diff in Constant 2016


ficatory language as a complex and interdependent web of relations,
Otlet imagined each element as a point of entry for the other. He stressed that responses to

P.12

P.13

displays in a museum involved intellectual and social processes that where different from
those involved in reading books in a library, but that one in a sense entailed the other. [5]. The
dreamed capacity of his Mondotheque was to interface scales, perspectives and media at the
intersection of all those different practices. For us, by transporting a historical device into the
future, it figured as a kind of thinking machine, a place to analyse historical and social
locations of the Mundaneum project, a platform to envision our persistent interventions
to


th century Utopia of Mundaneum stood
for.
Embedded hierarchies addresses how classification systems, and the dream of their universal
application actually operate. It brings together contributions that are concerned with
knowledge infrastructures at different scales, from disobedient libraries, institutional practices
of the digital archive, meta-data structures to indexing as a pathological condition.
Disambiguation dis-entangles some of the similarities that appear around the heritage of Paul
Otlet


ts, image collections and other materials that make connections
emerge between historical and contemporary readings, unearthing possible spiritual or
mystical underpinnings of the Mundaneum, and transversal inclusions of the same elements in
between different locations.
The point of modest operations such as Mondotheque is to build the collective courage to
persist in demanding access to both the documents and the intellectual and technological
infrastructures that interface and mediate them. Exactly


tions and their vision on digital information sharing. The voices of Sylvia
Van Peteghem and Dries Moreels (Ghent University), Églantine Lebacq and
Marc d'Hoore (Royal library of Belgium) resonate on the following pages.
We hear from them about the differences and similarities in how the three
institutions deal with the unruly practice of digital heritage.

The full interviews with the Royal Library of Belgium and Ghent University
Library can be found in the on-line publication.

• RC = Raphaèle


me
endroit.
RC : Il y avait en tout cas cette idée par la suite, d’avoir une plate-forme commune, qui
s’appelle numériques.be[2]. Malheureusement, ce qu’on trouve sur numeriques.be ne
correspond au contenu sur Pallas, ce sont deux structures différentes. En gros, si on veut
diffuser sur les deux, c’est deux fois le travail.
En plus, ils n’ont pas configuré numérique.be pour qu’il puisse être moissonné par
Europeana[3]. Il y a des normes qui ne correspondent pas encore.
SM : Ce sont


oit se faire à une discipline qui nous impose
aussi de protéger le patrimoine ici, qui appartient à la Communauté Française et qui donc
doit être décrit de manière normée comme dans les autres centres d’archives.

P.32

P.33

C’est une différence de dialogues. Pour moi ce n’est pas un détail du tout. Le fait que par
exemple, certains vont se dire « vous ne mettez pas l’indice CDU dans ces champs » ... vous
n’avez d’ailleurs pas encore posé cette question … ?
ADV : Elle al


en terme de données conservées chez nous. Le débat nous intéresse au même titre
que ce débat existait sous une autre forme fin du 19e siècle avec l’avènement de la presse
périodique et la multiplication des titres de journaux ainsi que la diffusion rapide d’une
information.
RC : Le fait d’avoir eu Paul Otlet reconnu comme père de l’internet etcetera, d’avoir pu le
rattacher justement à des éléments actuels, c’était des sujets porteurs pour la communication.
Ça ne veut pas d


peut mettre sur une plaque et voilà. Il
transforme ça en autre support.
Je pense qu’il a imaginé des choses, parce qu’il avait cette envie de communiquer le savoir,
ce n’est pas quelqu’un qui a un moment avait envie de collectionner sans diffuser, non. C’était
toujours dans cette idée de diffuser, de communiquer quelques soient les personnes, quelque
soit le pays. C’est d’ailleurs pour ça qu’il adapte le Musée International, pour que tout le
monde puisse y aller, même ceux qui ne savaient pas lire avaient accès aux salles et
pouvaient comprendre, parce qu’il avait organisé les choses de telles façons. Il imagine à
chaque fois des outils de communication qui vont lui servir pour diffuser ses idées, sa pensée.

P.34

P.35

Qu’il ait imaginé à un moment donné qu’on puisse lire des choses à l’autre bout du monde ?
Il a du y penser, mais maintenant, techniquement et technologiquement, il n’a pas pu
concevoir. Mais je s


en a fait les frais. Ça peut laisser quelques traces inattendues dans
l’histoire. L’héritage d’Otlet en matière bibliographique n’est pas forcément mis en évidence
dans un lieu tel que la bibliothèque nationale. C’est on le comprend difficile d’imaginer une
institution qui explique certains engagements de manière aussi personnalisée ou
individualisée. On va plutôt parler d’un service et de son histoire dans une période plus
longue. On évite ainsi d’entrer dans des détail


t pas dans la fondation Otlet.

Nous sommes un centre d’archives spécialisé, qui a conservé toutes les archives liées à une
institution. Cette institution était animée par des hommes et des femmes. Et donc, ce qui les
animaient, c’était différentes choses, dont le désir de transmission. Et quand à Otlet, on a
identifié son envie de transmettre et il a imaginé tous les moyens. Il n’était pas ingénieur non
plus, il ne faut pas rire. Et donc, c’est un peu comme Jules Verne, il a rêvé le monde, il a
imaginé des choses différentes, des instruments. Il s’est mis à rêver à certaines choses, à des
applications. C’est un passionné, c’est un innovateur et je pense qu’il a passionné des gens
autour de lui. Mais, autour de lui, il y avait d’autres personnes, n


ontexte
particulier lié notamment à la sociologie, aux sciences sociales, notamment Solvay, et voilà.
Tout ceux qu’on retrouve et qui ont traversé une quarantaine d’années.
Aujourd’hui, nous sommes un centre d’archives avec des supports différents, avec cette
volonté encyclopédique qu’ils ont eu et qui a été multi supports, et donc l’œuvre phare n’a
pas été uniquement Le Traité de Documentation. C’était intéressant de comprendre sa
genèse avec les visites que vous avi


arce que Otlet a écrit que La Fontaine n’a pas travaillé sur le projet. Ce
n’était pas du tout les mêmes personnalités.
SM : On est sur des stéréotypes.
ADV : Otlet a tout de même énormément écrit ?
SM : Otlet a beaucoup synthétisé, diffusé et lu. Il a été un formidable catalyseur de son
époque.
RC : C’est plutôt perdre la pensée d’Otlet en allant dans un seul sens, parce que lui il voulait
justement brasser des savoirs, diffuser l’ensemble de la connaissance. Pour nous l’objectif

P.36

P.37

c’est vraiment de pouvoir tout exploiter, tous les sujets, tous les supports, toutes les
thématiques… Quand on dit qu’il a préfiguré internet, c’est juste deux sché


aujourd’hui encore classent au nom de la CDU
mais ils ne savent pas d’où ça vient. Tout ce travail on l’a fait et ça remettait, quand même,
les choses à leur place et on l’a ouvert quand même au public. On a eu des ouvertures avec
des différents publics à partir de ce moment là.
SM : C’est aussi d’avoir une vision globale sur ce que les uns et les autres ont fait et aussi de
ce qu’a été l’institution, ce qui est d’ailleurs l’une des plus grosse difficulté qui existe. C’est de
s’appeler Mundaneum dans l’absolu.
On est le « Mundaneum Centre d’archives » depuis 1993. Mais le Mundaneum c’est une
institution qui nait après la première guerre mondiale, dont le nom est postérieur à l'IIB.
Dans ses gênes, elle est bibliographique et peut-être que ce sont ces différentes notions qu’il
faut essayer d’expliquer aux gens.
Mais c’est quand même formidable de dire que Paul Otlet a inventé internet, pourquoi pas.
C’est une formule et je pense que dans l’absolu la formule marque les gens. Maintenant, il


tape et
d’éduquer sur l'ouverture au patrimoine. C’est ça aussi notre mission.

Donc Google a sa propre politique. Nous avons mis à disposition quelques expositions et
ceci en est l’intérêt. Mais on a quand même tellement de partenaires différents avec lesquels
on a travaillé. On ne privilégie pas un seul partenaire. Aujourd’hui, certaines firmes viennent
vers nous parce qu’elles ont entendu parler justement plus de Google que du Mundaneum et
en même temps du Mundaneum par l’in


à. À Gand, ils ont numérisé des livres. C’est leur choix soutenu par la Région
flamande. De notre côté, nous poursuivons une même volonté d’accès pour le public et les

P.40

P.41

chercheurs mais avec un matériel un patrimoine, bien différent de livres publiés uniquement !
Le travail avec Google a permis de collaborer plusieurs fois avec l’Université mais nous
l’avions déjà fait avant de se retrouver avec Google sur certaines activités et l’accueil de
conférenciers. Donc


rtoire de tous
ces bouquins, venez l’utiliser, nous on a le répertoire pour reconstituer toutes les
bibliothèques ».
Donc, tout numériser, non. Mais numériser certaines choses pour montrer le mécanisme de
ce répertoire, sa constitution, les différents répertoires qui existaient dans ce répertoire et de
pouvoir retrouver la trace de certains éléments, oui.
Si on numérise tout, cela permettrait d’avoir un état des lieux des sources d’informations qui
existaient à une époque pour u


effectivement, avec l’écriture d’Otlet.
SM : Autant on peut dire qu'Otlet est un maître du marketing, autant il utilisait plusieurs
termes pour décrire une même réalité. C’est pour ça que ne s’attacher qu’à sa vision à lui
c’est difficile. Comme classer ses documents, c’est aussi difficile.
ADV : Otlet n’a-t-il pas laissé suffisamment de documentation ? Une documentation qui
explicite ses systèmes de classement ?
RC : Quand on a ouvert les boîtes d'Otlet en 2002, c’était des caisses à bananes non
classées, rien du tout.


inistrative interne. Il a fallu montrer les éléments et archives sur
lesquels nous nous sommes basés pour bien prouver la démarche qui était la nôtre. Certains
documents expliquaient clairement cela. Mais si vous ne les avez jamais vu, c’est difficile de
croire un nouvel élément inconnu !
RC : On n’a pas beaucoup d’informations sur l’origine des collections, c’est-à-dire sur
l’origine des pièces qui sont dans les collections. Par hasard, je vais trouver un tiroir où il est
mis


ait quoi… Et ça, il
ne l’a pas laissé dans les archives.
SM : C’est presque la mémoire vive de l’institution.
On a eu vraiment cette envie de vérifier dans le répertoire cette façon de travailler, le fait
qu’il y ait des informations différentes. Effectivement, c’était un peu avant 2008, qu’on l'a su
et cette information s’est affinée avec des vérifications. Il y a eu des travaux qui ont pu être
faits avec l’identification de séries particulières des dossiers numéroté


gent, les chercheurs passent… vous avez vécu avec tout ça depuis longtemps. Je
me demande comment le faire transparaître, le faire ressentir?
SM : C’est vrai qu’on aimerait bien pouvoir axer aussi la communication de l’institution sur
ces différents aspects. C’est bien ça notre rêve en fait, ou notre aspiration. Pour l’instant, on
est plutôt en train de se demander comment on va mieux communiquer, sur ce que nous
faisons nous ?
RC : Est-ce que ce serait uniquement en mettant en lig


a, est-ce que c’est vraiment intéressant ?
Dans une base de données dite « classique », c’est ça aussi le problème avec nos archives, le
Mundaneum n'étant pas un centre d’archives comme les autres de par ses collections, c’est
parfois difficile de nous adapter à des standards existants.
ADV : Il n’y aurait pas qu’un seul catalogue ou pas une seule manière de montrer les
données. C’est bien ça ?
RC : Si vous allez sur Pallas vous avez la hiérarchie du fond Otlet. Est-ce que


les plus intéressants et peut-être les plus uniques. Maintenant,
le rêve serait de numériser tout, mais est-ce que ce serait raisonnable de tout numériser ?
FS : Si tous les documents étaient disponibles en ligne ?
RC : Je pense que ça serait difficile de pouvoir transposer la pensée et le travail d'Otlet et
La Fontaine dans une base de données. C’est à dire, dans une base de données, c’est
souvent une conception très carrée : vous décrivez le fond, la série, le dossier, la pièce.


n’est pas ça le musée virtuel.
RC : C’est un autre boulot.
Last
Revision:
2·08·2016

1. Logiciel fourni par la Communauté française aux centres d’archives privées. « Pallas permet de décrire, de gérer et de consulter
des documents de différents types (archives, manuscrits, photographies, images, documents de bibliothèques) en tenant compte
des conditions de description spécifiques à chaque type de document. » http://www.brudisc.be/fr/content/logiciel-pallas
2. « Images et histoi


ion_FR.pdf

6. « L'UNESCO a mis en place le Programme Mémoire du monde en 1992. Cette mise en oeuvre est d'abord née de la prise
de conscience de l'état de préservation alarmant du patrimoine documentaire et de la précarité de son accès dans différentes
régions du monde. » http://www.unesco.org/new/fr/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-

world/about-the-programme

7. Marcel Dieu dit Hem Day

Amateur
Librarian
-A
Course
in
Critical
Pedagogy
Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars (Public Li


y the ruling classes of that time consisted, indeed, either of a pious moral edification
serving political pacification or of an inculcation of skills and knowledge useful to the factory
owner. Even the seemingly noble efforts of the Society for the Diffusion of the Useful
Knowledge, a Whig organization aimed at bringing high-brow learning to the middle and
working classes in the form of simplified and inexpensive publications, were aimed at dulling
the edge of radicalism of popular movements.[4]
The


uratorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW, who have presented the
work of Public Library within the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge they organized at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid,
October 29, 2014 – February 9, 2015.
4. “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, June 25, 2015, https://

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Society_for_the_Diffusion_of_Useful_Knowledge&oldid=668644340.

5. Richard Johnson, “Really Useful Knowledge,” in CCCS Sel


de la bibliothèque publique en tant qu'institution
permettant l'accès à la connaissance, la tradition prolétaire de la connaissance
réellement utile et la puissance de l'amateur motivée par le développement
technologique, le programme couvre différents secteurs : depuis les flux de
travail directement applicables comme la numérisation, le partage et l'utilisation
de livres électroniques, à la politique et la tactique de conservation des
bibliothèques en ligne, en passant par la théorie


, soit à une édification morale pieuse au service de la pacification politique, soit à
l'inculcation de qualifications ou de connaissances qui seraient utiles au propriétaire de
l'usine. Même les efforts aux allures nobles de la Society for the Diffusion of the Useful
Knowledge, une organisation du parti whig cherchant à apporter un apprentissage intellectuel
à la classe ouvrière et à la classe moyenne sous la forme de publications bon marché et
simplifiées, avaient pour objectif l'atténu


n accès à la connaissance se sont largement étendues, les bibliothèques

publiques se retrouvent particulièrement limitées dans leurs possibilités d'acquérir et de prêter
des éditions aussi bien sous une forme papier que numérique. Cette difficulté est un signe de
l'inégalité radicale de notre époque : une fois encore, l'émancipation politique se bat de
manière défensive pour une base matérielle pédagogique contre les forces croissantes de la
privatisation. Non seulement l'éduca


, behalve verwijzen
en zorgen dat het evengoed vindbaar
is als de print.

Le programme de bibliothécaire amateur développe
plusieurs aspects et implications d'une telle définition.
Certaines parties du programme ont été construites à
partir de différents ateliers et exposés qui se déroulaient précédemment dans le cadre du
projet Public Library. Certaines parties de ce programme doivent encore évoluer s'appuyant
sur un processus de recherche futur, d'échange et de production de connaissan


t, How and for Whom/WHW, qui a présenté le
travail de Public Library dans le cadre de l'exposition Really Useful Knowledge qu'ils ont organisée au Museo Reina Sofía à
Madrid, entre 29 octobre 2014 et le 9 février 2015.
4. 4. « Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, » Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Juin 25, 2015, https://

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Society_for_the_Diffusion_of_Useful_Knowledge&oldid=668644340.

5. 5. Richard Johnson, « Really Useful Knowledge, » dans CCC


web. [7]
The World Wide Web provides a vast source of information of almost all types,
ranging from DNA databases to resumes to lists of favorite restaurants. However, this
information is often scattered among many web servers and hosts, using many different
formats. If these chunks of information could be extracted from the World Wide Web
and integrated into a structured form, they would form an unprecedented source of
information. It would include the largest international directory of people, the


cale of the web and still perform
using contemporary computing power completing its task in a reasonably short amount of
time.
A traditional algorithm could not compute the large itemsets in the lifetime of the
universe. [...] Yet many data sets are difficult to mine because they have many
frequently occurring items, complex relationships between the items, and a large
number of items per basket. In this paper we experiment with word usage in documents
on the World Wide Web (see Section 4.2 for details about this data set). This data set
is fundamentally different from a supermarket data set. Each document has roughly
150 distinct words on average, as compared to roughly 10 items for cash register
transactions. We restrict ourselves to a subset of about 24 million documents from the
web. This set of docum


e idea of a list ever being considered "unordered" (or in
opposition to the language used in the specification, for order to ever be considered
"insignificant"). Indeed in its suggested representation, still followed by modern web
browsers, the only difference between the two visually is that UL items are preceded by a
bullet symbol, while OL items are numbered.
The idea of ordering runs deep in programming practice where essentially different data
structures are employed depending on whether order is to be maintained. The indexes of a
"hash" table, for instance (also known as an associative array), are ordered in an
unpredictable way governed by a representation's particular implemen


e and Daniel Connolly, June 1993, http://
www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
11. http://informationobservatory.info/2015/10/27/google-books-fair-use-or-anti-democratic-preemption/#more-279

A Book
of the
Web
DUSAN BAROK

Is there a vital difference between publishing in print versus online other than
reaching different groups of readers and a different lifespan? Both types of texts
are worth considering preserving in libraries. The online environment has
created its own hybrid form between text and library, which is key to
understanding how digital text produces difference.
Historically, we have been treating texts as discrete units, that are distinguished by their
material properties such as cover, binding, script. These characteristics establish them as
either a book, a magazine, a diary, sheet music and so on. One book differs from another,
books differ from magazines, printed matter differs from handwritten manuscripts. Each
volume is a self-contained whole, further distinguished by descriptors such as title, author,
date, publisher, and classification codes that allow it to be located and referred to. The
demarcation of a publicatio


bliographic
information, but the URL.
(3) The text is as long as web-crawlers of a given search engine are set to reach,
refashioning the library into a storage of indexed data.

These are some of the lines along which online texts appear to produce difference. The first
contrasts the distinct printed publication to the machine-readable text, the second the
bibliographic information to the URL, and the third the library to the search engine.
The introduction of full-text search has created an
environ


rrors on chains and pulleys and a set of levered and
hinged mechanical arms to allow me to open the drawers and to privately consult my files
from any location within the sanatorium. The clarity of the image is however so far too much
effaced by the diffusion of light across the system.
It must further be borne in mind that a system thus capable of indefinite expansion obviates
the necessity for hampering a researcher with furniture or appliances of a larger size than are
immediately required. The co


of
handwritten index cards and various folded papers (from printed screenshots to
boarding passes) in the storage space of an institute. Upon closer investigation,
it has become evident that the mixed contents of the box make up one single
document. Difficult to decipher due to messy handwriting, the manuscript
poses further challenges to the reader because its fragments lack a preestablished order. Simply uploading high-quality facsimile images of the box
contents here would not solve the problems o


The day I resigned myself to those forces – and I assume, I had unleashed them upon myself
through my vengeful desire to hxxx {here, a 3-cm erasure} words until I could see carcass
after carcass roll down the stairs [truth be said, a practice that differed from other people's
doings only in my heightened degree of awareness, which entailed a partially malevolent but
perhaps understandable defensive strategy on my part] – that gloomy day, the burning
untitled shape I had been carrying in my mouth


g notes with
my body in a terribly twisted position. And when I'm not sitting, I'm forced to jump.
Agonizing thoughts numb my limbs so much so that I feel my legs turning to stone. On some
days I look up, terrified. I can't even make out whether the diffuse opening is egg- or squareshaped, but there's definitely a peculiar tic-tac sequence interspersed with neighs that my
pricked ears are picking up on. A sound umbrella, hovering somewhere up there, high above
my imploded horizon.
{illegible vertical


e chances of finding us? [Raised
eyebrows and puckered lips as first responses to the scarlet-haired question.] Well, the
incidence is just as low as finding a document or device you're looking for in our storage.
Things are not lost; there are just different ways of finding them. A random stroll, a lucky find
– be that on-line or off-line –, or a seductive word of mouth may be the entrance points into
this experiential space, a manifesto for haphazardness, emotional intuitions, subversion of
neu


list is just a bag of words that orders the common terms used in the works of
Le Corbusier and Paul Otlet with the help of text comparison. The quantity of similar words
relates to the word-count of the texts, which means that each appearance has a different
weight. Taken this into account, the appearance of the word esprit for instance, is more
significant in Vers une Architecture (127 times) than in Traité de documentation (240
times), although the total amount of appearances is almost two times


rmes les plus
communs utilisés dans les travaux de Le Corbusier et Paul Otlet en utilisant un comparateur
de texte. Le nombre de mots similaires rapotés par le comptage automatique des mots du
texte, ceci signifie que chaque occurence a une valeur différente. Prenons l'exemple des
aparitions du mot esprit par exemple sont plus significatives dans Vers une Architecture (127

P.152

P.153

fois) plutot que dans le Traité de documentation (240 fois), et ceci bien que le nombre
d'occurences est prat


most importantly, that he was living in the temporal and cultural context of modernism at
the beginning of the 20th century. The constructed identities and continuities that detach
Otlet and the Mundaneum from a specific historical frame, ignore the different scientific,
social and political milieus involved. It means that these narratives exclude the discording or
disturbing elements that are inevitable when considering such a complex figure in its entirety.
This is not surprising, seeing the parties that are involved in the discourse: these types of
instrumental identities and differences suit the rhetorical tone of Silicon Valley. Newly
launched IT products for example, are often described as groundbreaking, innovative and
different from anything seen before. In other situations, those products could be advertised
exactly the same, as something else that already exists[1]. While novelty and difference
surprise and amaze, sameness reassures and comforts. For example, Google Glass was
marketed as revolutionary and innovative, but when it was attacked for its blatant privacy

issues, some defended it as just a camera and a phone joined togethe


e content, especially in
view of international exchange[14] which already caused problems related to space back then:
the Mundaneum archive counted 16 million entries at its peak, occupying around 150
rooms. The cumbersome footprint, and the growing difficulty to find stable locations for it,
concurred to the conviction that the project should be included in the plans of new modernist
cities. In the beginning of the 1930s, when the Mundaneum started to lose the support of the
Belgian government, Otlet thought of a new site for it as part of a proposed Cité Mondiale,
which he tried in different locations with different approaches.
Between various attempts, he participated in the competition for the development of the Left
Bank in Antwerp. The most famous modernist urbanists of the time were invited to plan the
development from scratch. At the time, the left ba


data centers are similar to
the capitalist factory system; but

P.173

The Traité de Documentation, published in 1934, includes an extended reflection on a
Universal Network of Documentation, that would coordinate the transfer of knowledge
between different documentation centres such as libraries or the Mundaneum[17]. In fact the
existing Mundaneum would simply be the first node of a wide network bound to expand to
the rest of the world, the Reseau Mundaneum. The nodes of this network are explicitl


ighted by the data ports plan in Eemshaven.
Since private companies are the privileged actors in these types of projects, the circulation of
information increasingly respond to the same tenets that regulate the trade of coal or
electricity. The very different welcome that traditional politics reserve for Google data centres
is a symptom of a new dimension of power in which information infrastructure plays a vital
role. The celebrations and tax cuts that politicians lavish on these projects cannot be


still considered one of
their most important realizations as well as a corner-stone in Otlet's overall vision. Its
adoption, revision and use until today demonstrate a thoughtful and successful approach to
the classification of knowledge.

The UDC differs from Dewey and other bibliographic systems as it has the potential to
exceed the function of ordering alone. The complex notation system could classify phrases
and thoughts in the same way as it would classify a book, going well beyond the sole fu


nes like Lycos or Yahoo!, started with a combination of the two. The web directory
consisted of the human classification of websites into categories, done by an “editor”; crawling
in the automatic accumulation of material by following links with different rudimentary
techniques to assess the content of a website. With the exponential growth of web content on
the Internet, web directories were soon dropped in favour of the more efficient automatic
crawling, which in turn generated so many results


or “The University of District Columbia is the most relevant meaning of
the word 'UDC'”.
We (and Google) can read the model of reality created by the PageRank algorithm (and all
the other algorithms that were added during the years[27]) in two different ways. It can be
considered a device that 'just works' and does not pretend to be true but can give results
which are useful in reality, a view we can call pragmatic, or instead, we can see this model as
a growing and improving construction that


I thought that as an au-pair
I would be helping out in the house, but instead I ended up working with the professor on
finishing his book. At the time I arrived, the writing was done but his handwriting was so
hard to decipher that the printer had a difficult time working with the manuscript. It became
my job to correct the typeset proofs but often there were words that neither the printer nor I
could decipher, so we had to ask. And the professor often had no time for us. So I did my
best to make the


s, tells us that it all started as “a 20% project
within Google in 2010 and had its first public showing in 2011. It was 17 museums,
coming together in a very interesting online platform, to allow users to essentially explore art
in a very new and different way."[1] While Google Books faced legal challenges and the
European Commission launched its antitrust case against Google in 2010, the Google Art
Project, not coincidentally, scaled up gradually, resulting in the Google Cultural Institute with
h


al
institutions that provide this cultural material - such as 3D tour views and street-view maps.
So far and counting, the Google Cultural Institute hosts 177 digital reproductions of selected
paintings in gigapixel resolution and 320 3D versions of different objects, together with
multiple thematic slide shows curated in collaboration with their partners or by their users.

P.182

P.183

According to their website, in their ‘Lab’ they develop the “new technology to help partners
publish their


t since it reflects the colonial
impulses embedded in the scientific and economic desires that formed the very collections
which the Google Cultural Institute now mediates and accumulates in its database.

Who colonizes the colonizers? It is a very difficult issue which I have raised before in an
essay dedicated to the Google Cultural Institute, Alfred Russel Wallace and the colonial
impulse behind archive fevers from the 19th but also the 21st century. I have no answer yet.
But a critique of the Go


e commercial function of maritime technologies is
the same as the free – as in free trade – services deployed by Google or Facebook’s drones
beaming internet in Africa, although the networked aspect of information technologies is
significantly different at the infrastructure level.
There is no official definition of technocolonialism, but it is important to understand it as a
continuation of the idea of Enlightenment that gave birth to the impulse to collect, organise
and manage information in


à 20%, qui fut présenté
au public pour la première fois en 2011. Il s'agissait de 17 musées réunis dans une
plateforme en ligne très intéressante afin de permettre aux utilisateurs de découvrir l'art d'une
manière tout à fait nouvelle et différente. »[1] Tandis que Google Books faisait face à des
problèmes d'ordre légal et que la Commission européenne lançait son enquête antitrust
contre Google en 2010, le Google Art Project prenait, non pas par hasard, de l'ampleur.
Cela conduisi


riel culturel -des visites en 3D et des
cartes faites à partir de "street view". Pour le moment, le Google Cultural Institute compte
177 reproductions numériques d'une sélection de peintures dans une résolution de l'ordre
des giga pixels et 320 différents objets en 3D ainsi que de multiples diapositives thématiques
choisies en collaboration avec leurs partenaires ou par leurs utilisateurs.
Selon leur site, dans leur « Lab », ils développent une « nouvelle technologie afin d'aider
leurs par


ions
colonialistes ancrées dans les désirs scientifiques et économiques qui ont formé ces mêmes
collections que le Google Cultural Institute négocie et accumule dans sa base de données.
Qui colonise les colons ? C'est une problématique très difficile que j'ai soulevée
précédemment dans un essai dédié au Google Cultural Institute, Alfred Russel Wallace et
les pulsions colonialistes derrière les fièvres d'archivage du 19e et du 20e siècles. Je n'ai pas
encore de réponse. Pourtant, une


et éléments avec le projet colonial, comme l'exploitation des matériaux nécessaires à la
production d'informations et de technologies médiatiques - ainsi que les conflits qui en
découlent - les technologies de l'information sont tout de même différentes des navires et des
canons. Cependant, la fonction commerciale des technologies maritimes est identique aux
services libres - comme dans libre échange - déployés par les drones de Google ou Facebook
qui fournissent internet à l'Afrique, même si la mise en réseau des technologies de
l'information est largement différent en matière d'infrastructure.
Il n'existe pas de définition officielle du technocolonialisme, mais il est important de le
comprendre comme une continuité des idées des Lumières qui a été à l'origine du désir de
rassembler, d'organiser e


elebration that the “new economy” holds the keys to
individual freedom, liberty and democratic participation and will free labor from exploitation;
however, the material/physical base that supports the economy and our everyday lives tells a
very different story. My analysis presents an integral piece of the physical infrastructure
behind the “new economy” and the space embedded in that infrastructure in order to
elucidate that the “new economy” does not occur in an abstract place but rath


ning
power plant commissioned in 1952 – which has been polluting the area for years – to its 14
th data center powered by renewable power. Shifting from coal to renewable energy seems to
demonstrate how Google has gone “green” and is being a different kind of corporation that
cares for the environment. However, this is a highly calculated business decision given that
relying on renewable energy is more economical over the long term than coal – which is
more volatile as commodity prices grea


nt of struggling former industrial cites by
building Google data centers under the slogan of participation in the “new economy” really
meet social needs, and express democratic values? The “new economy” is boasted about as if
it is radically different from past industrial capitalist development, the solution to myriad social
problems that hold the potential for growth outside of the capitalist realm; however, the “new
economy” operates deeply within the logic of capitalist development –


Globe
NATACHA ROUSSEL

This timeline starts in Brussels and is an attempt to situate some of the events
in the life, death and revival of the Mundaneum in relation to both local and
international events. By connecting several geographic locations at different
scales, this small research provokes cqrrelations in time and space that could help
formulate questions about the ways local events repeatedly mirror and
recompose global situations. Hopefully, it can also help to see which
contextual elements in the first iteration of the Mundaneum were different from
the current situation of our information economy.
The ambitious project of the Mundaneum was imagined by Paul Otlet with support of Henri
La Fontaine at the end of the 19th century. At that time colonialism was at its height,
bringing a ste


expression, de socialiser le droit international, comme on a socialisé le droit privé, et de
[2]
prendre à l’égard des richesses naturelles des mesures de “mondialisation”. » .

The approaches of La Fontaine and Otlet already bear certain differences, as one
(Lafontaine) emphasises an organisation based on local civil society structures which implies
direct participation, while the other (Otlet) focuses more on management and global
organisation managed by a regulatory framework. It is interesting to look at these early
concepts that were participating to a larger movement called 'the first mondialisation', and
understand how they differ from current forms of globalisation which equally involve private
and public instances and various infrastructures.
The project of Otlet and Lafontaine took place in an era of international agreements over
communication networks. It is known and of


La Fontaine both
took part was already very early on trying to formulate a legal discourse that could help
address social inequalities, and eventually come up with regulations that could help 'reengineer' social organisation.

The Mundaneum project differentiates itself from contemporary enterprises such as Google,
not only by its intentions, but also by its organisational context as it clearly inscribed itself in
an international regulatory framework that was dedicated to the promotion of local civil
society. How can we understand the similarities and differences between the development of
the Mundaneum project and the current knowledge economy? The timeline below attempts
to re-situate the different events related to the rise and fall of the Mundaneum in order to help
situate the differences between past and contemporary processes.

DATE

EVENT

TYPE

1865

The International Union of telegraph STANDARD
, is set up it is an important element of the
organisation of a mondial communication
network and will further become the

SCALE


ctures of flows.
He was convinced to work with Van der
Swaelmen, who had already planned a
world city on the site of Tervuren near
Brussels in 1919.[4]

VAN DER SWAELMEN - TERVUREN, 1916

ends.

For Otlet it was the first time that two
notions from different practices came
together, namely an environment ordered
and structured according to principles of
rationalization and taylorization. On the one
hand, rationalization as an epistemic practice
that reduces all relationships to those of
definable me


founded by La Fontaine and Otlet in 1907,
and the League of Nations. “A material and moral representation of The greatest Society of
the nations (humanity);” an international city located on an extraterritorial area in Geneva.[16]
Despite their different backgrounds, they easily understood each other, since they “did
frequently use similar terms such as plan, analysis, classification, abstraction, standardization
and synthesis, not only to bring conceptual order into their disciplines and know


ctures de flux. Il avait été
convaincu de travailler avec Van der
Saelmen, qui avait déjà prévu une ville
monde sur le site de Tervuren, près de
Bruxelles, en 1919.[4]

Pour Paul Otlet, c'était la première fois que
deux notions de pratiques différentes se
rassemblaient, à savoir un environnement
ordonné et structuré d'après des principes de
rationalisation et de taylorisme. D'un côté, la
rationalisation: une pratique épistémique qui
réduit toutes les relations à des moyens et
des


w. And
I'm going to ask you to practice that,
OK? Can you say "raw"?

« Des informations, dont tout déchet et élément étrangers
Audience: Raw.
ont été supprimés, seront présentées d'une manière assez
analytique. Elles seront encodées sur différentes feuilles
Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say
"data"?
ou cartes plutôt que confinées dans des volumes, » ce qui
permettra l'annotation standardisée de l'hypertexte pour
Audience: Data.
la classification décimale universelle ( CDU ).[11] De plus,


La Fontaine et Otlet en 1907, et la Ligue
des nations. « Une représentation morale et matérielle de The greatest Society of the nations
(humanité) ; » une ville internationale située dans une zone extraterritoriale à Genève.[16]
Malgré les différents milieux dont ils étaient issus, ils pouvaient facilement se comprendre
puisqu'ils « utilisaient fréquemment des termes similaires comme plan, analyse, classification,
abstraction, standardisation et synthèse, non seulement pour un ordre co


possible. Puisque « Le Mundaneum est une
Idée, une Institution, une Méthode, un Corps matériel de travaux et collections, un Édifice,
un Réseau. »[18] il devait être conceptualisé comme un « plan organique avec possibilité
d'expansion à différentes échelles grâce à la multiplication de chaque partie. »[19] La
possibilité d'expansion et la redistribution organique des éléments adaptées à de nouvelles
nécessités et besoins garantit l'efficacité du système, à savoir en intég


. Au-delà de cette démarche originale entamée dans un esprit
philanthropique, le centre d’archives propose des collections documentaires à valeur
[25]
historique, ainsi que des archives spécialisées.

In 1993, after some armwrestling between different local fractions of the Parti Socialiste, the
collections of the Mundaneum are moved from Place Rogier to former departement store
L'independance in Mons, 40 kilometres from Brussels and home to Elio Di Rupo. Benoît
Peeters and François Schuite


nts some of the contraptions at work in the Mondotheque
wiki. The name "transclusionism" refers to the term "transclusion" coined by
utopian systems humanist Ted Nelson and used in Mediawiki to refer to
inclusion of the same piece of text in between different pages.
HOW TO TRANSCLUDE LABELLED SECTIONS BETWEEN
TEXTS:

To create transclusions between different texts, you need to select a section of text that will
form a connection between the pages, based on a common subject:
• Think of a category that is the common ground for the link. For example if two texts
refer to a similar issue or specific c


diff in Constant 2009


e and effect. Mutual movements (p. 139) started in the kitchen, the perfect place to
30

30

30

31

31

reconsider human-machine configurations, without having
to separate these from everyday life and the patterns that
are ingrained in it. Would a different idea of ‘user' also
change our approach to ‘use'?
At the end of the adventure Sadie Plant remarked in
her ‘situated report' on Tracks in electr(on)ic fields (p.
275): “It is ultimately very difficult to distinguish between
the user and the developer, or the expert and the amateur. The experiment, the research, the development is
always happening in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the
bus, using your mobile or using your computer. (...) this


the framework of the E-traces project.
For this, we started to work on Yoogle!, an online game.
This game, still in an early phase of development, will allow users to play with the parameters of the Web 2.0 economy and to exchange roles between the different actors
of this economy. We presented a first demo of this game,
accompanied by a public discussion with lawyers, artists
and developers. The discussion and lecture were meant
to analyse more deeply the mechanism of the economy
behind its friendl


novel one, instead of the multiple legs and compound
eyes that it has to use to manoeuvre through space. The uncanny
formations often used in science fiction to describe something radically inhuman (like the killing machine insects of Alien movies) differ
from the human being in their anatomy, behaviour and morals. The
human brain might be a much more effcient problem solver and the
human hands are quite handy tool making metatools, and the human
body could be seen as an original form of any model o


ased on the variations of perceptions also alternative worlds.
Baroque worlds, argues Deleuze in his book Le Pli from 1988, are
characterised by the primacy of variation and perspectivism which is
a much more radical notion than a relativist idea of different subjects
having different perspectives on the world. Instead, “the subject will
be what comes to the point of view”, and where “the point of view is
not what varies with the subject, at least in the first instance; it is, to
82

82

82

83

83

the contrary, the c


f England or the Post Offce without marvelling that even human reason can put together, with so little friction and such
slight deviations from correctness, machines whose wheels are
composed not of wood and iron, but of fickle mortals of a thousand different inclinations, powers, and capacities. But if such
establishments be surprising even with reason for their prime
mover, how much more so is a hive of bees whose proceedings
are guided by their instincts alone!
Whereas the imperialist powers of Eu


the
archaeological sense, that is discover what already exists. Nonsense is the entomologist's dream come true, or the Linnaean
classification gone mad, because gone creative (. . . )
For Alice, the feeling of not being herself and “being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing”, which of course is something
incomprehensible to the Caterpillar she encounters. It is not queer for
the Caterpillar whose mode of being is defined by the metamorphosis
and the various perception/action-modul


rm (despite the constant tension of such narratives
as educational and moralising tales that anthropomorphize affective
qualities into human characteristics). True to entomological classification, a big part is reserved for the structural-anatomical differences
of the insect life but also the affect-life of how insects relate to their
surroundings is under scrutiny.
As precursors of ethology, such natural historical quests (whether
archaeological, entomological or imaginative) were expressing an appreciation of phenomenal worlds differing from that of the human
with its two hands, two eyes and two feet. In a way, this entailed a
kind of an extended Kantianism interested not only in the conditions
of possibility of experiences, but the emergence of alternative potentials on the im


the human body that served as a storage house
90

90

90

91

91

of potential media. However, at the same time, another undercurrent
proposed to think of technologies, inventions and solutions to problems posed by life as stemming from a much more different class of
bodies, namely insects.
So beyond Kant, we move onto a baroque world, not as a period of
art, but as a mode of folding and enveloping new ways of perception
and movement. The early years and decades of technical media were
characterized


to comment on how many
individuals may be at risk, or how many financial institutions have had their data
stolen as well. BBC suggest the computer held data on around 400 customers with
high value individual savings accounts (ISAs), at each of five different companies –
including Standard Life and Liontrust. (In May, Standard Life sent around 300 policy
documents to the wrong people.)

106

106

106

107

107

Legal frameworks intended to safeguard a conception of privacy by
limiting data transfe


onic
memo:

113

113

113

114

114

“And the good news -- I enclose the 10 £ fee to be
passed to the branch sundry income account.” (Head
of Security, internal communication 09/2003)
From 2004, the process of obtaining images became much more difficult.
“It is clear from your letter that you are aware
of the provisions of the Data Protection Act and
that being the case I am sure you are aware of
the principles in the recent Court of Appeal decision in the case of Durant vs. financial Service



function (as any late night surfer can attest to) and watching a particularly sharp television program can be incredibly engaging, even
life changing. Glorianna would often describe her frustration with
traditional documentary by observing the vast difference between her
own sense of engagement with a story gained through the process of
shooting and editing, versus the experience of an audience member
from simply viewing the end result. Thus ‘active' here relates to the
act of authoring and the co


longer than 10 minutes in length. Furthermore all
clips are treated equally, there is no notion of a ‘lecture', versus a
‘slideshow', versus a ‘music video', together with a sense that these
different kinds of material might need to be handled differently. Each
clip is compressed in a uniform way, meaning at the moment into a
flash format video file of fixed data rate and screen size.
Clips have no history
Despite these limitations, users of YouTube have found workarounds
to, for instance, down


akes no visible use of a particular viewing history (though the fact that this information is stored
has been brought to the attention of the public via the ongoing Viacom lawsuit, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7506948.stm).
In this way it's difficult to get a sense of being in a particular ‘story
arc' or thread when moving from clip to clip in YouTube as in a sense
each click and each clip restarts the narrative experience.
No licenses for sharing / reuse
The lack of a download feature in


ith the help of a command line interface, or by using buttons, switches and
clicks. . . the exact location of interaction often serves as
conduit for mutual knowledge - machines learn about bodies and bodies learn about machines. Dialogues happen
at different levels and in various forms: code, hardware,
interface, language, gestures, circuits.
Those conversations are sometimes gentle in tone - ubiquitous requests almost go unnoticed - and other times
they take us by surprise because of their authorit


ractions translated into software, and how
does software result in interaction? Could the practice of
using and producing free software help us find a middle
ground between technophobia and technofetishism? Can
we imagine ourselves and our realities differently, when we
try to re-design interfaces in a collaborative environment?
Would a different idea about ‘user' change our approach
to ‘use' as well?


7

“Classic puff pastry begins with a basic dough called a détrempe (pronounced day-trahmp) that is rolled out and
wrapped around a slab of butter. The
dough is then repeatedly rol


rocessing, a theory that could be used to talk about ways of contesting,
critiquing, or making alternatives. The theory under development
here relies a lot on two notions, ‘intensive movement' and ‘centre
of envelopment' that Deleuze proposed in Difference and Repetition.

figure 117
A promotional video
from Intel
for the UltraMobilePC

1

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GFS2TiK3AI

156

156

156

157

157

However, I want to keep the philosophy in the background as much as
possible. I basically want to argue that we need to ask: why does so
much have to be enveloped or interiorised in wireless or audiovisual
DSP?
How does DSP differ from other algorithmic processes?
What can we say about DSP? firstly, influenced by recent software
studies-based approaches (Fuller, Chun, Galloway, Manovich), I think
it is worth comparing the kinds of algorithmic processes that take
place in DSP


edia more generally. Although
it is an incredibly broad generalisation, I think it is safe to say that
DSP does not belong to the set-based algorithms and data-structures
that form the basis of much interest in new media interactivity or
design.
DSP differs from set-based code. If we think of social software such
as flickr, Google, or Amazon, if we think of basic information infrastructures such as relational databases or networks, if we think of
communication protocols or search engines, all of thes


relations to data, to link identities and attributes.
In terms of activism, and artwork, relations that can be expressed in
the form of sets and operations on sets, are highly manipulable. They
can be learned relatively easily, and they are not too difficult to work
with. For instance, scripts that crawl or scrape websites have been
widely used in new media art and activism.
By contrast, DSP code is not based on set-making. It relies on
a different ordering of the world that lies closer to streams of signals that come from systems such as sensors, transducers, cameras,
and that propagate via radio or cable. Indeed, although it is very
widely used, DSP is not usually taught as part of the c


ement idealised in classical mechanics – translation, rotation, etc.
Think for instance of a typical photograph of a city street. Although
there are some regular geometrical forms, the way in which light is
reflected, the way shadows form, is very difficult to describe geometrically. It is much easier, as we will see, to think of an image as a
signal that distributes light and colour in space. Once an image or
sound can be seen as a signal, it can undergo digital signal processing.
What distinguishes DSP from other algorithmic processes is its
reliance on transforms rather than functions. This is a key difference.
The ‘transform' deals with many values at once. This is important
because it means it can deal with things that are temporal or spatial,
such as sounds, images, or signals in short. This brings algorithms
much closer to sensation, and to wha


s used for ‘jpeg fast DCT'. This is a typical
piece of DSP type code. It refers to the way in which video frames are
encoding using Fast Fourier Transforms. The key point here is that
these values have been carefully worked out in advance to scale different colour and luminosity components of the image differently. The
transform, DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), is applied to chunks of
sensation – video frames – to make them into something that can be
manipulated, stored, changed in size or shape, and circulated. Notice
160

160

160

161

161

tha


reflects the sheer number of operations that have to be compressed into code in order for
digital signal processing to work.
Working with DSP: architecture and geography
So we can perhaps see from the two code examples above that there
is something different about DSP in comparison to the set-based
processing. DSP seems highly numerical and quantified, while the
set-based code is symbolic and logical. What is at stake in this difference? I would argue that it is something coming into the code from
outside, something that is difficult to read in the code itself because
it is so opaque and convoluted. Why is DSP code hard to understand
and also hard to write?
You will remember that I said at the outset that there are some
facets of technological cultures that resist appropriat


porary world, I think it would be shoring up
or reinforcing a certain resistance to change associated with DSP, at
least in its main mathematical formalisations. I do think the mathematical models are worth engaging with, partly because they look
so different from the set-based operations found in much code today.
The mathematical models can tell us why DSP is difficult to intervene
in at a low level.
However, I don't think it is the mathematics as such that makes
digital signal processing hard to grapple with. The mathematics is an
architectural response to a geographical problem, a problem of where
code can g


SP is commonly found.
For instance, in the background of the scenes in the daily lives of
businessmen shown in Intel's UPMC video, lie wireless infrastructures
and networks. Audiovisual media and wireless networks both use
signal processing, but for different reasons. Although they seem quite
disparate from each other in terms of how we embody them, they
actually sometimes use the same DSP algorithms. (In other work, I
have discussed video codecs. 3
3

The case of video codecs
In the foreground of th


. Today, codecs nestle in
set-top boxes, mobile phones, video cameras and webcams, personal computers, media
players and other gizmos. Codecs perform encoding and decoding on a digital data
stream or signal, mainly in the interest of finding what is different in a signal and what
is mere repetition. They scale, reorder, decompose and reconstitute perceptible images
and sounds. They only move the differences that matter through information networks
and electronic media. This performance of difference and repetition of video comes at
a cost. Enormous complication must be compressed in the codec itself.
Much is at stake in this logistics from the perspective of cultural studies of technology
and media. On the one hand, codecs analyse, compres


y of performance and low cost is familiar. The chip combines computing performance and value for money (“ten times better
MIPS/$ – Million Instructions Per Second/$”) as a ‘baseband processor'. That means that it could find its way into many different version of hardware being produced for applications that range between
large-scale wireless information infrastructures and small consumer
electronics applications. Only the last point is slightly surprisingly
emphatic: “[c]rucially, the picoA


tems containing thousands of processors using on-chip
peripherals which effectively extend the on-chip bus structure.
(Panesar, et al., 2006, 324)
The array of processors shown then, is a partial representation, an
armature for a much more extensive diffusion of processors in wireless
digital signal processing: in wireless base stations, 3G phones, mobile
computing, local area networks, municipal, community and domestic
Wi-fi network, in femtocells, picocells, in backhaul, last-mile or first
mile inf



Architectures and intensive movement
It is as if the picoChip is a miniaturised version of the urban geography that contains the many gadgets, devices, and wireless and wired
infrastructures. However, this proliferation of processors is more than
a diffusion of the same. The interconnection between these arrays of
processors is not just extensive, as if space were blanketed by an ever
finer and wider grid of points occupied by processors at work shaping
signals. As we will see, the interconnection b


ecomes an increasingly
valuable, tightly controlled resource. For any one individual communication, not much space or time can be available. And even when
there is space, it may be noisy and packed with other people and
things trying to communicate. different kinds of wireless signals are
constantly added to the mix. Signals may have to work their way
through crowds of other signals to reach a desired receiver. Communication does not take place in open, uncluttered space. It takes
place in messy configurations of buildings, things and people, which
obstruct waves and bounce signals around. The same signal may
be received many times through different echoes (‘multipath echo'
). Because of the presence of crowds of other signals, and the limited spectrum available for any one transmission, wirelessness needs
to be very careful in its selection of paths if experience is to stream
rather than


more intensive, enveloped, and enveloping set of movements. To begin addressing this dynamic, we might say that wireless DSP is the armature
166

166

166

167

167

of a centre of envelopment. This is a concept that Gilles Deleuze
proposes late in Difference and Repetition. ‘Centres of envelopment'
are a way of understanding how extensive movements arise from intensive movement. Such centres crop up in ‘complex systems' when
differences come into relation:
to the extent that every phenomenon finds its reason in a difference of intensity which frames it, as though this constituted
the boundaries between which it flashes, we claim that complex
systems increasingly tend to interiorise their constitutive differences: the centres of envelopment carry out this interiorisation
of the individuating factors. (Deleuze, 2001, 256)
Much of what I have been describing as the intensive movement
that folds spaces and times inside DSP can be understood in terms
of an interiorisation of constitutive differences. An intensive movement always entails a change in the nature of change. In this case,
a difference in intensity arises when many signals need to co-habit
that same place and moment. The problem is: how can many signals
move simultaneously without colliding, without interfering with each
other? How can many signals pass by each other without


action.
The Fast Fourier Transform: transformations between time
and space
I have been arguing that the complications of the mathematics
and the convoluted nature of the code or hardware used in DSP,
stems from an intensive movement or constitutive difference that is
interiorised. We can trace this interiorisation in the DSP used in
wireless networks. I do not have time to show how this happens
in detail, but hopefully one example of DSP that occurs but in the
video codecs and wireless networks will


rum of frequencies present in a signal.
The notion of the Fourier transform is mathematical and has been
known since the early 19th century: it is an operation that takes
an arbitrary waveform and turns it into a set of periodic waves (sinusoids) of different frequencies and amplitudes. Some of these sinusoids
make more important contributions to overall shape of the waveform
than others. Added together again, these sine or cosine waves should
exactly re-constitute the original signal. Crucially, a F


s of a signal, in wireless
networks, and in many other communications setting, ffT is used to
put signals together in such a way as to contain them in a single envelope. The ffT is found in many wireless computation algorithms
because it allows many different digital signals to be put together on
a single wave and then extracted from it again.
Why would this superimposition of many signals onto a single complex waveform be desirable? Would it not increase the possibilities of
confusion or interference between signals? In some ways the ffT is
used to slow everything down rather than speed it up. Rather than
simply spatialising a duration, the ffT as used in wireless networks
defines a different way of inhabiting the crowded, noise space of electromagnetic radiation. Wireless transmitters are better at inhabiting
crowded signal spectrum when they don't try to separate themselves
off from each other, but actually take the presence of oth


M (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). OFDM spreads a single data stream coming
from a single device across a large number of sub-carriers signals (52
in IEEE 802.11a/g). It splits the data stream into dozens of separate signals of slightly different frequency that together evenly use
the whole available radio spectrum. This is done in such a way that
many different transmitters can be transmitting at the same time,
on the same frequency, without interfering with each other. The advantage of spreading a single high speed data stream across many
signals (wideband) is that each individual signal can carry data at a
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much slower rate. Because the data is split into 52 different signals,
each signal can be much slower (1/50). That means each bit of data
can be spaced apart more in time. This has great advances in urban
environments where there are many obstacles to signals, and signals
can reflect and echo often. In this context, the slower the data is
transmitted, the better.
At the transmitter, a reverse ffT (IffT) is used to re-combine
the 50 signals onto 1 signal. That is, it takes the 50 or so different
sub-carriers produced by OFDM, each of which has a single slightly
different, but carefully chosen frequency, and combines them into one
complex signal that has a wide spectrum. That is, it fills the available
spectrum quite evenly because it contains many different frequency
components. The waveform that results from the IffT looks like
'white noise': it has no remarkable or outstanding tendency whatsoever, except to a receiver synchronised to exactly the right carrier
frequency. At the receiver, this comp


c'hanges in kind. Data does not
simply move through space. It changes in kind in order to move
through space, a space whose geography is understood as too full of
potential relations.
Conclusion
A couple of points in conclusion:
a. The spectrum of different wireless-audiovisual devices competing
to do more or less the same thing, are all a reproduction of the
same. Extensive movement associated with wireless networks and
digital video occur in various forms. firstly in the constant enveloping of sp


in multiple ways. Here I have emphasised the constant folding inwards or interiorisation of heterogeneous movements via algorithms used in digital signal processing. Intensive
movement ensues occurs when a centre of envelopment begins to
interiorise differences. While these interiorised spaces are computationally intensive (as exemplified by the picoChip's massive
processing power), the spaces they generate are not perceived as
calculated, precise or rigid. Wirelessness is a relatively invisible,
mes


d distances that lacks
the visible form and organisation of other entities produced by
centres of calculation (for instance, the shape of a CAD-designed
building or car). However, similar processes occur around sound
and images through DSP. In fact, different layers of DSP are increasingly coupled in wireless media devices.
c. Where does this leave the centre of envelopment? The cost of
this freeing up of movement, of mobility, seems to me to be an
interiorisation of constitutive differences, not just in DSP code
but in the perceptual fields and embodiment of the mobile user.
The irony of the DSP is that it uses code to quantify sensations
or physical movements that lie at the fringes of representation
or awareness. We can't see D


ode processes that have proven productive in other areas into
the domain of DSP. What would that look like? How would it be
sensed? What could it do to our sensations of video or wireless
media?

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References
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul
Patton, Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers. (London; New
York: Continuum, 2001).
Panesar, Gajinder, Daniel Towner, Andrew Duller, Alan Gray, and
Will Robbins. ‘D'eterministic Parallel Processing, Interna



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ELPUEBLODECHINA A.K.A.
ALEJANDRA MARIA PEREZ NUNEZ
License: ??
EN

El Curanto
Curanto is a traditional method of cooking in the ground by the
people of Chiloe, in the south of Chile. This technique is practiced
throughout the world under different names. What follows is a summary of the ELEMENTS and steps enunciated and executed during el
curanto, which was performed in the centre of Brussels during V/J10.

Recipe

?

For making a curanto you need
to take the following steps and
arrange t


stioning of its representation. More concretely, Praticable takes the form of collective
periods of research and shared physical practices, both of which are
the basis for various creations. These periods of research can either
be independent of the different creation projects or integrated within
them.
During Jonctions/Verbindingen 10, Alice Chauchat and Frédéric
Gies gave a workshop for participants dealing with different ‘body
practices'. On the basis of Body-Mind Centering (BMC) techniques,
the body as a locus of knowledge production was made tangible. The
notation of the Dance performance with which Frédéric Gies concluded the day is reproduced in this book and published under an
open license.

figure 120
Workshop for
participants
with different
body
practices
at V/J10

figure 121
The body as
a locus of
knowledge
production
was made
tangible

figure 122

figure 123

184

Dance (Notation)
20 sec.
31. INTERCELLULAR flUID
Initiate movement in your intercellular fluid. Start slowly and
then


to postmodern surveillance configurations.
24 Portraits
Excerpt from a series of documentary portraits by Alain Cavalier, FR,
1988-1991.

umentaries paying tribute to women's
manual work. The intriguing and sensitive portraits of 24 women working
in different trades reveal the intimacy
of bodies and their working tools.

24 Portraits is a series of short doc-

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Humain, trop humain
Quotes from a documentary by Louis
Malle, FR, 1972.
A documentary filmed at the Citroen
car fact


ware, and ingimp is the first result of that work.
In a Skype conversation that was live broadcast in La Bellone during Verbindingen/Jonctions 10, we spoke about ingimp, a clone of the
popular image manipulation programme Gimp, but with an important difference. Ingimp allows users to record data about their usage
in to a central database, and subsequently makes this data available
to anyone.
At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Wroclaw, just before Michael
Terry presents ingimp to an audience of Gim


and hang
out with me in my apartment after school, and I would set them up
with Gimp, and quite often they would start off with one picture,
they would create a sphere, a blue sphere, and then they played with
filters until they got something really different. I would turn to them
looking at what they had been doing for the past twenty minutes,
and would be completely amazed at the results they were getting
just by fooling around with it. And so I thought, this application
has lots and lots of power;


e've collected about 5000 log files, representing over half a million
commands, representing thousands of hours of the application being
used. And one of the things you have to realise is that when you have
a data set of that size, there are so many different ways to look at it
that my particular perspective might not be enough. Even if you sit
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someone down, and you have him or her use the software for twenty
minutes, and you videotape it, then you can spend hours analysing


lled it, found that it didn't really do much
for them and so maybe they don't use it anymore. So, the first thing
we had to do is figure out which data points should we really pay
attention to. We decided that a person should have used ingimp on
two different occasions, preferably at least a day apart, where they'd
saved an image on both of the instances. We used that as an indication of what a serious user is. So with that filter in place, the ‘800
installations' drops down to about 200 people. So


rking on the image. I should probably
be looking at my data analysis as I say this, but they are very quick,
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short, versatile sessions, and when they use it, they use less than 10
different tools, or they apply less than 10 different commands.
What else did we find? We found that the two most popular monitor resolutions are 1280 by 1024, and 1024 by 768. So, those represent
collectively 60 % of the resolutions, and really 1280 by 1024 represents
pretty much the maximum for m


the software has in a
way become a creative process that is now shared between interface
designer, developer and user. If you look at the ‘activity tags' you
are collecting, do you find a new vocabulary developing?
MT: I think there are 300 to 600 different activity tags that people
register within that group of ‘significant users'. I didn't have time to
look at all of them, but it is interesting to see how people are using
that as a medium for communicating to us. Some people will say,
“Just t


want it upstream, because
I want it to always be an opt-in, so that it can't be turned on by
mistake.
FS: You mean you have to download ingimp and use it as a separate
program? It functions in the same way as Gimp, but it makes the
fact that it is a different tool very clear.
MT: Right. You are more aware, because you are making that
choice to download that, compared to the regular version. There is
this awareness about that.
We have this lengthy text based consent agreement that talks about
the data


mouse and a keyboard on the graph, and they type and you
see the keyboard bar go up, and then at the end when they close the
application, you see the data being sent to a web server. And then
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we show snapshots of them doing different things in the software, and
then show a corresponding graph change. So, we developed these by
bringing in both native and non-native speakers, having them look at
the diagrams and then tell us what they meant. We had to go through
about fifteen


e how big their
monitor resolutions are, and say, well, given the size of the monitor
resolution, maybe this particular design idea is not feasible. But I
think it is going to complement the existing practices, in the best
case.
FS: And do you see a difference in how interface design is done in
free software projects, and in proprietary software?
MT: 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.

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I think one of the dangers in your question is that you sort of
lump a lot of different projects and project styles into one category
of ‘open source'. ‘Open source' ranges from volunteer driven projects
to corporate projects, where they are actually trying to make money
out of it. There is a huge diversity of projects that are


work than they can possibly tackle with the number of
resources they have. That makes it very challenging to do interface
design; I mean, when you look at interface code, it costs you 50 or 75
% of a code base. That is not insignificant, it is very difficult to hack,
and you need to have lots of time and manpower to be able to do
significant things. And that's probably one of the biggest differences
you see for the volunteer driven projects: it is really a labour of
love for these people and so very often the new things interest them,
whereas with a commercial software company developers are going to
have to do things sometimes they don't


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direct and immediate sense. And cooking is also the work behind the
scene, the often forgotten work, again a little bit like programming,
that results in something which – again like a lot of technology – can
operate on many different scales. Cooking is in one sense the most
basic kind of activity, a simple matter of survival, but it can also
work on a gourmet level too, where it becomes the most refined – and
well paid – kind of work. It can be the most detailed, fiddly,


h
cooking, the production of textiles again has this same kind of sense
of being very basic to our survival, very elemental in that sense, but
it can also function at a high level of detailed, refined activity as well.
With a piece of knitting it is difficult to see the ways in which a single
thread becomes looped into a continuous textile. But if you look at a
woven pattern, the program that has led to the pattern is right there
in front of you, as you see the textile itself. This makes weaving a
ve


In the realm of cooking, you have the chef on the one hand,
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who is often male and enjoys the high status of the inventive, creative expert, and the cook on the other, who is more likely to be
female and works under quite a different rubric. In reality, it might
be said that the distinction is far from precise: the very practise of
using computers, of cooking, of knitting, is almost inevitably one of
constantly contributing to their development, because they are all relatively open systems and they all evolve through people's constant,
repetitive use of them. So it is ultimately very difficult to distinguish
between the user and the developer, or the expert and the amateur.
The experiment, the research, the development is always happening
in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the bus, using your mobile or
using your computer. Fernand Bra


and all the other bodies that
haven't quite fitted the philosophical ideal. Both the Platonic and
Christian traditions have tended to dismissing or repress the body,
and with it all the kind of messy, gritty, tangible stuff of culture,
as transient, difficult, and flawed. And what has been elevated is of
course the much more formal, idealist, disembodied kind of activities
and processes. This is a site of continual struggle, and I guess part of
the purpose of a weekend like this is to keep working aw


ain bodies, complex material processes, working in a complex
material work.
Once again, there still tends to be something of a gendered divide.
The dance workshop organised this morning by Alice Chauchat and
Frédéric Gies was an inspiring but also difficult experience for many
of us, unused as we are to using our bodies in such literally physical
and public ways. It was not until we came out of the workshop into
a space which was suddenly mixed in terms of gender, that I realised
that the participa


s just how easy it is for us to forget
our physicality. This morning's dance workshop really showed some
of the virtues of being able to turn off one's self-consciousness, to
dismiss the constantly controlling part of one's self and to function
on a different, slightly more automatic level. Or perhaps one might
say just to prioritise a level of bodily activity, of bodily awareness,
of a sense of spatiality that is so easy to forget in our very cerebral
society.
What Frédéric and Alice showed us was


jects of
the activity, but rather to perceive the interactivity, the sense of an
interplay, not between two dualistic things, the body and the mind, or
the agent and the tool, the producer and the user, but to try and see
much more of a continuum of different levels and different kinds and
different speeds of material activity, some very big and clunky, others at extremely complex micro-levels. During the dance workshop,
Frédéric talked about all the synaptic connections that are happening as one moves one's body, in order to instil in us this awareness
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of ourselves as physical, material, thinking machines, assemblages of
many different kinds of activity. And again, I think this idea of bringing together dance, food, software, and brainpower, to see ourselves
operating at all these different levels, has been extremely rewarding.
Femke asked a question of Sabine and Simon yesterday, which perhaps never quite got answered, but expressed something about how
as people living in this especially wireless world, we are now carrying more and more technical devices, just as I am now holding this
microphone, and how these additional machines might be changing
our awarenesses of ourselves. Again it came up this morning in the
workshop when we were asked to imagine that we might have different parts of our bodies, another head, or our feet may have mirrors
in them, or in one brilliant example that we might have magnets,
so that we were forced to have parts of our bodies drawn together
in unlikely combinations, just to imagine a different kind of sense of
self that you get from that experience, or a different way of moving
through space. But in many ways, because of our technologies now,
we don't need to imagine such shifts: we are most of us now carrying
some kind of telecommunicating device, for example, and while we
are not physically attached to


fact that I am holding this thing
[the microphone] obviously does change my body, its capacities, and
its awareness of itself. We are all aware of this to some extent: everyone knows that if you put on very formal clothes, for example, you
behave in different ways, your body and your whole experience of its
movement and spatiality changes. Living in a very conservative part
of Pakistan a few years ago, where I had to really be completely covered up and just show my eyes, gave me an acute sense of thi


nd of abstract and formal kind of cyberspace. It brings us back into
touch with ourselves and our geographies.
The interaction between actual space and virtual space, has been
another theme of this weekend; this ability to translate, to move between different kinds of spaces, to move from the analogue to the
digital, to negotiate the interface between bodies and machines. Yesterday we heard from Adrian Mackenzie about digital signal processing, the possibility of moving between that real sort of anal


ed in the idea of notation, not to
preserve or to conserve, but rather to be able to send food or dance
off into the future, to make it possible in the future. And Simon
referred to these fantastic diagrams from The Scratch Orchestra, as
an entirely different way of conceiving and perceiving music, not as
a score, a notation in this prescriptive, conserving sense of the word,
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but as the opportunity to take something forward into the future.
And to do so not by writing down t


e fantastic food that has been provided all weekend. We
haven't just thought about dancing, but dancing has actually been
done. We haven't just thought about translating, but with great
thanks to the translators – who I think have often had a very difficult job – translating has also happened as well. And in all of these
cases we have seen what might so easily have been a simply theoretical discussion, has itself been translated into real bodily activity:
they have all been, literally, brought in


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of a community: an open, democratic grouping is great when you're
in it and you all agree what's desirable, but what happens to all the
people that don't quite fit the picture? How open can one afford to
be? We need some broader, different senses of how to come together
which, as Alice and Frédéric were discussed, are ways of collaborating
without becoming a new fixed totality. If we go back to the practices
of cooking, weaving, knitting, and dancing, these long histories of
ver


n
June 2006 with Google randomizer
Shmoogle.
She is currently a researcher at the Design department of
the Jan van Eyck Academie.

Simon Hecquet
EN

Dancer and choreographer. Educated
in classical and contemporary dance,
Hecquet has worked with many different dance companies, specialised
in contemporary as well as baroque
dance.
During this time, he also
studied different notation systems to
describe movement, after which he
wrote scores for several dance pieces
from the contemporary choreographic
repertory. He also contributed, among
others, with the Quatuor Knust,
to projects that restaged important
dance piece


n the
1970's, specifically for typesetting mathematical and other scientific
material. Powerful algorithms automatize widow and orphan control and can handle intelligent image placement. It is renowned for
being extremely stable, for running on many different kinds of computers and for being virtually bug free. In the academic tradition
of free knowledge exchange, Knuth decided to make TEX available
‘for no monetary fee' and modifications of or experimentations with
the source code are encouraged. In typical self referential style, the
near perfection of its software design is expressed in a version number
which is converging to π 3.
For OSP, TEX represents the potential of doing design differently.
Through shifting our software habits, we try to change our way of
working too. But Scribus, like the kinds of proprietary softwares it is
modeled on, has a ‘productionalist' view of design built into it 4, which

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ch block on a scale from 0 to 10.000), and encounter a
long history of wonderful but often incoherent layers of development
that envelope the mysterious lasagna beauty of TEX's typographic
algorithms.
Laying-out a publication in LATEX is an entirely different experience than working with a canvas-based software. first of all, design decisions are executed through the application of markup which
vaguely reminds of working with CSS or HTML. The actual design is
only complete after ‘compiling' the doc


onts and while plenty of questions, bugs and dark areas remain, it
feels we are close to producing the kind of multilingual, multi-format,
multi-layered publication we imagine Tracks in Electr(on)ic fields to
be.
However, Pierre and I are working on different versions of Ubuntu,
respectively on a Mac and on a PC and we soon discover that our
installations of ConTEXt produce different results. We can't find
a solution in the nerve-wrackingly incomplete, fragmented though
extensive documentation of ConTEXt and by June 2009, we still have
not managed to print the book. As time passes, we find it increasingly

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