in a function outside of the ATNOFS project.** \ rosa going on a residency, for example in FHM's Greece based network, or that of participants from the different sessions of ATNOFS.\ * To imagine different contexts into which rosa functions; finding a travel path 'outside' of the network. * Until now it has been EU focused because of the nature of the funds but without this constraint rosa could travel further away. * What are none EU possibilities?\ - Places such as Vedettas, Marialab..\ + Here are some South American labs that were connected to 'Labsurlab' but it is an old list: \ * Can rosa be borrowed by other people? Listy lists on feminist servers: * Alive projects * Anarchaserver * La Bekka * Cl4ndestina * CódigoSur * Fuxico + Feminist Pirate Box * MaadiX * Matriar.cat * Systerserver * Vedetas * 1984 * Diebin * rosa * Closed projects * Kefir.red **Could rosa become a pointer to different practices?** \ * rosa is now only accessible through Varia, is this something we should assess? \ * Different approaches are present on rosa that can be passed on in chunks, instead of a whole (which would be very specific: Debian on that hardware, running x services).\ * The manual should be very clear and visible, so people can use it without our help, this manual should be somewhere else, not on rosa.\ * The use of a VPN for rosa could be super useful knowledges for activists groups for instance (something that was highlighted during hypha session).\ * What if we think of this the other way around. We work with someone on rosa, hosting others on rosa. This work / labour can be shared.\ * This wouldn't work outside the media art context. In an activist context rosa may not be super relevant (for security concerns for instance).\ * There is the idea of having multiple machines.\ * What about rosa becoming the hub for other feminist servers ----->>>> singu-rosa-ty: rosa as hub for other rosas that could be hubs for other rosas? **Where will rosa go-oh-oooh!?** \ It's also about responsibility for hard reboots and energy costs and internet connection etc. All ATNOFS partners should have a say. Another possibility: a feral travelling rosa? ## Collective Writing Session\ We collectively wrote the introduction to the ATNOFS publication on an etherpad. A series of questions was proposed in combination with a playlist to listen to whilst typing the answers. This edited introduction can be read at the beginning of this publication. The playlist: ``` another dyke - gender taiwan - hello Λένα Πλάτωνος- Εμιγκρέδες της Ρουμανίας Λένα Πλάτωνος- Ερωτες Το Καλοκαίρι Λένα Πλάτωνος - Μάρκος AfroRack - OSC Horselords live (long concert, can be shortened with an elegant fade out) YlangYlang - Uncertain Landscapes jaimie jbanch - theme 001 Kate Tempest - Three Sided Coin ```
The questions to answer: - In what ways did ATNOFS sessions collaborate between each other? - What can be said about each session's documentation; are there different strategies or similarities? How are these differences / similiarities made legible? - Which counter-efforts were centralised, or what commercial infrastructures became more present through the project? - What were the implications of the received funding for the network? Did it get stronger, larger, more complex ... did it change anything? - The project was a proposal to consolidate / strengthen existing projects / initiatives. How did that happen? In what way will this consolidation continue, if at all? - Did anything unforeseen / surprising appear / emerge? - How did rosa evolve beyond a computer connected to the internet, running a website and file storage? - What did rosa experience while traversing the ATNOFS activities? - How did the project allow participants to engage with new tools? What can be said about the modes, practices, ways that were discovered / shared / invented to do so? - What changed as a result of connecting local spaces? What resources could be collectivised? Which ones stayed local? - Who else joined the network, besides project partners? How did they engage with ATNOFS? - What can be said about current, and future, shared urgencies for A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers? - Have our expectations been met? Would we do it again? How would we do it differently? ## The Visual Archive Method The Visual Archive method aims at bringing the documentation of a project into the room.\ Olivier Heinry printed the different documents from each session on the wall. By making the archive tangible you can feel the different approaches of the sessions, you see the elements, topics, activities that had some traversal quality across the sessions and in the project at large. This becomes a metacoding mapping wall; you can trace topics over different pages / activities, apply visual pattern recognition, see what emerges from these prints.\ Paper magicwordsIn this context, a magicword is a word in a (digital) text document with a specific syntax, such as `__MAGICWORD__`, which functions as a referential tag to a type of content. This can be indicating the status of a document (`__PUBLISH__` to designate that a pad is public) or a content tag. The special syntax, two underscores and all caps, can be a string pattern on your server to look for, and highlight the magicwords. On paper this is done by highlighting the same term, even connecting them with a thread, as seen on one of the pictures. were added to the documentation. This mapping allowed us to read together, to perceive and address the links which aren't so evident when every pad and document is on its own spot on rosa. This is a technique inspired by Open Space to animate groups.\ The principle is to make the corpus physically available, by printing it out, displaying it on the wall. The information created becomes tangible, it can be read simultaneously and annotated by multiple persons. ![](https://piwigo.constantvzw.org/_data/i/upload/2022/10/10/20221010092159-84d26b88-me.jpg) ![](https://piwigo.constantvzw.org/_data/i/upload/2022/10/04/20221004091329-9a4b60cc-me.jpg) ![](https://piwigo.constantvzw.org/_data/i/upload/2022/10/10/20221010092143-11dea133-me.jpg) ![](https://piwigo.constantvzw.org/_data/i/upload/2022/10/04/20221004091256-5f9adcb2-me.jpg) We get the horizontal dimension, a kind of timeline by making a display on the wall. Each physical location of the timeline has been tagged, in this case by green post-its. \ We added other colours, each tagging a different relationship between each item.\ The first link was the **pink** post-it, related to rosa and the technical aspects such as explanations on ssh or tutorials on how to generate pdfs in octomode\ Each colour is a different tag:\ **Green**: documentation strategies\ **Yellow**: feminist pedagogy\ **Blue**: communities\ **Orange**: pointers & flu/flux/flow links\ **Purple dot**: speculative aspect\ **Light blue**: items related to language\ The visual mapping of the Constant session was digitally transcribed. This was a way of hypertextually connecting the myriad of pads and work documents, onto which you can hop from one magicword to another. ## Acknowledgements This session took place in Chaussee de Jette 388 Jetsesteenweg, Brussels on the 1st and 2nd October, 2022. It was organised by Donatella Portoghese and Wendy Van Wynsberghe with the gracious assistance of the Constant team and the people in the network. This episode of ATNOFS was made valuable by the richness and diversity in topic proposals by the network and the people present. The main starting point of this session was the read and write access of the program by all participants and proposals that came out of the group discussions. The principle thread was connecting, sharing, mapping, archiving, filling voids and enhancing potential. This session was a final collective rounding up. Copious amounts of lovely food were provided by APUS & les cocottes volantes. ![](https://piwigo.constantvzw.org/_data/i/upload/2022/10/04/20221004091311-ed0136a2-me.jpg)