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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 2015

I think that conversations are the
best, biggest thing that Free Software has to offer its user, is taken
from an interview with Debian developer Asheesh Laroia, Just
ask and that will be that, included in this publication. His remark points at the difference that Free Software can make when
users are invited to consider, interrogate and discuss not only
the technical details of software, but its concepts and histories
as well.
Conversations documents discussions about tools and practices
for typogr

however, at moments full of tension, created by diverging views on what the development process entails and what it might
mean. The conversations brought together in this book resulted from the
need to discuss those complex issues and to adress the differences and similarities between design, design production, Free Culture and software development. As in theatre, where it is said that conflict drives the plot forward,
so it does here. It makes us think harder about the ethics of our practices
while

practice, interaction design, software design and mysterious hypermedia. F/LOSS was part of my artistic practice for many years,
7

Larisa Blazic:

Introduction

but its inclusion to the UK Higher Education was a real challenge. My
frustration with difficult computer departments grew exponentially year by
year and LGM looked like a place to visit and get much needed support.
Super fast-forward to Madrid in April 2013: I landed. Little did I know
that this journey would change everything. Firstly, th

ar as I know, he saw a feature somewhere else
or he found an article about how to do this kind of stuff, and I don’t know
where he did it, but I would have to ask him. It was a logic extension of the
colour wheel functionality, because if you pick different colours, they look
different to all people. What looks like red and green to one person, might
look like grey and yellow to other persons. Later on we just extended the
code to apply to the whole canvas.
1

2

http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Version_1.3.4%2B-New_Features
Petr Vanek

13

It is quite special to offer such a precise preview of different perspectives in your
software. Do you think it it is particular to Scribus to pay attention to these kind
of things?

Yeah, sure. Well, the interesting thing is ... in Scribus we are not depending
on money and time like other proprietary package

ople that also are interested in working on the project involved,
so you can work together. With closed software you usually have to pay
people; I would only work because someone else wants me to do it and
we would not be as motivated. It is totally different. If it was closed, it
would not be fun. In Germany they studied what motivates Open Source
developers, and they usually list: ‘fun’; they want to do something more
challenging than at work, and some social stuff is mentioned as well. Of
cour

lso limits us. I can say: I want it
this way but then it is not possible now, it might be on the roadmap, but we
might have to do other things first.

When we use Scribus, we actually thought we were experiencing ‘The Scribus
Way’ through how it differences from other layout packages. First of all, in
Scribus there is a lot more attention for everything that happens after the layout
is done, i.e. export, error checking etc. and second, working with the text editor
is clearly the preferred way of

is just technical
problems. Scribus is at the moment internally not that well designed, so we
first have to rewrite a lot of code to be able to reach some elements. The
coding structure for drawing and layout was really cumbersome inside and
it was difficult to improve. We worked with 2.500 lines of code, and there
were no comments in between. So we broke it down in several elements,
put some comments in and also asked Franz: why did you did this or that, so
we could put some structure back into the

than if it is all left to big players like
InDesign and Quark ... I think this will improve and it will maybe also
change the demands that users will make for our application. If you do page
layout, you get into a new frame of mind ... you look in a different way at
publications. It is less content oriented, but more layout oriented. You will
pick something up and it will spread. People by now have understood that
it is not such a good idea to use twelve different fonts in one text ... and I
think that knowledge about better page layout will also spread.

19

When we came to the Libre Graphics Meeting
for the first time in 2007, we recorded this rare
conversation with George Williams, developer of
Fon

obviously
retired but he still occasionally teaches, and has been working for about 30
years on one of those versions of Shakespeare where you have two lines of
Shakespeare text at the top and the rest of the page is footnotes. And I went
completely differently and became a mathematician and computer scientist
and worked in those areas for almost twenty years and then went off and
tried to do my own things.

So how did you become a mathematician?
(pause) I just liked it.
(laughs) just liked it

I was

it (the font) to be displayed on a small screen with a low resolution display.
And there are all kinds of hacks in modern fonts formats for dealing with
low resolution stuff. PostScript calls them hints and TrueType calls them
instructions. They are different approaches to the same thing. But that,
that certainly has affected font design in the last — well since PostScript
came out.
The web itself? I don’t think that has yet been a significant influence on
font design, but then — I’m no longe

sland who was sitting behind me at the end was talking
to me today — he sat down — we started talking after lunch but on the
way up the stairs — at first he was complaining that FontForge isn’t written
with a standard widget set. So it looks different from everything else. And
yes, it does. And I don’t care. Because this isn’t something which interests
me.
On the other hand he was saying that what he also wanted was a paragraph
level display of the font. So that as he made changes in the

month I got all excited about the release that I put
out last Tuesday — today is Sunday. And so I was working really hard —
probably got up to — oh — 30 hours some of that time. I was really excited
about the change. All kinds of things were different — I put in Python
scripting, which people had been asking for — well, I’m glad I’ve done it,
but it was actually kind of boring, that bit — the stuff that came before was
— fascinating.

Like?

I — are you familiar with the OpenType spec? No. OK. The way you ...
the way you specify ligatures and kerning in OpenType can be looked at at
several different levels. And the way OpenType wants you to look at it, I
felt, was unnecessarily complicated. So I didn’t look at it at that level. And
then after about 5 years of looking at it that way I discovered that the reason
I thought it was unnecessari

Greek, it probably
is unnecessarily complicated. But for Indic scripts it is not unnecessarily
complicated, and you need all those things. So I ripped out all of the code
for specifying strange glyph conversions. You know in Arabic a character
looks different at the beginning of a word and so on? So that’s also handled
in this area. And I ripped all that stuff out and redid it in the way that
OpenType wanted it to be done and not the somewhat simplified but not
sufficiently powerful method that I�

like to create
something else. The small impact a group like BXLug can make ... well,
there are several small projects, such as the one to develop a distribution
specifically designed for small organisations, to which nobody could object
of course. Different directions coexist, because there is currently not any
project with enough at stake that it would shock the others.
To go once again from a large scale to a small scale ... how would you describe
your own itinerary from mathematics to working on

good
teacher, how to open up the mind of a student in the context of a course.
That’s when I discovered another pleasure, of helping a journey into a kind
42

of math that was a lot more concrete, or that I learned to render concrete.
One of the difficult subjects you need to teach in high schools, is scales and
plans. I came up with a rendering of a submarine and all students, boys as
well as girls, were quickly motivated, wanting to imagine themselves at the
real scale of the vessel. I like mat

f it into
HTML. In the meantime, the way that the interface works, the way that
the visually semantic markup works, is that it is a mutable interface. It
could be tailored to your sense of what it should look like. It can be tailored
specifically to different workflows. And because there is such a diversity
within typographic workflows, typesetting workflows ... that is akin to the
separation of form and content in HTML and CSS, but it’s not meant to be
... as problematic as that. I’m not sure if

as with ‘Subtext’ you would just go
into the interface type like configuration and say: These are converted into
a quote basically. And then the effects are listed in other configuration files
so that the effects of quotes in HTML can be ...
... different.

Yes. Maybe have specific CSS properties for spacing, that kind of stuff. And
then in ConTeXt the same sort of ... both the environmental setup as well
as the raw ‘what is put into the document when it’s translated’. This kind of
separati

erface. And
then later on typesetting system, maybe iTeX comes out, you know, Knuth’s
joke, anyway. 6 That kind of separation seems to imply a future proofing
that I find very elegant. That you can just add later on the effects that you
need for a different system. Or a different version of a system, not that you
have to learn ‘mark 6’, or something like that ...
Back to the future ... I wonder about ConTeXt being bound to a particular
practise located with two specific people. Those two are actually the ones that
pr

oint. you know,
this kind of thing like ... really baby steps. How to make a cover page. These
kinds of things are not documented.
Documentation is let’s say an interesting challenge for ConTeXt. How do you
think the ConTeXt community could enable different kinds of use, beyond the
ones that are envisioned right now? I guess you have a plan?

Yeah ... that’s a good question. Part of it is just to do stuff, like to get you
more involved in the ConTeXt group for instance, because I was talking to
A

al. 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 different
paradigm or you know .. So these baby steps of kind of opening the field up
a little bit and then using it my own practise of guerilla typesetting and kind
of putting it out there. and you know ... And people gonna start being like:
oh yeah, bea

future for
ConTeXt more in the context of academic publishing than in traditional design
practise?

Yes. In terms of ‘Subtext’, I mean the origins of that project, very much
... It’s an interesting mix because it’s really a hybridity of many different
processes. Some, much come directly from this obscure art project ‘the abstraction’. So I have stuff like the track changes using Git version control
and everything being placed on plaintext as a necessity. That’s a holdover
from that proj

itten in Pascal, you know, how that was. Yeah, that’s a really
interesting question of how swappable is the backend. How much can we
go in and kind of ... you know. And it its an inspirational question to me,
because now I’m trying to envision a different page. And I’m really curious
about that. But I think that ConTeXt itself will likely be pretty stable in its
scope ... in that way of being ... sort of ... deterministic in its expectations.
But where that leaves us as users ... first I’d be

assumption to say oh
yeah, don’t worry about the rules and the way TeX is organised but you’re not
writing your documents in ConTeXt the way you would write them if you’re
using plain TeX. I mean that’s just ... it’s just not ... It’s a different workflow
... it has a completely different set of processes that you need to arrange. So
it has a very distinct organisational logic ... that I think that ... yeah ... like
being able to go into the source and be like oh OK, like I can see clearly this
is ... you know. And then you can w

ou what arguments are available, but
doesn’t even list the available arguments. It’s just like: These are the positions
of the arguments. And it’s interesting.

So expecting writers of the program to write the manual fails?
Right.

What is the difference between your plans for ‘Subtext’ and a page layout program
like Scribus?

You mentioned ‘Subtext’ coming from a more academic publishing rather
than a design background. I think that this belies where I have come into
typesetting and my understanding of typography. Because in reality DTP
has never kind of drawn me in in that way. The principle differences are
really based on this distribution of agency, in my mind. That when you’re
demanding the software to be ‘what you see is what you get’ or when you
place that metaphor between you and your process. Or you and your engagement, you’re

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 like \blank in order to move down the
page. Because it has thi

��re like
ok, I’m gonna use this measurement for the further on in my document. So it’s
that whole top-down vs. bottom-up approach. It really breaks down into
the core organisational logics of those softwares.
I think it’s too easy to make the difference based on the fact that there is a
metaphorical layer or not. I think there is a metaphorical layer in ConTeXt too
...

Right. Yeah for sure.

And they come at a different moment and they speak a different language. But I
think that we can agree that they’re both there. So I don’t think it’s about 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
easily made in ConTeXt. And that it’s much easier to typeset a book in ConTeXt
than it is in Scribus

What is exciting in something like this is that placement is relative always.
Relative to a page, relative to a chapter, relative to itself, relative to what’s next
to it. Where in a canvas based software your page is fixed.

Right.

This is very different from a system where you make a change, then you compile
and then you look at it and then you go back into your code. So where there is a
larger distinction between output and action. It’s almost gestural ...

It’s like two different ways of having a conversation. Larry Wall has this really great metaphor. He talks about ‘ballistic design’. So when you’re doing
code, maybe he’s talking more about software design at this point, basically
it’s a ‘ballistic practise’ to write code. Ballistics comes from artillery. So you
shoot at a thing. If you hit it, you hit it. If you miss it, you change the
amount of gun powder, the angle. So code is very much a ‘ballistic practise’.
I think that filters into this difference in how the conversation works. And
this goes back to the agencies where you have to wait for the computer to
figure out. To come with its into the conversation. You’re putting the code
in and then the computer is like ok; this is what the code means
and then is this what you wanted? Whereas with the WYSIWYG
kind of interface the agency is distributed in a different way. The computer is just like ok, I m a canvas; I m just here to hold what
you re putting on and I m not going to change it any way or
affect it in any way that you don t tell me to. I mean it’s
the same way but I ... is it just a matter of t

e
computer dissapear. Because if you are not wrestling ... you’re dancing, you know.

Yeah.

But I think it’s interesting to see that ballistics, that the military term of shooting
at something, is the kind of metaphor to be used. Which is quite different than a
creative process where there is a direct feedback between something placed and the
responses you have.
Right.

And it’s not always about aiming, but also sometimes about trying and about
kind of subtle movements that spark off something

ter. With the one that makes the movement. Where
here the agency is very much in this confrontational relation between me aiming
and ...

So yeah, when we put it in those metaphors. I’m on the side with the
painting, because ...

But I mean it’s difficult to do a book while wrestling. And I think that’s why a
poster is very difficult to do in this sort of aiming sense. I mean it’s fun to do but
it’s a strange kind of posters you get.

You can’t fit it all in your head at once. It’s not possible.
No. So it’s okay to have a bit of delay.

I wondered to what extent, i

’re making in the code, if compilation was instantaneous, how that would
affect the experience. I guess it would still have this ballistic aspect, because
what you are doing is ... and that’s really the side of the metaphor ... or
a metaphorical difference between the two. One is like a translation. The
metaphor of ok this code means this effect ... That’s very different from picking
a brush and choosing the width of the stroke. It’s like when you initialise
a brush in code, set the brush width and then move it in a circle with a
radius of x. It’s different than taking the brush in Scribus or in whatever
WYSIWYG tool you are gonna use. There is something intrinsically different about a translation from primitives to visual effect than this kind of
metaphorical translation of an interaction between a human and a canvas ...
kind of put into software terms.

But there is a translation from me, the human, to the machine, t

ere is something in drawing digitally, which
is such a weird thing to do actually, and this is interesting in this sort of cyborgs
we’re becoming, which is all about forgetting about the machine and not feeling
what you do. And it’s completely a different world in a way than the ballistics of
ConTeXt, LaTeX or whatever typesetting platform.

Yeah, that’s true. And it’s something that my students were forced to confront and it was really interesting because that supposed invisibility or almost
necessitated invisibility of the software. As soon as they’re in Inkscape instead of Illustrator they go crazy. Because it’s like they know what they want
to do, but it’s a different mechanism. It’s the same underlying process which
itself is only just meant to give you a digital version of what you could easily
do on a piece of paper. Provided you have the right paints and stuff. So
perhaps it’s like the difference between moving from a brush to an air brush.
It’s a different ... interface. It’s a different engagement. There is a different
thing between the human and the canvas. You engage in this creative process where it’s like ok, we’ll now have an airbrush and I can play around to
see what the capacities are without being stuck in well I can’t get it to do
my fine lines

uessed, in my ignorance. In the process, that’s not quite
been true. But it is much more flexible, in my opinion, what I’ve developed,
compared to a lot of other toolkits. Other people have other goals, so I’m
sure they would have a completely different opinion. For what I’m doing,
it’s much more adaptable.
You said you had no experience in programming? You studied in art school?

I don’t think I ever actually took computer programming classes. I grew
up with a Commodore 64, so I was alwa

re looking for good excuses to program.
(laughs) That could be.

We can discuss at length about how actual toolkits don’t match your needs,
but in the end, you want to input certain things. With any recent toolkit, you
can do that. It’s not that difficult or time consuming. The way you do it, you
really enjoy it, by itself. I can see it as a real creative work, to come up with new
digital shapes.
Do you think that for you, the program itself is part of the work?

I think it’s definitely part of

I think the program itself is an artwork, very much. To me it is also
a reflection on moving between 2D and 3D, about physical computation.
Maybe this is the actual work. Would you agree?
I don’t know. To an extent. In my mind, I kind of class it differently.
I’ve certainly been drawing more than I’ve been doing technical stuff like
programming. In my mind, the artwork is things that get produced, or a
performance or something like that. And the programming or the tools
are in service to those

o much.
If you just have one fold, it’s pretty easy to figure out what the creep is for
that. You can do tests and you can actually measure it. That’s pretty easy
to compensate for. But if you have many more folds than that, it becomes
much more difficult.
Are you thinking about how to do that?

I am.

That would be very interesting. To imagine paper in digital space, to give
an idea of what might come out in the end. Then you really have to work
your metaphors, I think?
76

A long time ago, I d

ter to just completely abandon what doesn’t work and make something
that’s new, that actually does work. Especially with multitouch stuff, a lot of
old widgets make no more sense. You have to deal with a lot of other kinds
of things, so you need different controls.

It makes sense, but I was thinking about the visual effect. Maybe it’s not
Laidout if it’s done in Qt.
Your visuals and drawings are very aesthetically precise. We’re wondering
about the aesthetics of the program, if it’s some

se XML there are all these
greater thans and less thans. It is better than binary, but it is still a huge
mess. When everything is indented like a tree, it is very easy to find things.
The only problem is to always input tabs, not spaces. I have two different
imposition types, basically, the flat-folding sheets and the three dimensional
ones. The three dimensional one is a little more complicated.
If you read the file, do you know what you are folding?

Not exactly. It lists what folds exists. If you

s of imposition, the first one being
very familiar to us. It must be the most frequently asked question on the
Scribus mailing list: How to do imposition. Even the most popular search
term on the OSP website is ‘Bookletprinting’. But what is the difference with
the plan for a 3D object? A classic imposition plan is also somehow about
turning a flat surface into a three dimensional object?
It is almost translatable. I’m reworking the 3D version to be able to
incorporate the flat folding. It is n

xt to each other in the physical form are not necessarily
related to each other at all in the actual piece of paper. Right now, the piece
of paper you use for the 3D model is very defined, there is no flexibility.
Give me a few months!
So it is very different actually.

It is a different approach. One person wanted to do flexagons, it is sort
of like origami I guess, but it is not quite as complicated. You take a piece
of paper, cut out a square and another square, and than you can fold it and
you end up with a square that is actually made up of four different sections.
Than you can take the middle section, and you get another page and you can
81

keep folding in strange ways and you get different pages. Now the question
becomes: how do you define that page, that is a collection of four different
chunks of paper? I’m working on that!
We talk about the move from 2D to 3D as if these pages are empty. But
you actually project images on them and I keep thinking about maps, transitional objects where physical space is projected on paper whi

that Open Source is about sharing is also important. If you try to
do everything from zero, you just never advance. Now with Open Source, if
somebody does something and you have access to what they do, and you can
take it further and take it into a different direction.

Claire Williams

99

I haven’t always used Open Source software. It started
at the Piet Zwart Institute where there was a decision made by Matthew
Fuller and Femke Snelting who designed the program. They brought a
bunch of people

re which
is FFmpeg, a program that lets you work with video. So there again there
was a kind of connection. It was just by the virtue of the fact that it was
one of the only tools available that could take a video, pull out frames,
work with lots of different formats, just an amazing tool. So it started with
convenience. But the more that I learned about the whole kind of approach
of Open Source, the more Open Source I started to use. I first switched from
MacOSX to maybe Dual Booting and now indeed

ed that when you use these tools, you are learning
much more about inner workings of things, about the design decisions that
go into a piece of software so that you are actually understanding at a very
deep level, and this then lets you move between different tools. When
tools change, or new things are offered, I think it is really a deep learning
that helps you for the future. Whereas if you just focus on the specific
particularities of one platform or piece of software, that is a bit fragile and
wi

100

and so on, though I think we’re on shaky ground if we try to defend F/LOSS
in terms of its benefits to the end user. Using F/LOSS has a learning curve,
challenges which I put up with because I believe in it socially. This would
probably be a different answer from say, a sysadmin, someone who could see
really concrete benefits of using F/LOSS.
Actually I came from Open Content and alternative licensing to the technical side of using GNU/Linux. My main motivation
right now is the possibility to

wn ideas. You can kind of put them out there and share them.
It is organic, like things that can grow and that they will become bigger
and bigger, become something else that you couldn’t have ever thought. It
makes the horizon much bigger. It is a different way of working I guess.
The obvious reason is that it is free, but the sharing philosophy is really at
the core of it. I have always thought that when you share things, you do not
Christina Clar

101

get back things instantly, but you do get s

ean that you are really isolated from other communities. So that’s always
a bit of balancing act, how independent can you be, how independent you
want to be, how big does your audience need to be, or you community needs
to be. So that’s a lot of different decisions. Certainly, when I am working
in the context of an art school with design practitioners, you know it is not
always possible to really go completely independent and there are lots of
implications in terms of how you work and whom you ca

e future. Second: Our last year in Variable has begun. Under the
header Etat des Lieux, Constant started gathering reflections and documents to archive this three year working period. One of the things
I would like to talk about is the parallels and differences between a
physical studio space and a distributed workflow. And of course I am
personally interested in the idea of ‘versions’ linked to digital collaboration. This connects to old projects and ideas and is sparked again
by new ones revive

with at least four of you participating, and I will prepare questions
(and cake).
Speak soon!
xF

109

How do you usually explain Git to design students?
Before using Git, I would work on a document. Let’s say a layout, and to
keep a trace of the different versions of the layout, I would append _01, _02
to the files. That’s in a way already versioning. What Git does, is that it
makes that process somehow transparent in the sense that, it takes care of
it for you. Or better, you have to make it t

versions.
More than versioning your own files, it is a tool to synchronize your work
with others. It allows you to work on the same projects together, to drive
parallel projects.
It really is a tool to make collaboration easier. It allows you to see differences.
When somebody proposes you a new version of a file, it highlights what has
changed. Of course this mainly works on the level of programming code.
Did you have any experience with Git before working with OSP?
Well, not long before I joined OSP

t convenient for Linus. And I didn’t see a point in making my
practice convenient for Linus. I was already using Subversion for a while
and it was really working great at providing an environment to work together with a lot of people and check out different versions. Anything you
expect from a versioning system was there, all elements for collaborative
work were there. I didn’t see the point to change for something that didn’t
feel as comfortable with, culturally. This question of checking out different
directories of repositories was really important to me. At this time (Git has
evolved a lot) it was not possible to do that. There were other technical
aspects I was quite keen of. I didn’t see why to go for Git which was not
offering the same

be able to influence what they are. So there is the fan act, and
there’s also the act of trying to be aware of all the logic contained in these
actions.

And from another side, in the world of graphic design it is also a way to
affirm that we are different. And that we’re really engaged in doing this
and not only about designing nice pictures. That we really develop our own
tools.

It is a way to say: hey, we’re not a kind of politically engaged designers with
a different political goal each next half month, and than we do a project
about it. It really impacts our ecosystem, we’re serious about it.
115

It’s true that, before we started to use Git, people asked: So you’re called
Open Source Publishing, but

sense if you work on a project
... but at the same time you could have every saved revision mapped to a
Git revision. It’s clear Git is made for asynchronous collaboration process.
So there is Linus in his office, there are patches coming in from different
people. He has the time also to figure out which patch needs to go where.
This doesn’t really work for the Etherpad-style-direct-collaboration. For
me it’s cool to think about how you could make these things work together.
Now I’m working

uidness of Etherpad, where the granularity is
much finer. Sparkleshare would be in between?
I think it would be interesting to have this kind of Sparkleshare behaviour, but
only when you want to work synchronously.

So you could switch in and out of different modes?

Usually Sparkleshare is used for people who don’t want to get to much involved
in Git and its commands. So it is really transparent: I send my files, it’s synchronized. I think it was really made for this kind of Dropbox behaviour. I

And, this kind of thing where we
want to see many versions at the same time, to compare seems important.
Well it’s the kind of thing that could take advantage of a versioning system,
to build.
It is of course a bit strange that if you want to see different versions next
to each other you have to go back in time. It’s a kind of paradox, no?

But then you can’t see them at the same time
Exactly, no.

119

Because there is no way to visualize your trip back in history.

Well I think, something y

ve talked how it’s easier to contribute to Git based projects
but to be accepted into an existing repository someone needs to say okay,
I want it, which is like SVN. What is easier, is to publish you’re whole
Git repository online, with the only difference from the the first version,
is that you added your change, but it means that in proposing a change
you are already making a new cultural artifact. You’re already putting a new
something there. I find this to be a really fascinating phenomena

we have our own server it’s quite private, it’s really hard to
allow anyone to contribute to fonts for example. So we had e-mails: Hey here’s
a new version of the font, I did some glyphs, but also changed the shape of
the A. There we have two different things, new glyphs is one thing, we could say
120

we take any new glyph. But changing the A, how do you deal with this? There’s
a technical problem, well not technical ...

An architectural problem?

Yeah, we won’t add everyone’s SSH-key

ted?

For the foundry we decided to have a maintainer for each font project.

It’s the kind of thing we didn’t do well. We have this kind of administrative
way of managing the server. Well it’s a lot of small elements that all together
make it difficult. Let’s say at some point we start to think maybe we need to
manage our repositories, something a bit more sophisticated then Gitolite. So we
could install something like Gitorious. We didn’t do it but we could imagine
to rebuild a kind of ecosystem where people have their own repositories and
do anything we can imagine on this kind of hosting service. Gitorious is a
Free Software so you can deploy it on your own server. But it is not trivial
to do.
Can you explain the difference between Gitorious and GitHub?

Gitorious is first a free version, it’s not a free version of Git but GitHub. One
is free and one is not.
Meaning you can not install GitHub on your own server.

Git is a storage back-end, and Gitorious or GitHu

t still it’s some kind of easy to grasp web interface
management, repositories manager. Which is quite cool. We could do that,
to install this kind of interface, to allow more people to have their repositories on the OSP-server. But here comes the difficult thing: we would need
a bit more resources to run the server to host a lot of repositories. Still this
moment we have problems sometimes with the server because it’s not like
a large server. Nobody at OSP is really a sysadmin, and has time to i

for the pictures in high-resolution, .pdfs. We thought about it
when we were in Seoul, because we were putting pictures on a gallery, and
we were like ah, this gallery. We were wondering, perhaps if GitMX works
well, perhaps it can be separated into different types of content. And then
we can branch them into websites. And perhaps pictures of the finalized
work. In the end we have the ‘Iceberg’ with a lot of ‘in-progress’-pictures,
124

but we don’t have any portfolio or book. Again becaus

I commit just when I need to share the files with someone else. So I wait
until the last moment.

To push you mean?

No, to commit. And then I’ve lost track of what I’ve done and then I just
write ...

But it would be interesting, to look at the different speeds of collaboration. They might need each another type of commit message.

But it’s true, I must admit that when I start working on a project I don’t read the
last messages. And so, then you lose this dialogue as you said. Because someti

tion, but we don’t actually care.
It’s not our problem to care about that. It’s your problem to care about
that. Part of it is sharing with the working group and getting the group
to work together, which requires constant effort, but it’s no different from
any sort of managerial or trust company type thing. There’s this sort of
encouragement in it that at the end of the day you’re making the world a
better place. You’re building a new thing and people will use it and whatever.
And that

oting 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 you don’t.
If you read about why this kind of work is done ... you find different arguments. From enhancing global markets to: ‘in this way, we will create a
better world for everyone’. In Tim Berners-Lee’s statements, these two are
often mixed. If you for example look at the DIN standards, they are unambiguously put in

ou are telling them how
that is going to help them when this thing becomes a spec, and the fact that
they can use this on multiple platforms, and whatever. Remember: when
the web came out, to exchange any document other than plain text was extremely difficult. It meant exchanging word processor formats, and you had
to know on what platform you were on and in what version. The idea that
you might get interoperability, and that the Mac and the PC could exchange
characters that were outside ASCII was ju

t anyone. Individuals. Open Source
projects. So, the funding model of the W3C is that members pay money,
and that pays our salaries, basically. We have a staff of 60 odd or so, and
that’s where our salaries come from, which actually makes us quite different
from a lot of other organisations. IETF is completely volunteer based so
you don’t know how long something is going to take. It might be quick, it
might be 20 years, you don’t know. ISO is a national body largely, but the
national bodies are

to contribute on an ongoing basis if they want to. Right from the
beginning part, to the end where you’re polishing the tiny details in the
corner.
I think the story of web fonts shows how an involvement of the Open Source
people could have made a difference.

When web fonts were first designed, essentially you had Adobe and Apple
pushing one way, Bitstream pushing the other way, both wanting W3C to
make their format the one and only official web format, which is why you
ended up with a mechanism t

ff to a
Bitstream format, and you had IE4 which pointed off to this Embedded
Open Type (EOT) format. If you were a web designer, you had to have two
different tools, one of which only worked on a Mac, and one of which only
worked on PC, and make two different fonts for the same thing. Basically
people wouldn’t bother. As Håkon 9 mentioned the only people who do
actually use that right now really, are countries where the local language
9

Håkon Wium Lie proposed Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 199

IE4. It hasn’t done SVG. Now they’ve got their own
thing ... Silverlight. It has been very hard to get Microsoft on board and
getting them doing things. Microsoft were involved in the early part of
SVG but getting things into IE has always been difficult. What amazes me
to some extent, is the fact that it’s still used by about 60-70% of people.
You look at what IE can do, and you look at what all the other browsers
can do, and you wonder why. The thing is ... it is still a break and some
techn

ards body.

No, it didn’t come from W3C. The same for Acid 2, Håkon Wium Lie was
involved in that one. He didn’t blow his own trumpet this morning, but
he was very much involved there. Acid 3 was Ian Hickson, who put that
together. It’s a bit different because a lot of it is DOM scripting stuff. It
does something, and then it inquires in the DOM to see if it has been done
correctly, and it puts that value back as a visual representation so you can
see. It’s all very good because apparently i

end-users, artists. The trick is to find out how to
represent them. The CSS working group tried to do that. They brought in
a number of designers, Jeff Veen 13 and these sort of people were involved
early on. The trouble is that you’re speaking a different language, you’re
not speaking their language. When you’re having weekly calls ... Reading a
spec is not bedtime reading, and if you’re arguing over the fine details of a
sentence ... (laughing) well, it will put you to sleep straight away.

the students. How would you conceive a visual
test? I think that this could be a really nice workshop to do in a university
or in a design academy ...
It’s the kind of reverse-reverse engineering of a standard which could help
you understand it on different levels. You have to imagine how wild you
can go with something. I talk about standards, and read them - not before
going to bed - because I think that it’s interesting to see that while they’re
quite pragmatic in how they’re put together,

hen you would have a script or something which
would turn it into an SVG pie chart. And you could have a bar chart, or you
could also say show me only February. That interaction is one of the things
that one can do, and arguably you’re giving it a different presentational form.
It’s still very much a gradation. It’s how much re-styleability remains. You
can’t ever have complete separation. If I’m describing a company, and [1]
I want to do a marketing brochure, and [2] I want to do an annual

a case of
complete separation. It’s a case of deferring it and not tripping yourself up.
Just simple things like bolds and italics and whatever. Putting those in as
emphasis and whatever because you might choose to have your emphasized
words done differently. You might have a different font, you might have a
different way of doing it, you might use letter-spacing, etc. Whereas if you
tag that in as italics then you’ve only got italics, right? It’s a simple example
but at the end of the day you’re going to have to decide

d, who were the managers. What was really interesting was how this division between content
and style was also recouping a kind of political or socio-organizational divide within companies where you need to assign roles, borders, responsibilities to different people. What was really frightening from the talk was
that you understood that this division was encouraging people not to try
and learn from each other’s practice. At some point, the designer would
come to the programmer and say: In the spec,

if I could get a job at the end of it, because
I could get a job with computers, if I needed to get a job So I studied that
at my school for like a one year course, after my school. A foundation year,
and the deal with that is that you study all the different art and design disciplines. Because in highschool you don’t really have the specialities where you
specifically study textile or photography, not every school has a darkroom,
schools are not well equipped.
DC

155

You get to experience all t

was Unix so it was the
same I figured. But when I started to do my work I really stood against the
limitations of Adobe software, specifically in parallel publishing which is
when you have the same basic informations that you want to communicate
in different mediums. You might want to publish something in .pdf, on the
web, maybe also on your mobile phone, etc. And doing that with Adobe
156

software back then was basically impossible. I was aware of Free Software
design tools and it was kind of obv

t Free Software,
I could make contributions in fonts. Looking into that area, I found that
there was some postgraduate course you can study at in Europe. There’s
two, there is one at The Hague in The Netherlands and one at Reading.
They’re quite different courses in their character and in how much they cost
and how long they last for and what level of qualification they are. But
they’re both postgraduate courses which focus on typeface design and font
software development. So if you’re intere

ly 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 have to take it with a mathematical
158

mind and that isn’t something which graphic designers typically have as a
strong part of their skill set.

The

... Mac costs not a lot money compared to those
big expensive computers. So, Ikarus M was not widely distributed. It’s
kind of an obvious idea – you know you have those innovative computers
doing graphic interfaces and laser printing and several different people had
several different ideas about how to employ that. Obviously you had John
Warnock within Adobe and at that point Adobe was a systems company,
they made this PostScript system and these components, they didn’t make
any user applications. But John Warnock – and

DC

PH

used?

And before that, do you know what font design software Adobe designers

I don’t know. Basically when Adobe made PostScript for the Apple
LaserWriter then they had the core 35 PostScript fonts, which is about
a thousand families, 35 differents weights or variants of the fonts. And I
believe that those were from Linotype. Linotype developed that in collaboration with Adobe, I have no idea about what software they used, they
may have had their own internal software. I know that before

n guys from Holland started using Fontlab. They managed to
convince the Fontlab guys to include Python scripting support in Fontlab.
Python had become a major language, for doing this kind of scripting. So
Fontlab added in Python scripting. And then different type designers, font
developers started to use Python scripts to help them develop their fonts,
and a few of the guys doing that decided to join up and they created the
RoboFab project which took the ideas that had been developed for Robofob
and

nd then you’ve got the character-spacing which makes what a
paragraph will look like. A really good example of this is if you want to do
interpolation, if you have a very narrow version of a font and a very wide one,
and you want to interpolate in different versions between those two masters
– you really want to do that in a script, and RoboFab makes this really easy
to do this within Fontlab. The ever important thing about RoboFab was
that they developed UFO, I think it’s the Universal Font Object – I’m not
sure what the exact name is – but it’s a XML font format which means that
you can interchange 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

the Free Culture movement. There is that website Freedom Defined 2 that states that the principles of Free Software can
apply to all other kind of works. This isn’t shared by everybody in the Free
Software movement. Richard Stallman makes a clear difference between
three kind of works: the ones that function like software, encyclopedias,
dictionaries, text books that tell how to makes things, and text typefaces.
Art works like music and films, and text works about opinions like scientific papers or political manifestos. He believes that different kinds of rights
should apply for that different kind of works. There is also a different view
in which anything in a computer can be edited ought to be free like Free
Software. That is certainly a position that many people take in the Free
Software community. In the WikiMedia Foundation text books project,
you can see that when more

nice icons nice windows; anti aliasing
and these kind of things.
I mean there’s nothing wrong with the FontForge interface. It is what it
is. But it scares a lot of people away, people say that they don’t like this. I
think it is too scary, too different. I think we are going to see some exciting
stuff in the next few years in the Free Software font editor space.
DC

166

At the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Wroclaw, just before
Michael Terry presents his project ingimp to an audience of
c

uman Computer
Interaction Lab of the University of Waterloo, Canada and his
main research focus is on improving usability in Open Source
software. We speak 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. This conversation was also published in the Constant
publication Tracks in electr(on)ic fields.
Maybe we could

g out with me in my apartment after school, and I would set them
up with GIMP, and quite often they would always 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,

��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 someone down, and you have him or her use the
software for twenty minutes, and you videotape it, then you can spend hours
analysing just that twenty minutes o

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 too. We decided that a person should have saved an image,
and they 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, then the ‘800 installations’ drops down to about 200 p

and
they are applying fewer than a hundred operations when they are working on
the image. I should probably be looking at my data analysis as I say this, but
they are very quick, short, versatile sessions, and when they use it, they use
less than 10 different tools, or they apply less than 10 different commands
when they are using it. 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 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?
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
174

them, but it is interesting to see how people are using that as a medium
for communicating to us. Some people will say,

sit down and do it. Now there is an extension out for Firefox
that will collect this kind of data as well, so you know ...
Maybe users could talk with each other, and if they are aware that this
type of monitoring could happen, then that would add a different social
dimension ...
177

It could. I think it is a matter of awareness, really, so when we bring
people into the lab and have them go to the ingimp website, download and
install it and use it, and go check out the stats on the website, and the

t want it upstream, because I want it to always be an opt-in, so
that it can’t be turned on by mistake.
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.

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
we

ere is a little icon of a 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 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

like 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.

And do you see a difference in how interface 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 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

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�

lf right now. We sustain
our company at this point by taking on other projects; for example we are
here for a project that has really little to do with Telekommunisten, where
we’re helping a recruiting company in Canada, I’m in the UK for a very different reason than Telekommunisten, doing independent software development for a private company. So we’re still self-funding our company. So we
haven’t yet got to a stage where our company can actually sustain itself from
our own peer production,

uctive cycle has to be
owned collectively by the workers. The designers, together with the journalists, together with the administrators, have to own the magazine, otherwise
they can’t capture their full value. As a group of designers this is very difficult, because as a group of designers you’re only selling an input, you’re not
at the end owning a product. The only way to do this is by forming alliances
with other people, and not based on wages, not based on them giving you
an arbitrary amoun

ducers. None of that product is owned by the people who are simply owning
instruments of production. That is what is meant by commons-based peer
production. But that’s exactly what the anarchist and the socialist call communism. There is no actual difference. Communism in a text book example
is the state less, property-less society. And that’s what it means, commonsbased peer production is a neologism, a modern way of saying communism
because for political reasons, post-war rhetoric, these words

at is the source for the exchange value.
And once you identify the source of the exchange value, you have to figure
out how to create a direct relationship with all the other producers that are
involved in the production cycle.
...

Seems incredibly difficult ...

If it was easy then capitalism would have been overthrown centuries ago

193

... You’re now owning a magazine already with a couple of people. The
next person asks you to design a beer label ...
You have to own the beer factory!

... An

know how to make design, I need
some people who know how to make beer. So then we have a beer factory.
And then you need people who drink the beer! Who’s going to make the
people that drink the beer?
Haha.

But wait, there must be a little bit of difference, a modified option to
this. For example ...

In the scenario of commons-based peer production it’s not that the designers have to own the beer factory, it’s just that there can’t be any capitalist
in the middle that owns the land, it’s

e things to capture exchange value.
Because the reproduction costs are no longer zero, because of artificial costs
of reproduction. But in certain things the capitalists are not homogeneous,
there’s not just one group of capitalists. There is many different capitalists.
Even though some make their living from typography, many more capitalists make their living by using typography, so with typography as an input.
From the point of view of those capitalists, the ones trying to restrict the
reproducti

with it. They
just go to the computer with it when they need to do the layout, overall
it’s not a huge cost. They don’t need it every time they publish a book.
Whether if they had to pay for the font they used and every time they
wanted to use a different font, and they had to pay for it again, that would
be a problem, so they’d rather use a free font, and if that means hiring
somebody to drop the pixels down for a new font once and then having it
free forever, it can all make sense. That’s why typography is different from
software. And so the Scribus project has gone really far but the reason
196

it’s obscure is because except from the ideological case, they don’t have a
business case they can make for the publishers. Because for publishers they
want a

m. Even Microsoft doesn’t dare to charge money
for Internet Explorer, cos they know people would just say Fuck off. They’re
not going to buy it. In more obscure areas, like publishing, 3D animation,
film and video, it doesn’t make so much of a difference. In those business
models, for instance 3D animation, one of the biggest companies is Pixar.
They make the movies! They don’t make the software, they go all the way
through the process and they make the movie! So they completely own
everythin

ween three and fifteen minutes
long so it is OK to have them be linear. In writing the plot, you just imagine
what would it take a new contributor to understand not only what to do, but
also what a ‘normal community member’ would know to do. The different
training missions get this right to different extents.

How does this type of knowledge form, you think? Did you need to become a kind
of anthropologist of Free Software? How do you know you teach the right thing?
I spend a lot of time both working with and thinking about new contributions

the dataset wasn’t. In conversation with a
friend of mine named Theo 2 , who also collaborated with me on the
L.A.S.E.R. Tag project 3 , he brought up the .graph file again and how
we could bring back the file format as a way to connect all these different applications. Graffiti Analysis 4 , L.A.S.E.R. Tag, EyeWriter 5 ... so I
worked with Theo Watson, Chris Sugrue 6 and Jamie Wilkinson 7 and
other people to develop Graffiti Markup Language. It is a simple set of
guidelines, basically an .xml file

graffiti when we were writing the format. But looking back,
it is interesting to think about it.
Graffiti has a lot of privacy issues related to it too, right? So we did
discuss about what it would mean to start recording geo-located data.
There are different interests in graffiti. There is an interest in visuals and
in deconstructing characters. Another group is interested in it, because
it is a sport and more of a performance art. For this type of interest, it
is more important to know exactly where and when it happened because
it is different on a rooftop in New York to a studio in the basement of
someones house. But if someone realizes this data resulted from an illegal
action, and wanted to tie it back to someone, than it starts to be like
a surveillance camera. What happens when s

come to a much
better understanding about how it is made as opposed to just seeing a
photograph of it.

ER

If you want to learn from the person writing, you would need to see
more than just the trace of a pen?
PW

Someones tag might look completely different if they had six seconds
to make it, they make different decisions. In the first version of the
Graffiti Analysis project, I had one camera recorder tracking the pen and
another camera behind the hand and another so you could see the full
body. But there was something about tracking just the pen tip that I
liked. It is an easier point of entry for dealing with the motion data than
having three different video feeds.
ER

Maybe it is more about metadata? Not a question of device or application, but about space for a comment.
FS

Maybe in the keywords there will be something like: Rooftop.
Brooklyn. Arrested.
The most interesting part is often the

ld be interesting for the project, if
someone would try to licence it. Legal things matter, but for the things I
do, I am most of all interested in getting the idea across.
ER

I am interested in the way GML stems from a specific practice. How
it is different and similar to large, legal, commercial, global standardization practices. Related, how can GML connect to other standard practices?
Could it be RDF compliant?

FS

PW

Gesture recognition to help out the police?

Or maps of places that are in n

mething
else: because EyeWriter was GML based, a lot of the collaborations
that happened with people outside of the project were GML related,
not EyeWriter related. So we did have artists like Ben and Golan take
data drawn by TEMPT and do completely different things which made
TEMPT a collaborator with them in a way. The software allowed him to
share his work in a format that allowed other people to work with him.
The wish-list came out of the fact that I was working on a graffiti related
project tha

ich seems funny. The project I’d like to concentrate on is making the data collection easier so that graffiti writers can be
more active in the upload sense. Taking the NASA development model:
Can you get into orbit on this budget?
ER

How is that different from the way you record graffiti motion at the
moment?
FS

If I go out with a graffiti writer, I’m stuck standing with a laptop and
a camera facing the wall and then the graffiti writer needs to have a really
bright light attached to the writi

ked and some
that didn’t.
FS

I think the forum is the obvious thing that did not work. I have
friends working on OpenFrameworks, it is headed primarily by Zach and
Theo. When you see that forum, it is very involved. It is a deep system,
with many different libraries and lots of code flying around. GML is really
not large enough.
I think what makes sense for this project is when I post news about the
project, I see it ripple in Google Alerts. For people working on it, having
a place where these thi

But it could be nice if you could record with a device that is less conspicuous.
FS

I know. I have just been experimenting with mounting cameras on
spray-cans. A tangent to GML, but related. It is not data, but video.
ER

What do you think is the difference between recording video, and
recording data? You mentioned that you wanted to move away from documentation the image to capture movement. Video is somehow indirect
data?
FS

Video is annoying in that it is computationally expensive. In Brazil 2

is not very precise.
Kyle thinks he might be able to back out GML data from videos. This
might solve the challenge, depending on how many cameras you need and
how expensive they are. But so far I have not heard back from him. He
said it needs three different cameras all looking at the wall. I mean: talk
about computationally expensive! He likes video-processing, he knows
some Open Source software that can look for similar things and knows
how to relate them. To me it seems more difficult than it needs to be
(laughs).
ER

It is both overcomplicated and beautiful, trying to reverse engineer
movement from the image.
FS

I am getting more into video myself. I get more enjoyment from capturing the data than from the projections, like

am for the
web. But what if it was playing more with language, starting from graffiti
which is very coded?
When I was in college, I was always thinking about how to visualize
motion in print. I was looking for ways people had developed languages
for different ways of writing.
ER

Maybe you could look at the Chinese methods for teaching writing,
because the order of the strokes is really important. If you make the stroke
from bottom to top, and not from top to bottom, it is wrong.
SV

A friend in Hong Kong, MC Yan, loves the Graffiti Analysis project
because it shows the order in which he is writing and he likes to play
with that. So he writes words in different order than people are used to
and so it changes the meaning. People can not only watch the final result,
but also the order which is an interesting part of the writing process. The
brush, the angle, direction: depicting motion!
In the beginning

nd 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 and that would fit

235

Tying the story to data

into corners, I was interested in designing something that wasn’t curved;
that would fit the angles of the city, hard edges. So I had forgotten all
my research about drafting and writing. I th

based and how much memory they had.
ER

–

All data recorded using the field recorder should be
saved in a secure and non-incriminating fashion.

(laughs) If I had to do that one again, I would have put that in Bonus
category actually. That’s a difficult question to ask. What does secure
mean? It seems a bit unfair, because it doesn’t fit in to the way graffiti is
currently documented. There’s not a lot of graffiti writers that currently
are shooting encrypted photos and videos, right?
But w

is a really weird
surface. Or even writing on glass, or on metal or on other reflecting
surfaces that could screw up your reading. It is there as a reminder for
people that are not thinking about graffiti that much. The street and the
studio are so different.
ER

–

Data should be captured at 30 points per second minimum.

I was assuming that lots of people were going to use cameras, and
I wanted to make sure they were taking enough data points. With other
capturing methods it is probably not such

centimeters,
it might not ruin the data. If you look at the data he is getting, it actually
looks very good. I don’t think he has any numbers on the actual resolution
he is getting but if you were using his system with a pen, I think it would
be a different case. I like a lot of his solution too, it is an interesting hack.
It is funny that two of the candidates for the prize are both mouse hacks.
One is hacking a mechanical mouse and the other an optical mouse.
ER

FS
JH

It goes from drawing on a

The cash prize does something similar. It attaches weight
to something that most people don’t even care about. Even having the
name of an organization like Constant attached to it is showing that I am
really serious about this. In that sense it is different than a wishlist.
I just read the Linus Torvalds 34 biography, and I liked his idea that ‘fun’
is part of innovation, right? In a programming sense, it is scratching a
personal itch. The attachment of a prize is more to underline the fun
aspe

ould be cool uses for more involved pieces. It would be great if
someone else would come in and do that, because it is a part of graffiti that
I haven’t studied that much. I would not even be able to write a specssheet for it; it requires a lot of different things when you paint these
super-involved murals, when you have an hour or more time on your
hands a lot more things come into play. Color, nozzles, nozzle changes
and so on.
ER

JH

Z-axis becomes important?

Yes, and your distance from the wa

illion of them. While others do not want people painting over them,
the city or other graffiti writers. Also if a tag has been up there for a few
years, it acquires more reverence and it is even worse when it is painted
over.
But I think that GML is different, it is really more similar to a photo of
the tag. It is not trying to be the actual thing.
FS

Once a tag is saved in GML, what can be done with the data?

I am myself reluctant to take any of these tags that I’ve collected and
do anything wit

is such an intimate thing. In that sense it is strange to have
an open data repository and to be so reluctant to use it in a way that is
looking at anyone too specifically.
The sculpture I’ve been working on is an average from a workshop; sixteen different graffiti writers merged into one. I don’t want to take advantage of any one writer. But this has nothing to do with the licence,
it is totally a different topic. If someone uploads to the 000000book site,
legally anyone should be able to do anything that they can do under the
Creative Commons licence that’s on the site but I think socially within
the community, it is a huge thing.
ER

There must

KRS-One Master Teacher. AN INTRODUCTION TO HIP HOP .
http://www.krs-one.com/#!temple-of-hip-hop/c177q

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Tying the story to data

in the larger world of hiphop. What other types of contact points might
there be? Do you see any similarities and differences?

For me, even beyond technology and beyond graffiti it all boils down to
this idea of the hack that is really a phenomenon that has been going on
forever. It’s taking this system that has some sort of rigidity and repeating
elements and fli

re’s this empowering idea of individual small actors
assuming control over systems that are bigger than themselves. To me, that’s
the connection point, whether its Hip Hop or rap or programming.
The similarities are there. I think there are huge differences in those communities too. One of them is this idea of the hustler from Hip Hop: the
idea of hustling doesn’t have anything to do with the economy of giftgiving. The idea that Jay-Z has popularized in Hip Hop and that rap music
and graffiti h

to data

I like that, I think there’s something there. At the instigation of the
Open Source Initiative, though: like Linus ‘pre-stock option’, sitting in his
bedroom not seeing the sun for a year and hacking and nerding out. To me
they are so different, the idea of making this thing just for fun with a kind
of optimistic view on collaboration and sharing. I know it can turn into
money, I know it can turn into fame, I know it can turn into Lamborghinis
but I feel like where its coming from is different.
ER

I agree, that’s clearly a distinction between the two. They are not
coming from the same thing. But for me its also interesting to think
about it in terms that these are both sort of movements that have at times
been given liberational tr

apper who came from that, and he’s sort of showing off his stuff and
he has this machismo about him. Not necessarily directly mysognistic
but a macho kind of character and then take a nerd and have them do the
same.
JH

FS

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�

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’re coming from two completely different strata, from a
class-based analysis which is absent from a lot of discussion. Even on
that level, how to integrate them to me is a political question to some
degree.
JH

ER
FS
ER
FS

Right.

Will any features of GML ever be deprecated?

Breaking

font. Because one font
has one of the character they need and then another one doesn’t. Like
for example when a font has the capital letter but not the corresponding
lowercase letter. Users don’t really know how to deal with that, they just
try different fonts and when they’re more courageous, they go online and
find how to complain about those to developers – I mean font designers or
engineers. And those people try to solve those problems as well as they
can. But sometimes it’s pretty har

e to see in a font.
So when font designers face that issue, they have to make a choice rather
they want to go with one tradition or another, and if they want to go one
way they’re scattered to those people. Also you have problems of spacing
things differently, like a stacking of different accents – called diacritics or
diacritical marks. Stacking this high up often ends up on the line above, so
you have to find a solution to make it less heavy on a line, and then in some
languages, instead of stacking them, they end up putting

e.
But basically, all these things are based on how type is represented on computers. You used to have simple encodings like ASCII, the basic Western
Latin alphabet where each character was represented by bytes. The character could be displayed with different fonts, with different styles, they could
not meet the requirements of different people. And then they made different encodings because they were a lot of different requirements and it’s
technically impossible to fit them all in ASCII.
Often they would start with ASCII and then add the specific requirements
but soon they ended up having a lot of different standards because of all the
different needs. So one single byte of representation would have different
meanings and each of these meanings could be displayed differently in fonts.
But old webpages are often using old encodings. If your browser is not
using the right encoding you would have jibbish displayed because of this
chaos of encodings. So in the late eighties, they started thinking about
those problems

just ordered in the way they’re ordered within Unicode
using their code point order: for example, capital A is 41, and then B is 42,
etc. The further you go in the alphabet the further you go in the Unicode
blocks and tables, and there is a lot of different writing systems ... Moreover
because Unicode is sort of expanding organically – work is done on one
script, and then on another, then coming back to previous scripts to add
things – things are not really in a logical or practical order. Basic Latin is all
the way up there, and more far, you have Latin Extended A, (Conditional)
Extended Latin, Latin Extended B, C and D. Those are actually quite far
apart within Unicode, and each of them can have a different setup: for
example, here you have a capital letter that is just alone, and here you have
a capital letter and a lowercase letter. So when you know the character you
want to use, sometimes you would find the uppercase letter but you’d have
to k

so have to
provide proof that the characters you want to add are actually used or how
they would be used.

263

The criterias are quite complicated because you have to make sure that this is
not a glyphic variant (the same character but represented differently). Then
you also have to prove the character doesn’t already exist because sometimes
you just don’t know it’s a variant of another one; sometimes they just want
to make it easier and claim it’s a variant of another one even though you
d

hing that already exists, they added them. Then
they figured they already had all those accented characters from other encodings so they’re also going to add all the ones they know are used even
though they were not encoded yet. They ended up with different names because they had different policies at the beginning instead of having the same
policy as now. They added here a bunch of Latin letters with marks that
were used for example in transcription. So if you’re transcribing Sanskrit for
example, you would use some of the char

’s technically
feasible but it’s a slow process to have all the possibilities. You might have
one whic is very common so developers end up adding it to the keyboard
layouts or whatever applications they’re using, but not when other people
have different needs.
There is a lot of documentation within Unicode, but it’s quite hard to find
what you want when you’re just starting, and it’s quite technical. Most of it
is actually in a book they publish at every new version. This book has a few
chapters that describe how Unicode works and how characters should work
together, what properties they have. And all the differences between scripts
are relevant. They also have special cases trying to cater to those needs that
weren’t met or the proposals that were rejected. They have a few examples
in the Unicode book: in some transcription systems they have this sequence
of characters or ligature; a t and a s with a ligature tie and then a dot above.
So the ligature tie means that t and s are pronounced together and the dot
above is err ... has a different meaning (laughs). But it has a meaning! But
because of the way characters work in Unicode, applications actually reorder
it whatever you type in, it’s reordered so that the ligature tie ends up being
moved after the dot. So you always have thi

tion or in the fonts.
The documentation of Unicode itself is not prescriptive, meaning that the
shape of the glyphs are not set in stone. So you can still have room to
have the style you want, the style your target users want. For example
if we have different glyphs: Unicode has just one shape and it’s the font
designer’s choice to have different ones. Unicode is not about glyphs, it’s
really about how information is represented, how it’s displayed. Or you have
two characters displayed as a ligature: it is actually encoded as one character
because of previous encodings. But if ever i

a TrueType OpenType font. But then, you need your
applications to be able to handle Graphite. So eventually the real unique
standard is TrueType Opentype. It’s pretty well documented and very technical because it allows to do many things for many different writing systems.
But it’s slow to update so if there’s a mistake in the actual specifications of
OpenType, it takes a while before they correct it and before that correction shows up in your application. It’s quite flexible and one of the

r for one
accentuated letter. Sometimes they just think that following the Unicode
blocks is good enough. But then you have problems where, as you can see
in the Basic Latin charts at the beginning, the capital is in one block and
its lowercase in a different block. And then they just work on one block,
they just don’t do the other one because they don’t think it’s necessary, but
yet, two blocks of the same letter are there, so it would make sense to have
both. It’s hard because there’s ver

ur school. I mean, having to work full time doing illustration, corporate
identity, graphic design, etc., to make a living, deliver on time to clients and
make a profit to pay the bills by the end of the month!

Do you think OSS can/should be taught differently? It seems selfteaching is built in to these tools and the community around it. It means
you learn to teach others in fact ... that you actually have to leave the
concept of ‘mastering’ behind?
I agree. The great thing about Linux is precis

om other people than your tutor ... and that
you can teach someone else.

The aspect of taking responsibility, this has to be cultivated – a responsible use of these tools. About changing things under the hood ... well this I
think it will be more difficult. I think there is barely space to educate people to hack their own tools let alone getting under the hood and modifying
them. But you are right that under the OSS communication model, the
peer review model of analysis, communication is getting l

rio would be that you’ve wasted time perfecting your skills or learned a
282

new tool that didn’t become a standard ... How many times have we done
this already in our life? In any way, we need to learn concepts behind
the tools, learn new and different tools, even unnecessary ones in order to
broaden our knowledge base – this will eventually 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 matu

the work of the foundries. Today, thanks to the digital tools, you
can easily switch between type design, type setting and graphic design.

What about the idea that fonts might be the most ‘pirated’ digital object possible?
Copying is much more difficult when you’ve got lead type to handle!

Yes, digitalisation changed the rules. Just as .mp3 changed the philosophy
of music. But in typography, there is a strange confrontation between this
flux of copied information, piracy and old rules of own

. Every designer
has at least 500 fonts on their
computer, not licenced, but
copied because it would be impossible to pay for!

Even the distribution model of fonts is very peer-to-peer as well. The reality
might come close, but font licences tell a different story.
I believe that we live in an era where
anything that can be expressed as bits
will be. I believe that bits exist to
be copied. Therefore, I believe that any
business-model that depends on your bits
not being copied is just dumb, and that

because
it refers to almost every field in culture. The banners behind G.W. Bush
communicate more than just ‘Mission Accomplished’. Typefaces carry a
‘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

//letterror.com/writing/is-best-really-better

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The Metapolator Uinverse by Simon Egli (2014)

FS

H

FS

I really like this idea ... to have more than one master. Imagine you own one
master and I own the other and than we adjust and tweak from different sides.
That would be real collaborative type! Could ‘multiple’ mean more than one you
think?

It is a bit more complicated than drawing a simple font in Fontographer or
Fontforge. Pierre told me that the MM feature is still available in Adob

en Content ... someone must have had the same idea? In discussions
about digital tools you begin to find designers expressing concern over the
fact that their work might all look the same because they use exactly the
same Adobe suite and as a way to differentiate yourself, Free Software could
soon become more popular. I think the success of Processing is related
to that, though I doubt such a composed project will ever make anyone
seriously consider Scribus for page layout, even if Processing is Open

ing is for a Linux
developer: only a few people actually make fonts but many people use them
all the time. Software companies have been inconsistent in developing proprietary tools for editing fonts, which has made the work of typographers
painfully difficult at times. This is why George Williams decided to develop
FontForge, and release it under a BSD license: even if he stops being interested, others can take over. FontForge has gathered a small group of fans
who through this tool, stay into contac

oisonous
lead into sets of ultra light vector drawings, held together in complicated
kerning systems. When you take this software-like aspect as a startingpoint,
many ways to collaborate (between programmers and typographers; between
people speaking different languages) open up, as long as you let go of the
uptight licensing policies that apply to most commercial fonts. I guess the
image of the solitary master passing on the secret trade to his devoted pupils
does not sit very well with the invitatio

unication between let’s say Greek, Russian, Slovak and French.
These kinds of vast projects are so much easier to develop and maintain in
a Free Software way; the DéJàVu font project shows that it is possible to
work with many people spread over different countries modifying the same
set of files with the help of versioning systems like CVS.
But what it all comes down to probably ... Donald Knuth is the only person
I have seen both Free Software developers and designers wear on their Tshirts.

Th

ore the case. How would
you characterise the scenes around each of these applications?

The kinds of applications we use form a category in themselves. They are
indeed small projects so ‘scene’ fits them better than ‘culture’. Graphics
tools differ from archetypal Unix/Linux code and language based projects
in that Graphical User Interfaces obviously matter and because they are used
in a specialised context outside its own developers circle. This is interesting because it makes F/LOSS develop

r of women is involved in F/LOSS makes apparent how openness
and freedom are not simple terms to put in practice. When asked whether
gender matters, the habitual answer is that opportunities are equal and from
that point a constructive discussion is difficult. There are no easy solutions,
but the lack of diversity needs to be put on the roadmap somehow, or as a
friend asked: Where do I file a meta-bug?
Visually, or in terms of the aesthetic qualities of the designs you have developed
would you say you have managed to achieve anything unavailable through the
output of the Adobe empire?

The members of OSP would never have come up with the idea to combine
their aesthetics and skills using Adobe, so that makes it difficult to do a
‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison. 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 larger discoveries, the Spiro toolkit that Free Software
activist, Ghostscript ma

ain this to a printer trying to get a file to convert to the
kind of thing they expect?
Not! Printing has become cheap through digitization and is streamlined to
the extreme. Often there is literally no space built in to even have a second
look at a differently formatted file, so to state that glitches are productive
is easier said than done. Still, those hickups make processes tangible, especially at moments you don’t want them to interfere.
For a book we are designing at the moment, we might part

en if that was possible, would not be very interesting in that respect; we
turn software into fairytales if that is what it takes to make our point.
In terms of the development of F/LOSS approaches in areas outside software,
one of the key points of differentiation has been between ‘recipes’ and ‘food’, bits
and atoms, genotype and phenotype. That is that software moves the kinds of
rivalry associated with the ownership and rights to use and enjoy a physical object
into another domain, that o

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 particular way, or by

urce Publishing
(OSP)?

OSP is a working group producing graphic design objects using only
Libre and/or Open Source software. Founded in 2006 in the frame of the
arts organisation Constant 1 , the OSP caravan consists today of a dozen
individuals of different backgrounds and practices.
Since how long are you working as a duo, and as a team in OSP?
3 to 4 years.

And how many books have you conceived?

As a team, it’s our first ‘real’ book. We previously worked together on a
somewhat similar pro

his process. These archives weren’t structured, so the exploration was less
linear.
You rapidly chose TeX/ConTeXt as a software environment to produce
this book. Was it an obvious choice given the nature of the project, or did you
hesitate between different approaches?

The construction of the book focused on two axes/threads: chronology
and a series of ‘trace-route’ keywords. Within this approach of reading and
navigation using cross-references, ConTeXt appeared as an appropriate tool.
1
2

ht

written in 1978 by Donald Knuth
distinguished by the Fernand Baudin Prize 2009

312

tool. 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 projects use parts of the code ? Or, without
any explicit documentation, would it be highly improbable?

Indeed, the documentation part is still on the to-do list. Yet a large part
of the code is quite directly reusable. The code allows to parse different types
of files. E-mails and chat-logs are often found in project archives. Here the
Python scripts allows to order them according to date information, and will
automatically assign a style to the different content fields.

The code itself is 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.
D

://artwarez.org/femext/content/femextEN.html
http://www.obn.org/

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Performing Libre Graphics

It is slightly more mysterious than the term ‘free’, especially when it turns up
in the English language. It sort of hints that there is something different,
something done on purpose. And it is also a group of people that are
inspired by Free Software culture, by Free Culture, by thinking about how
to share both their tools, their recipes and the outcomes of all this. Libre
Graphics goes in many di

But it is an interesting context to work
in, that for me has been quite inspiring for a few years now.

The context of Libre Graphics

The context of Libre Graphics is multiple. I think that I am excited about
it and also part of why it is sometimes difficult to describe it in a short
sentence. The context is design, and people that are interested in design, in
creating visuals, animation, videos, typography ... and that is already multiple contexts, because each of these disciplines have their own h

inking that, when
you develop technology, and I am using technology in the sense that it is
cultural as well to me, deeply cultural, you need to take care as well of sharing the recipes, for how this technology has been developed. This produces
many different other tools, ways of working, ways of speaking, vocabularies, because it changes radically the way we make and the way we produce
hierarchies. It means for example, if you produce a graphic design artifact,
that you share all the source files that were necessary to make it; but you
also share as much as you can, descriptions or narrations of how it came to
be, which does include maybe how much was paid for it, where difficulties
were in negotiating with the printer; and what elements were included, because a graphic design object is usually a compilation of different elements;
what software was used to make it, and where it might have resisted. The
consequences of taking the Free Software culture serious in a design context, means that you care about all these different layers of the work, all the
different conditions that actually made the work happen.

Free Culture

The relationship from Libre Graphics to Free Culture is not always that
explicit. For some people it is enough to work with tools that are releas

work, and as a consequence, between professional and amateur work, I find that very problematic. Because
I think one of the most important elements of Free Software culture for me,
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Performing Libre Graphics

is the possibility for people from different backgrounds, with different skill
sets, to actually engage with the digital artifacts they’re surrounded with.
By making this lazy separation between commercial and non-commercial,
which especially in the context of the web as it is right now, is not really
easy to hold

icit about the fact that anyone can
use whatever I produce in any context. Because I think that is where the
real power is of Free Software culture. For me Free Software licences and
all the licences that are around it, because I think there is many different
types and that is interesting, is that they have a viral power built in. So if
you apply a Free Software licence to, for example, a typeface, it means that
someone else, even someone else you don’t know, has the permission and
doesn’t have t

, continuously exciting, is the whole, let’s say, all the other elements
around it. The way people organize themselves in conferences, mailing lists,
the kinds of communication that happens, the vocabularies, the histories,
the connections between different disciplines ... And all that is available to
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Performing Libre Graphics

look at, to work with, to come into contact with; to speak to people that do
these tools and ask them, why is it like this and not like that. And that to
me seems obvious that artists want to have that kind of layered relationship
with their tools, and not just only accept whatever comes out of next door
shop. I have a very different, almost different physical experience of these
tools, because I can enter on many levels. That makes them part of my
practice, not just means to an end. I really can take them into my practice.
That I find interesting, as an artist and as a designer.

Artifacts

The outcomes of this type of practice are different, or at least, let’s say, in
the kind of work I make, try to make and the people I like to work with.
There is obviously also groups of people that would like to do Hollywood
movies with those tools. That is kind of interesting, that that happe

roduct is always the beginning of another product, either by me or by
other people. I think that is two things that you can always see in the kind
of works we make when we do libre-graphics-my-style. When we make a
book, for example, what is already different, is when we start the process, it
is not yet defined what tool we will use. There is a whole array of tools you
can choose from. I mean, books are basically text on paper, and there are
many ways to arrive at that output. For one book we did a f

ite terrible in these manuals; accept that certain things that
we thought would be easy, were actually not easy at all; and then understand
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Performing Libre Graphics

how we could use the things that were popping up or not working or that
were different, how we could use them in our advantage. The final result
is a book that is slightly strange, because there are some mistakes that have
been left in, deliberately or by accident sometimes. The book contains an
extensive description of how it was

ght to actually claim this typeface as such. But through their communication they do
so. OSP was invited to work in an art academy in London, where they had
a lead version. And we decided to play with the typeface. The typeface OSP
released has many different versions, not versions as in bold, light etc. but
it has different levels of ‘licencing risk’. One is a straight scan of the prints
that were made at that workshop. Another version is more guilty, in the
sense that it is an extraction from a .pdf using the Monotype Gill. Another
is a redrawn version that takes the matrix, the spacing of a Monotype Gill,
but combines it with a redrawn example. All different variations of this font
touch on different elements of licencing problems that might occur with
typefaces. We sent our experiment to Monotype, because we wanted to hear
from them what they thought. After a few months we received a letter from
a lawyer saying, would you please identify yourself. We decided to write
back as we are, which is, 25 people from 20 different countries with stable
and unstable addresses. This long list probably made that we never heard
anything again, and ‘Sans Guilt’ is still available from our website under an
open font licence. What the is important, the typeface is different, in the
sense that the specimen is not much about showing off how beautiful it will
look in any context, but has the description of the process, the motivation
of why we did it, the letter we sent to Monotype, the response we got, ...
The whole

aw to be able to understand how nonfree documents actually are constructed. They are really working on trying to
understand non-free documents, to be able to read them and to be able to
develop tools for them, that they can be reused and remade. The difference
between a free and a non-free document is that, for example, an InDesign
file, which is the result of a commercial product, there is no documentation
available of how this file works. This means that the only way to open the
document, is with t

Libre Graphics. One of the problems we run into, is
the fact that validation systems are really geared towards judging individuals.
And our type of practice is always multiple. It is always about things that
happen with many people. And it is really difficult to inspire students to
work that way, and at the same time know that at the end of the day, they’ll
be judged on what they produced as an individual. In traditional education
there is always a separation between teaching technology and practice. You
have, in different ways, you have the studio practice, and then you have the
workshops. And it is very difficult to make conceptual connections between
the two. We end up trying to make that happen, but it is clearly not made
for that. And then there is the problem of hierarchies between tutor and
student, that are hard to break in formal education, just b

etup is,
even in very informal situations, that someone comes to teach and someone
else comes to be taught. And there is no way to truly break that hierarchy,
because that is the way a school works. For years we are thinking about how
to do teaching differently or how to do learning differently, and last year, for
the first time, we organized a summer school. Just like a kind of experiment
to see if we could learn and teach differently. The title, the name of the
school is Relearn. Because the sort of relearning for yourself but also to
others, through teaching learning, has become really a good methodology,
it seems.
If I say ‘we’, that’s always a bit uncomfortable, b

, is Constant, an association for
arts and media active in Brussels since 1996. Or 1997 maybe. Our interest
is more in mixing Copyleft thinking, Free Software thinking and feminism.
In many ways that intersects with OSP but they might phrase it in a different way. Another ‘we’ is the Libre Graphics community, which is even a
more uncomfortable ‘we’. Because it includes engineers that would like to
conquer the world ... and small hyper intelligent developers that creep out
of their corners to

ally can get quite
complex during the transformation process. But it should always have this
level, where it’s quite simple. So just text and for example this one markup
element for ok now the speaker changes.
In the beginning we experimented with differents tools, basically small
scripts to perform all kinds of layout task. Xavier for example prepared a
hotglue2svg converter. After that, we thought, why don’t we try to connect different approaches? Not only the very strict markdown to TeX to
.pdf transformations, but to think about, under which circumstances you
would actually prefer a canvas-based approach. What can you do on a canvas
that you can’t do or is much harder with

itory might be not at
the latest state and a missing image would prevent LaTeX from rendering
the document. It should also ignore errors, for example if someone mistypes
the name of image or the command. It should not stop the process, but
produce a different output, e.g. without the image.
Why do you think the process should not stop when there’s an error? Why is
that so important?

For me it was important to ensure some kind of feedback, even if there might
be ‘errors’ in the output. Not just

a tolerance for errors, which would even produce something, that maybe
different from what you expected. But it should produce ‘something’.
You imagine a kind of iterative development that we know from working with
code, that allows you to keep differents versions, that keeps flowing in a way.
For example, this specific markup format. It’s basically markdown and
I wanted some more elements, like footnotes and the option to include
citations and comments. I find it quite handy, when you write s

tput.
But back to the etherpash workshop. Commands are basically comments
that will trigger some action, for example the inclusion of a graphic or
changing the font or anything. These commands are referenced in a separate
file, so everybody can have different versions of the commands on their own
machine. It would not affect the other people. For example, if you wanted
to have a much more elaborated GRAFIK command, you could write it and
use it within your transformer of the document or you could introduce new
commands, that are written on the main pad, but would be ignored for
other people, because they have a different reference file. Does this make
sense?
Yes. In a way, there are a lot of grey zones. There are elements that are
global and elements that are local; elements can easily go parallel and none
of the commands actually has always the same output, for everyone.

They can, but they do not need to. You can stick to the very basic version
that comes directly from the repository. You could use this version to create
a .pdf in the ‘original’ way, but you can easily change it on different levels.
You can change the Bash commands that are triggered by the transformer
script, you can work on the LaTeX macros or change the script itself. I
found it quite important to have different levels of complexity. You may go
deeper, but you do not necessarily have to. The Etherpad content is the very
top level. You don’t have to install a software on your computer, you can
just open up a browser and edit the text. So this should ma

ess to
collaboration easier. Because for a lot of experimental software you spend a
lot of time to get it even running. Most often you have a very steep learning
curve and I found it interesting, to separate this learning curve in a way. So
you have different layers and if you really want to reconfigure on a deep level,
you can, but you do not necessarily have to.
I guess you are talking about collaboration across different levels of complexity, where different elements can transform the final outcome. But if you
take the analogy of CSS, or let’s say a Content Management System that
generates HTML, you could say that this also creates divisions of labour. So
rather than making collaboration possible, it confines people to to different
336

files. How do you think your systems invite people to take part in different
levels? Are these layers porous at all? Can they easily slip between different
roles, let’s say an editor, a typographer and a programmer?
Up to a certain extent it’s like a division of labour. But if you call it a
separation of tasks, it makes definitely sense for me. It can be quite hard, if
you have to take over res

n your commandline interface. So in this case, automation helps to work around a missing
multipage support in inkscape. Not by changing the application itself, but
by plugging something ‘on top’ of it. I like to think of the Bash as glue
between different applications. So if we have a look now at the setup for
the conversations publication, we may see that Bash makes it really easy to
develop own configurations and setups. I actually thought about prefering
the word ‘setup’ to ‘writing software’ ...

Are you saying you prefer setup ‘over’ configuration?

Setup or configuration of software ‘over’ actually writing software. Because
for me it’s often more about connecting different applications. For example,
here we have a browser-based text editor, from which the content is automatically pulled and transformed via text-transform tools and then rendered
as a .pdf. What I find interesting, is that the scripts in between may

you can be decisive in your design decisions because
the outcome could also be another. You could always regenerate the .pdf
with other decisions.
Yes. For example, I would regenerate the .pdf with the same decisions,
another person maybe would take different decisions. But that’s one step
before the final object. For example, if we do not talk about the .pdf, but
we actually talk about the book, then it’s very clear, that there are decisions,
that need to be taken or that have been taken. And ac

hic decisions ... in the beginning we searched for
fancy fonts, but in a way came back to use very classic fonts, respectively one classic
font. So the Junicode 8 for the text and the OCR-A 9 for anything else. Because
we decided to focus on testing different ways of layouting and use the fonts as a
way to keep a certain continuity between the parts. We thought this can be more
interesting, than to show that we can find a lot of beautiful, fancy fonts.

So in the beginning, we thought about having a different font for every
speaker, but sooner or later we realised that it would be good to have something that keeps the whole thing together. Right now, this are the two
fonts. The Junicode, which is a font for medievalists, and the OCR-A,
which is a opt

rom the early age of computer technology. So the hypothesis was, to have this combination – a very
classical typeface inspired by the 16th century and a typeface optimized for
machine reading – that maybe will produce an interesting clash of two different approaches. While at the same time providing a continuous element
throughout the book. But that still has to be proven in the final layout.

I find it interesting that both fonts in their own way are somehow conversational. They are both used in situations where one system needs to talk to
another.

Yeah, definitely in a way. They are both optimised for a special usage, which,
by the way, isn’t the usage of our case. One for the display of medieval
texts, where you have to have lot of different signs and ligatures and ... that’s
the Junicode. The other one, the OCR-A, is optimized to be legible by
machines. So that are two different directions of conversation. And they’re
both Free and Open Source fonts ...
And for the layout? How are the divider pages going to be constructed?

For the divider pages, it’s an application ‘Built with Processing’, done by
Benjamin 10 . In a way, it’s a different approach, because it’s a software with
an extensive Graphical User Interface, with a lot of options. So it’s different
8
9

10

http://junicode.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocr-a-font/
Stephan

340

from the very modular, connective approach. There we decided to have this
software, which is directly controlled by the controller, the person w

a easy way. So now you could just have a ~fiveliner, that will pull the text
from the Etherpad and convert it to simple markdown or to HTML.
Wonderful.

If you have a more or less clean source format, then it’s in most cases easy
to convert it to different formats. For example, the Evan Roth interview,
you provided as a ConTeXt file. So with some text manipulation, it was
easy to do the transformation to our Etherpad markup. And it would be
harder if the content is stored as an Open Office documen

k on this still, so I was
wondering ... are there other things you are testing or trying ?

Yeah, I think I want to finish the hotglue2svg.sh, I mean it’s my first
Bash program, I want to raise my baby. ( laughs) But right now I’m trying to
find different ways of layouts. The first one is the one with the big squares, the
big unicode characters and all the arrows. So it’s very complicated, but it’s the
attempt to find an another way to express a conversation in text.

Can you say more about t

c things, like the choice
342

of the unicode characters. If this can be a way to express a conversation. Because
it’s hard to it with programming stuff so we’re using GUI based software.

It’s a bit coming to the question, what you are doing differently, if you work
with a direct visual feedback. So you don’t try to reduce the content to get
it through a logical structure. Because that’s in a way how the markdown
to LaTeX transformation is doing it. You set certain rules, that may be in
s

set of
rules. With this application of rules you are a lot confronted in daily graphic
design. And this is also a way of working you learn during your studies.
Stick to certain logical or maybe visual grids. And so now the question is:
What’s the difference if you do a really visual layout. Do you deal differently
with the content, does it make sense, or if you’re just always coming back
to a certain grid, then you might as well do it by computation. So that’s
something that we wanted to find out. What advantage do you really gain
from having a canvas-based approach throughout the layout process.
In a way the interviews are very similar, because it’s always peoples speaking,
but at the same time each of the conversations is slightly different. So in what
way is the difference between them made legible, through the same set of rules
or by making specifics rules for each of them?
If you do the layout by hand you can take decisions that would be much
harder to translate to code. For example, how to emphasize certain pa

sual design of the content ... The point why it’s interesting to me is because
working as a designer you get quite often reduced to this visual design of the
content, at the same it may make sense in a lot of cases. So it’s a evaluation
of these different approaches. Do you design the ruleset or do you design
the final outcome? And I think it has both advantages and disadvantages.

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Colophon

In conversation with: Agnes Bewer, Alexandre Leray, An Mertens, Andreas Vox, Asheesh
Laroia,

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