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genera in Barok 2014

B

It can be said that research, as inquiry into a subject-matter, consists of
discrete queries. A query, such as a question about what something is, what
kinds, parts and properties does it have, and so on, can be consulted in
existing documents or generate new documents based on collection of data [in]
the field and through experiment, before proceeding to reasoning [arguments
and deductions]. Formulation of a query is determined by protocols providing
access to documents, which means that there is a

word, another to cluster them, and yet
another to abstract[generalize] the subject-matter of each of these clusters.
Needless to say, this is a craft of a few and these criteria are rarely being
disclosed, despite their impact on research, and more generally, their
influence as conditions for production[making] of a so called _common sense_.

It doesn't take that much to reimagine what a dictionary is and what it could
be, especially having large specialized corpora of texts at hand. These can
also se

roblems from which arguments/deductions start.
These are a definition (όρος), a genus (γένος), a property (ἴδιος), and an
accident (συμβεβηϰόϛ). Porphyry does not explicitly refer _Topics_ , and says
he omits speaking "about genera and species, as to whether they subsist (in
the nature of things) or in mere conceptions only"
⁸(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C1),
which means he avoids explicating whether he talks about

ver, the work sparked confusion, as
the following passage [suggests]:

> "[I]n each category there are certain things most generic, and again, others
most special, and between the most generic and the most special, others which
are alike called both genera and species, but the most generic is that above
which there cannot be another superior genus, and the most special that below
which there cannot be another inferior species. Between the most generic and
the most special, there are others which are alike both genera and species,
referred, nevertheless, to different things, but what is stated may become
clear in one category. Substance indeed, is itself genus, under this is body,
under body animated body, under which is animal, under animal rational animal,
under

.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C2))

Porphyry took one of Aristotle's ten categories of the word, substance, and
dissected it using one of his four rhetorical devices, genus. Employing
Aristotle's categories, genera and species as means for logical operations,
for dialectic, Porphyry's interpretation resulted in having more resemblance
to the perceived _structures_ of the world. So they began to bloom.

There were earlier examples, but Porphyry was the most infl

nd, but
should try t o find out what significance they had in the writer's mind.
Second, I realized that all functional or grammatical words (which in my mind
are not 'empty' at all but philosophically rich) manifest the deepest logic of
being which generates the basic structures of human discourse. It is .this
basic logic that allows the transfer from what the words mean today t o what
they meant to the writer.

>

> In the works of every philosopher there are two philosophies: the one which
he consci

actice of searching the web. It is a mechanism not
dissimilar to thought process involved in retrieving particular information
online. And search engines have it built in their indexing algorithms as well.

There is a paper proposing attaching words generated by tf-idf to the
hyperlinks when referring websites ¹⁴(http://bscit.berkeley.edu/cgi-
bin/pl_dochome?query_src=&format=html&collection=Wilensky_papers&id=3&show_doc=yes).
This would enable finding the referred content even after the link is de

genera in Constant 2015

a marketing trick ... because it is such
an easy function to do. But, if someone from Creative Commons would ask
for this function, I think someone would implement it for Scribus in a short
time, and I think we would actually like it. Maybe we would generalize it a
little, so that for example you could also add other licenses too. We already
have support for some meta data, and in the future we might put some more
function in to support license managing, for example also for fonts.
6
7

because the fonts get outlined and/or reencoded
http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/5947

18

About the relation between content and Open Source software in general
... there are some groups who are using Scribus I politically do not really
identify with. Or more or less not at all. If I meet those people on the IRC
chat, I try to be very neutral, but I of course have my own thoughts in the
back of my head.

Do

ing mode)
but it doesn’t do multi-columns then. So it’s either one vertical row or one
horizontal row of glyphs.
And I do also have a paragraph level display, but it is static. You bring
it up and it takes the current snapshot of the font and it generates a real
TrueType font and pass it off to the X Window 14 rasterizer — passes it off
to the standard Linux toolchain (FreeType) as that static font and asks that
toolchain to display text.
So what he’s saying is OK, do that, but update the font

You should also not idealise the Free Software community itself. There’s an anthropologist who has made a proper description 7 ...
but there are certainly relational and organisational problems, and political
problems, power struggles too. But the general idea ... we have come to the
political point of saying: we have technologies, and we want to appropriate
them and we will discuss them together. I feel I am a feminist ... but I know
there are other kinds of feminism, liberal feminism for example, t

that, actually. But it is not really a problem, because I know other groups
that pose more interesting questions and with whom I find it more interesting to have a debate. Last year we have been working away like small busy
bees, distributing the general idea of Free Software with maybe a hint to the
societal questions behind but in fact not marking it out as a counterweight
to a commercialised society. We haven’t really deepened the problematics,
because for me ... it is clear that Free Software

don’t see this actually
lasting for too long in the situation of ConTeXt. As it gets more stable it’s
basically destined to become more of a standard platform. But this is all
tied into to stuff that I’m planning to do with the software. If my generative
typesetting platform ... you know ... works and is actually feasible, which is
maybe a 80% job.

Wait a second. You are busy developing another platform in parallel?

Yes, although I’m kind of hovering over it or sort of superceeding it as
an i

d to
without having to deal with this 32 year old macro programming language.
On top of that and part of how directly engaging with that kind of movement foreward is ... not that I am switching over to LuaTeX entirely at this
point ... but that this generative typesetting platform that was sort of the
foundation of this journal proposal we did. Where you could imagine actual
humanity scholars using something that is akin to markdown or a wiki formatting kind of system. And I have a nice little buzzword

o do that directly ... I see it more as baby steps for
me personally at this point. Just getting a tutorial on how to typeset a cd
booklet. Just basically what I’m writing. That at the same time, you know,
gets you familiar with ConTeXt and TeX in general. Before my presentation
I was wondering, I was like: how do you set a variable in TeX. Well, it’s a
macro programming language so you just make a macro that returns a value.
Like that kind of stuff is not initially obvious if you’re used to a di

with it that way. There are advantages to that metaphor. For instance I don’t plan on designing covers in
ConTeXt. Or even a poster or something like that. Because it doesn’t really
give affordances for that kind of creativity. I mean you can do generative
stuff with the MetaFun package. You can sort of play around with that. But
I haven’t seen a ConTeXt generated cover that I liked, to be honest.

OK.

OK. Principle differences. I’m trying to ... I’m struggling a little bit. I think
that’s partially because I’m not super comfortable with the layout mechanism
61

and stuff yet. And you have things

the one
being without and the other being with. Of course there is another sense of placing
something in a canvas-based software than in a ... how would you call this?

So I guess it is either ‘declarative’ or ‘sequence’ based. You could say generative in a way ... or compiled or ... I don’t even know. That’s a cool question.

What is the difference really and why would you choose the one or the other? Or
what would you gain from one to the other? Because it’s clear that posters are not
e

mework for example and did not use any existing frameworks. You
didn’t use existing GUIs and toolboxes. It would be nice to listen to you about
how you worked, how you worked on the programming.
I think like a lot of artists, or creative people in general, you have to
enjoy the little nuts and bolts of what you’re doing in order to produce any
final work, that is if you actually do produce any final work. Part of that is
making the tools. When I first started making computer tools to help me
73

i

you work together in the same space, if you don’t have a
system to share files, it’s a pain in the ass.
After using it for a few years, would you say there are parts of in Git
where you do not feel at home?

In Git, and in versioning systems in general, there is that feeling that the
latest version is the best. There is an idea of linearity, even though you can
have branches, you still have an idea of linearity in the process.

Yes, that’s true. We did this workshop Please computer let me design

at you, where you save is a disk. It was just like saving and it
was committing.

I really agree. From the experience of working on a typeface together in
Git with students, it was really painful. That’s because you are trying to
do something that generates source code, a type design program generates
source code. You’re not writing it by hand, and if you then have two versions
of the type design program, it already starts to create conflicts that are quite
hard. It’s interesting to bring to models together. Git is just an architecture
on h

t’s just an example of not putting the .pdf, but you have
everything you need to make the .pdf yourself. For me it’s quite interesting to say
our sources are there. You can buy the book but if you want the .pdf you have
to make a small effort to generate it and then you can distribute it freely. But I
find it quite interesting to, of course the easiest way would be the .pdf but in this
case we can’t. Because the publisher doesn’t want us to.

But that distinction somehow undervalues the fact th

want to clone it, if you want people to clone
it also you don’t want a 8 gigabyte repository.

I don’t know because it’s not really what OSP is for, but you can imagine, like
Dropbox has been made to easily share large files, or even files in general.
We can imagine that another company will set up something, especially
graphic designers or the graphic industry. The way GitHub did something
for the development industry. They will come up with solutions for this
very problem.
I just want to say t

roups consider all legitimate views and objections, and endeavor to resolve
them, whether these views and objections are expressed by the active participants of the
group or by others (e.g., another W3C group, a group in another organization, or the general
public). World Wide Web Consortium. General Policies for W3C Groups, 2005. [Online; accessed 30.12.2014]

139

make voting blocks and convince other people to vote their way ... it is much
better when it is done on the basis of a technical discussion, I mean ... you
either convince people or

got that clock speed and it’s got this much memory. OK, great, cool.
This one is better than that one because this one’s got 4 gigs and that one’s
got 2 gigs. It’s a lot of other things as well, but that’s something that the
public can in general look at and say That one is better. When I mentioned
the W3C process, I was talking about the engineers, managers. I didn’t talk
about the lawyers, but we do have a process for that as well. We have a patent
advisory group conformed. If someone ha

and the
middle point of the crossbar and the bottom point. By describing all of that
in algebra, you really describe the structure of that shape and that gives you
a lot of power because it means you can trace a pen nib objects over that
skeleton to generate the final typeform and so you can apply variations, you
can rotate the pen nib – you can have different pen nib shapes And you can
have a lot of different typefaces out of that kind of source code. But that
approach is not a visual approach, you

n on Apple computers. Obviously that was a bit of a damn on Robofog.
Pretty soon after that Jim sold Fontographer to Macromedia. He and his
employes continued to develop Fontographer into Freehand, it went from a
font drawing application into a more general purpose illustration tool. So
Macromedia bought Altsys for Freehand because they were competing with
Adobe at that time. And they didn’t really have any interest in continuing
to develop Fontographer. Fonts is a really obscure kind of area. As a p

hange font source data with different programs and specifically
that means that you have a really good font interpolation program that can
read and write that UFO XML format and then you can have your regular
type design format font editor that will generate bitmap font formats that
you actually use in a system. You can write your own tool for a specific
task and push and pull the data back and forth. Some of these Dutch guys,
especially Erik has written a really good interpolation tool. So, as a kind

great application, there is a lot of power to it, and I had already
an investment in its code base so it made sense to use that as a platform for
testing out ideas of open instrumentation.
What is special about ingimp, is the fact that the data you generate is made by
the software you are studying itself. Could you describe how that works?
Every bit of data we collect, we make available: you can go to the website,
you can download every log file that we have collected. The intent really
is for us to b

t adds a really nice
human element to all this empirical data.
I wanted to ask you about the data, without getting too technical, could
you explain how these data are structured, what do the log files look like?

So the log files are all in XML, and generally we compress them, because
they can get rather large. And the reason that they are rather large is that we
are very verbose in our logging. We want to be completely transparent with
respect to everything, so that if you have some doubts or if you h

u can’t really
reduce these kind of questions to an answer of N people do this, you have to
understand the larger context. You have to understand why they are doing
it, why they are not doing it. So, the data helps to answer some questions,
but it generates new questions. They give you some understanding of how
the people are using it, but then it generates new questions of, Why is this
the case? Is this because these are just the people using ingimp, or is this
some more widespread phenomenon? They asked me yesterday how many
people are using this colour picker tool – I can’t remember the exact

rface design is done in free software projects,
and in proprietary software?
Well, I have been mostly involved in the research community, so I don’t have
a lot of exposure to design projects. I mean, in my community we are always
trying to look at generating new knowledge, and not necessarily at how to
get a product out the door. So, the goals or objectives are certainly different.
I think one of the dangers in your question is that you sort of lump a lot
of different projects and project styles into

omy of scale doesn’t apply. This is why commercial
software is still hanging on in these niche markets where there isn’t a broad
enough market. It’s not a broad enough input so that freedom is supported
by the users of it. Typography is a very general input. It’s like a nut or
a bolt, while QuarkXpress is pretty specific. Franziska was saying that in
her publishing company all they really need is two copies, or maybe one
even, of the software, and the whole company can work with it. They
just g

In the panel How to
keep and make productive libre graphics projects?, Asheesh
had responded rather sharply to a remark from the audience that only a very small number of women were
present at LGM: Bringing the problem back to gender is
avoiding the general problem that F/LOSS has with social
inclusion. Another good reason to talk to him were the
intriguing ‘Interactive training missions’ that he had been
developing as part of the OpenHatch.org project. I wanted
to know more about the tutorials he

ians, where
are the Asians in our community? This is still a confusing question, but not
awkward.

Why is it not awkward?

(laughs) As I am an Indian person ... you might not be able to tell from the
transcription?
It is an easy thing to do, to make generalizations of categories of people
based on visible characteristics. Even worse, is to make generalizations about
all individual people in that class. It is really easy for people in the Free
Software community to subconsciously think there are no women in the
room ‘because women don’t like to program’, while we know that is really
not true.

how-to guides for how to do this, they can digitize their tags
ER

2
3

4
5
6
7

Theo Watson http://www.theowatson.com
In its simplest form, L.A.S.E.R. Tag is a camera and laptop setup, tracking a green laser
point across the face of a building and generating graphics based on the laser’s position which
then get projected back onto the same building with a high power projector.
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/projects/laser-tag
Graffiti Analysis is a digital graffiti blackbook designed for documentin

ds and
downloads?
FS

Right. It starts with Graffiti Analysis. It is software written in C++
using OpenFrameworks, an Open Source platform designed by artists for
visual applications. Right now you can download the recorder app and
from that you can generate your own .gml files. And from there you can
upload these files into the playback app. In the beginning that was the
only Open Source side of the project. Programmers could also make new
applications based on the software, which also happened.
Last

which would be a good thing.
ER

In a way typography has a similar culture of apprenticeship. Some
people enjoy spreading knowledge, and others resist in the name of quality
control.
FS

Interesting. I think the work I am doing is such a tangent! In general,
for something that is decidedly against the rules, the culture of writing
graffiti often has a rigid structure. To people in that community what
ER

11
12

KATSU http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=graffiti+katsu
Mark Jenkins tapesculptures http://tape

lked about posting a wish-list and being surprised that your
wishes were fulfilled within weeks. Why do you think that a project like
EyeWriter, even if it interests a lot of people, has a hard time gathering
collaborators, while something much more general like GML seems to be
more compelling for people to contribute to?
FS

16

Benjamin Gaulon, Print Ball
http://www.eyewriter.org/paintball-shooting-robot-writes-tempt1-tag

223

Tying the story to data

I’ll answer that in a second, but you reminde

is written and
the order of the letters. When TEMPT picked this style he made a smart
decision that a lot of people miss when you make a font, you miss all the
motions and the connections.
ER

What if a programmer could put this data in a font, and generate
alternating connections?
SV

ER That kind of stuff is interesting. It would help graffiti writers to design
tags maybe?
To get my feet wet, I designed a tag once, and it was so not-fun to write!
I was thinking about a tag that would look different

300
worth of equipment on him or herself.

I was trying to think of how the challenge could be gamed ... I did not
want to get into a situation where we were getting stressed out because some
smart hacker found a hole in the brief, and bought a next generation iPhone
that somehow just worked. I didn’t want to force people to buy expensive
equipment. This line was more about covering our own ass.
ER

–

The graffiti writer must be able to activate the recording function alone (i.e., without assistan

Would they really be so different?

253

Tying the story to data

Obviously some rappers and some nerds, I mean that’s one of the
beauties – I mean its a global movement, you can’t help but have diversity
– but if we’re just speaking in generalizations?
JH

FS

There’s a lot of showing off in F/LOSS too.

Yeah, and there’s a lot of chauvinism. And when you said that selfmade thing, that’s the Free Software idea number one.
JH
ER

I think that part is a direct connection.

And they’

ually help us think ‘out of the
box’ and hopefully push boundaries further [not so much as escaping them].
For me OSS and its movement have reached a maturity level that can prove
it’s own worth in society. Just see Firefox – when it reached general user
acceptance level (aka ‘project maturity’ or ‘development state’), they started
to compete directly with MS Internet Explorer. This will happen with the
rest (at least that’s what I believe). It’s a matter of quality and doing the
correct broadcast to the general public. Linux started almost as a personal
project and now it’s a powerhouse in programming or web environments.
Maybe because these are areas that require constant software and hardware
attention it became an obvious and successful choice. People

eloped.
While I think typography, historically, is always seen as a way to share
knowledge. Humanist stuff.

287

The art and craft of typeface design is
currently headed for extinction due to the
illegal proliferation of font software,
piracy, and general disregard for proper
licensing etiquette. 1

H
FS

H

FS

Emigré ... Did they not live
from the copyrights of fonts?!

You are right.
They are
like a commercial record company. Can you imagine what
would happen if you would
open up the typographic

��meta language’.
290

FS
H

FS
H

It is truly embedded content

Exactly! It is still very difficult to bridge the gap between personal emotions
and programming a font. Moreover, there are different approaches, from
stroke design to software that generates fonts. And typography is standardisation. The first digital fonts are drawn fixed shapes, letter by letter,
‘outstrokes’. But there is another approach where the letters are traced by
the computer. It needs software to be generated. In Autocad, letters are
‘innerstroke’ that can vary of weight. Letterrors’ Beowolf 3 is also an example of that kind of approach. interesting way to work, but the font depends
on the platform it goes with. Beowolf only works on OS9. It also

ts? Frutiger?
292

H

FS

H
FS

Fonts are Culture Capsules! It was Adrian Frutiger. But he wasn’t the only
one to try ... It was a research for the Univers font I think. Here again we
meet this paradox of typography: a standardisation of language generating
cultural complexity.

Univers. That makes sense. Amazing to see those examples
together. It seems digital typography got stuck at some
point, and I think some of the ideas and practices that are
current in Open Source could help break out of it.

son. Or maybe we should call this an achievement
of Free Software too?
Using F/LOSS has made us reconsider the way we work and sometimes this
is visible in the design we produce, more often in the commissions we take
on or the projects we invest in. Generative work has become part of our
creative suite and this certainly looks different than a per-page treatment;
also deliberate traces of the production process (including printing and prepress) add another layer to what we make.
Of all smaller and larg

ns by using the
term ‘open universal’, I think this is why we are attracted to Free Software:
it has the potential to open up both the design of parameters as well as their
application. Which leads to your next question.
You mentioned the use of generative design just now. How far do you go into
this? Within the generative design field there seem to be a couple of tendencies, one
that is very pragmatic, simply about exploring a space of possible designs through
parametric definition in order to find, select and breed from and tweak a good
result that would not be necessarily imaginable otherwise, the other being more
about the inefible nature of the generative process itself, something vitalist. These
tendencies of not of course exclusive, but how are they inflected or challenged in
your use of generative techniques?

I feel a bit on thin ice here because we only start to explore the area and we
are certainly not deep into algorithmic design. But on a more mundane level
... in the move from print to design for the web, ‘grids’ have been replac

her kinds of
data, such as music, texts and so on. (This migration of rivalry is often glossed
over in the description of ‘goods’ being ‘non-rivalrous’.) Graphic Design however
is an interesting middle ground in a certain way in that it both generates files of
many different kinds, and, often but not always, provides the ‘recipes’ for physical
objects, the actual ‘voedingstof ’, such as signage systems, posters, books, labels and
so on. Following this, do you circulate your files in any

. Scribus and LibreOffice (spreadsheet) are also part of our book making
toolbox.
During our work session with you at Constant Variable, we noticed
that it was difficult to install a sufficiently complete TeX/ConTeXt/Python
environment to be able to generate the book. Is Pierre’s machine still the only
one, or did you manage to set it up on other computers?

Now we all have similar setups, so it’s a generalized generation. But it’s true
that this represented a difficulty at some times.
The source code and the Python scripts created for the book are publicly
accessible on the OSP Git server. Would these sources be realistically reusable? Could other publication p

s a documentation source, as much on concrete aspects, such
as e-mail parsing, than on a possible architecture, on certain coding motives, etc.
And most importantly, is consists in a form of common experience.
Do you think you will reuse some of the general functions/features of
archive parsing for other projects ?
Hard to say. We haven’t anything in perspective that is close to the Aether9
project. But for sure, if the need of such treatment comes up again, we’ll retrieve
these software components

rnelia’s contributions to
hacker culture for long. She pioneered as a cyberfeminist
in the 1990s with the hilarious and intelligent net-art piece
Female Extension 2 , co-founded Old Boys Network 3 and
developed seminal projects such as the Net Art Generator.
The opportunity to spend two sunny spring days with her
intelligence, humour and cyberfeminist wisdom could not
have come at a better moment.
What is Libre Graphics?

Libre Graphics is quite a large ecosystem of software tools; of people, people

GPL, an open content licence. And there it stops. Even their work
will be released under proprietary licences. For others, it is important to
make the full circle and to think about what the legal status is of the work
they release. That is the more general one. Then, Free Culture, we can use
that very loosely, as in ‘everything that is circulating under conditions that
it can be reused and remade’. That would be my position. Free Culture
is of course also referred to a very specific idea of how th

m these
tools remain ‘inspectable’, are documented, that either you can open them
in another tool or could develop a tool to have these files available for you.
It is really part and parcel of Free Software culture, that you care about that
what generates your artifact, but also the materiality of your artifact. Open
standards are important. Or maybe let’s say it is is important that file formats
are documented and can be understood. What is interesting to see is that in
this whole Libre Graphics

text
using inkscape on the commandline
using pdftk
... distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without
even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Free Software Foundation. GNU General Public License, 2007

338

therefore more or less temporary. So I need to be able to read and adapt
them myself.
I know that you usually afterwards you provide a description of how the collage
was made. You publish the scripts, and sketches and int

f may
be stored anywhere, as long as it is accessible over the internet. I found
this an interesting opportunity for collaboration. Because if somebody does
not want to stick to the grid given by the LaTeX configuration or to this
kind of working in general, this person could create a .pdf, store it online,
reference it and the file will be included. This can be a very disconnected
way of contributing to the final book. And that’s also a thing we’re now
trying to test ourselves. Because in the begi

es included into the final document are referenced in the table of
contents.

Can you explain that again ?

Separate .pdfs, that are included into the final document will be referenced
in the table of contents. We can still make use of the automatic generation
of page numbers in the table of contents, so there it goes together. There
are certain borders, for example since the .pdfs are more like finished documents, indexing will probably not work. Because even if you can extract
references from the .pd

4, 179–183, 276, 279,
280, 298, 299, 351
Git, 57, 109–121, 123–125, 127–129,
203, 313, 320, 351
GitHub, 7, 111, 116, 120–124, 126, 128
Gitorious, 111, 116, 121, 122, 124
Glitch, 305
Glyph, 31, 48, 120, 121, 165, 262, 266,
268, 291, 314
Gnu General Public License, 219, 253,
305, 321, 338
Goller, Ludwig, 304
Google Summer of Code, 205, 206
Graphic Design, 7, 9, 111, 113, 115, 116,
119, 156, 159, 161, 162,
175, 227, 280, 287, 297,
298, 306, 311, 312, 321,
333, 343
Graphical User Interface, 14, 2

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