Back to Index

ming in Sollfrank & Kleiner 2012

ind
of bursting out of its original military and NGO roots, and really hitting the
general public. At the same time free software is something that is becoming
better known, and inspiring more people – so the ideas of questioning
copyright are becoming more prominent. [25:16] So Creative Commons seizes on
this kind of principles approach that anti-copyright and copyleft take. And
again, one of the single most important things about anti-copyright and
copyleft is that in both cases the freedom that

e same time allowing the commons producers to make a
living as they normally would within the regular cultural industry. [32:25]
Some good examples where you can see something like this – might be clear –
are some of the famous novelists like Wu Ming or Cory Doctorow, people that
have done very well by publishing their works under Creative Commons non-
commercial licenses. [32:42] Wu Ming's books, which are published, I believe,
by Random House or some big publisher, are available under a Creative Commons
non-commercial license. So if you want to download them for personal use, you
can. But if you are Random House, and you want to publish them and put them on
bookstores, and manufacture them in huge supply, you have to negotiate non-
free terms with Wu Ming. And this allows Wu Ming to make a living by licensing
their work to Random House. [33:10] But while it does do that, what it doesn't
do is allow that book to be manufactured any other way. So that means that
this capitalist form of production becomes the only form that you

and exhibiting the most are deadSwap,
Thimbl and R15N, and these all attempt to explore some of the ideas.

[35:01]
deadSwap

[35:06]
deadSwap is a file sharing system. It's playing on the kind of
circumventionist technologies that are coming out of the file sharing
community, and this idea that technology can make us be able to evade the
legal and economic structures. So deadSwap wants to question this by creating
a very extreme parody of what it would actually mean to really be private.

ming in Constant 2015

y you design for
Just Ask and That Will Be That
Tying the story to data
Unicodes

If the design thinking is correct, the tools should be irrelevant
You need to copy to understand
What’s the thinking here

The construction of a book (Aether9)
Performing Libre Graphics

The Making of Conversations

7
13
23
37
47
71
84
99
109
135
155
171
187
201
213
261
275
287
297
311
319
333

Colophon

351

Keywords

353

Free Art License

359

Larisa Blazic:

Introduction

Computational concepts, their technologi

developers! It was very exciting
listening to talks, overhearing conversations in breaks, observing group discussions and slowly engaging with the Libre Graphics community. Being
there to witness how far the F/LOSS community has come was so heartwarming and uplifting, that my enthusiasm was soaring.
The main reason for my attendance at the Madrid LGM was to join
the launch of a network of Free Culture aware educators in art, music and
design education. 1 Aymeric Mansoux and his colleagues from the W

of Medialab Prado. The introduction round began, and I thought:
there are so many people using F/LOSS in their teaching! Short courses,
long courses, BA courses, MA courses, summer schools, all sorts! There
were so many solutions presented for overcoming institutional barricades,
Adobe marriages and Apple hostages. Individual efforts and group efforts,
long term and short, a whole world of conventional curriculums as well as
a variety of educational experimentations were presented. Just sitting there

ble with Scribus and if a functionality is not there, we
ask them to put in a bug report so we do not forget it and some time later
we will pick it up and implement it. Especially the possibility to edit from
the canvas, this will approve in the upcoming versions.
Some things we just copied from other applications. I think Franz 5 had no
previous experience with PageMaker, so when I came to Scribus, and saw
how it handled text chains, I was totally dismayed and made some changes
right away because I

ic ... and men are more
logical ... even if it is true ... it seems quite a good thing to
have when you are doing math or software?

Juliane is a Brussels based computer scientist, feminist
and Linux user from the beginning. She studied math,
programming and system administration and participates in Samedies. 1 In February 2009 she was voted
president of the Brussels Linux user group (BXLug).

I will start at the end ... you have recently become president of the BXLug. Can
you explain to us what it i

BXLug

38

relationship with technology which comes out when you open up the commandline
... there’s something in you that comes to life.

Oh, yes! To begin with, I am a mathematician (‘matheuse’), I was a math
teacher, and I have been programming during my studies and yes, there
was something fantastic about it ... informatics for me is all about logic, but
logic in action, dynamic logic. A machine can be imperfect, and while I’m
not specialised in hardware, there is a part on which you can

mean, there is
no handicap we start out with, it is a social handicap ... convincing girls to
become a secretary rather than a system administrator.
6

Participants in the Samedies: Femmes et logiciels libres (http://www.samedies.be)

40

I am assuming there is a link between your feminism and your engagement with
Free Software ...

It is linked at the point where ... it is a political liaison which is about reappropriating tools, and an attempt to imagine a political universe where we
are ourselve

recuperated by the business world, and now we are in a
period where tendencies will become clear. I have the impression that with
the way society is represented right now ... where they are talking about the
economical crisis ... and that we are becoming a society of ‘gestionnaires’
and ideological questions seem not very visible.
So do you think it is more or less a war between two tendencies, or can both
currents coexist, and help each other in some way?

The current in Free Software that could

e, with the scalability
of our approach right now. And how to set up this infrastructure to support
the software as it grows bigger. I should forward you this e-mail that I
wrote, that is a response to their name choices. They were contemplating
becoming a group called ‘cows’. Which is clearly an inside joke because they
loved to do figure demonstrations with cows. And seeing ConTeXt as I do,
as a platform, a serious platform, for the future, something that ... it’s almost like it hasn’t gott

it will come out as a nice looking .pdf.

LuaTeX allows the connection to TeX to widen?

Yeah. It takes sort of the essence of TeX. And this is, I guess, the crucial
thing about LuaTeX that up until now TeX is both a typesetting engine and
a programming language. And not a very good one. So now that TeX can
be the engine, the Tschicholdian algorithms, the modernist principles, that,
for whatever reason, do look really good, can be utilised and connected to
without having to deal with this 32 year old macro programming language.
On top of that and part of how directly engaging with that kind of movement foreward is ... not that I am switching over to LuaTeX entirely at this
point ... but that this generative typesetting platform that was sort of the
foundation of t

et a cd
booklet. Just basically what I’m writing. That at the same time, you know,
gets you familiar with ConTeXt and TeX in general. Before my presentation
I was wondering, I was like: how do you set a variable in TeX. Well, it’s a
macro programming language so you just make a macro that returns a value.
Like that kind of stuff is not initially obvious if you’re used to a 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

ption in Free Software. We wanted escape
that kind of stiffness of the page, or of the canvas in a way. But ConTeXt
was not the dream solution either. For us it had a lot to do, of course, with
issues of documentation ... of not understanding, not coming from that kind of
automatism of treating it as another programming language. So I think we could
have had much more fun if we had understood the culture of the project better.
I think the most frustrating experience was to find out how much the model of
typesetting is linked to the Tschichold universe, that at the m

sers ... first I’d be really surprised if the engine
itself, if LuaTeX was not being some way written to ... I feel really ignorant
about this, I wish I just knew. But, yeah, there must be ... There is no way
to translate this into a modern programming language without somehow
thinking about this in terms of the design. I guess to certain extent the
answer to your question is dependent on the conscientiousness of Taco and
the other LuaTex developers for this kind of modularity. But I don’t ... yo

an you might as well write it in Bash or ... I mean I think Bash would
even be more sensible to figuring out what’s going on. So, the switch to Lua
there is kind of I think a useful step just in being more transparent. To allow
you to get into becoming more intimate with the source or the operation
59

of the system ... you know ... without having to go ... I mean I guess ... the
TeX Book would still be useful in some ways but that’s ... I mean ... to go
back and learn TeX when you’re just try

ions
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 differenc

t, you’re gaining the usefulness of that metaphor, which is ... it’s
almost ... I hope I don’t sound offensive ... but it’s almost like child’s play.
It’s almost like point, click, place. To me it just seems so redundant or ...
time-consuming maybe ... to really deal with it that way. There are advantages to that metaphor. For instance I don’t plan on designing covers in
ConTeXt. Or even a poster or something like that. Because it doesn’t really
give affordances for that kind of creat

en 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, if it were updated in real time, al

c books and also to work on
three dimensional mathematical objects. We were excited
about how his software represents the gesture of folding,
loved his bold interface decisions plus were impressed by the
fact that Tom decided to write his own programming framework for it. A year later, we met again in Montreal, Canada
for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 where he presents a
follow-up. With Ludivine Loiseau 1 and Pierre Marchand 2 ,
we finally found time to sit down and talk.
What is Laidout?

Well, La

u’re doing in order to produce any
final work, that is if you actually do produce any final work. Part of that is
making the tools. When I first started making computer tools to help me
73

in my artwork, I did not have a lot of experience programming computers.
I had some. I did little projects here and there. So I looked around at the
various toolkits, but everything seemed really rigid. If you wanted to edit
some text, you had this little box and you write things in this little box and
if you w

er 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 always making letters fly around the
screen and stuff like that, and follow various curves. So I was always doing
little programming tricks. I guess I grew up in a household where that
sort of thing was pretty normal. I had two brothers, and they both became
computer programmers. And I’m the youngest, so I could learn from their
mistakes, too. I hope.
You’re looking for good e

for you, the program itself is part of the work?

I think it’s definitely part of the work. That’s kind of the nuts and bolts
that you have to enjoy to get somewhere else. But if I look back on it, I
74

spend a huge amount of time just programming and not actually making
the artwork itself. It’s more just making the tools and all the programming
for the tools. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. When it comes time to
actually make artwork, I do like to have the tool that’s just right

ent. 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 things. That’s how I think of it. I can see that ...
I’ve distributed Laidout as something in itself. It’s not just some secret tool
that I’ve put aside and presented only the artwork. I do enjoy the tools

iddle and
fold. Very simple. I’ve done some where you cut down the middle and lay
the sides on top and they’re perfect bound. I’ve done just a couple where
it’s an actual hand bound, hard cover. I do enjoy that. It’s quite a time
75

consuming thing. There’s quite a lot of craft in that. I enjoy a lot of hand
made, do-it-yourself activities.
Do you look at classic imposition plans?

I guess that’s kind of my goal. I did look up classic book binding
techniques and how people do it and w

r, 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, we had a little introduction to Mercurial,
another versioning software, at school in 2009. Shortly after I switched to
Git. I was working with som

, making it ... I don’t want to
say ‘clean’ ... legible, using variable names that people can understand. Because,
sometimes when we code just for ourselves I use French variables so that I’m sure
that it’s not word-protected by the programming language. But then it is not
accessible to many people. So stuff like that.
You have decided to use a tool that’s deeply embedded in the world of
F/LOSS. So I’ve always seen your choice for Git both as a pragmatic
choice as well as a fan choice?

n would makes 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

his available only when you decide, OK I go synchronous. Like you say,
if you have a commit for every letter it doesn’t make sense.
It makes sense. A lot of things related to versions in software development
is meant to track bugs, to track programming choices.
118

I don’t know for you ... but the way I interact with our Git repository since we
started to work with it ... I almost never went into the history of a project. It’s
just, it really never happened to go back into this history, to ch

have enough resource to work on it. GitHub starts
to cover a lot of needs, but always in their way of doing things, so it’s a
problem.
122

I’m very surprised ... the quality of Git is that it isn’t centralized, and nowadays everything is becoming centralized in GitHub. I’m also wondering
whether ... I don’t think we should start to host other repositories, or maybe
we should, I don’t know.
Yeah, I think we should

You do or you don’t want to become a hosting platform?

No. What I thin

story we tell depends on who we are telling it to and
who is listening and why we want to convince them. Which I hope is not as
duplicitous as it may sound. Basically, if you try to convince a manager that
you want 20% time of an engineer for the coming two years, you are telling
them things to convince them. Which is not untrue necessarily, but that is
the focus they want. If you are talking to designers, you are telling them how
that is going to help them when this thing becomes a spec, and the fa

put styling on it. The type of thing I’m doing is going to vary for those
audiences, as will the presentation. There’s a limit. You can’t say: here’s the
überdocument, and it can be styled to be anything. It can’t be. The trick is
to not mingle the style of the presentation when you don’t need to. When
you do need to, you’re already halfway down the gradient. Keep them as far
apart as you can, delay it as late as possible. At some point they have to be
combined. A design will have to

r

y

a

n

d

j

a

z

z

m

u

s

i

c

So, the history of typography actually starts with Free Software, with Donald
Knuth and his TeX. The TeX typesetting system has its own font software
or font system called Metafont. Metafont is a font programming language,
and algebraic programming language describing letter forms. It really gets
into the internal structure of the shapes. This is a very non-visual programming approach to it where you basically use this programming language to
describe with algebra how the shapes make up the letters. If you have a
capital H, you got essentially 3 lines, two verticals stands and a horizontal
crossbar and so, in algebra you can say that you’ve got one ratio whitch is
the height

they
may have had their own internal software. I know that before they had
DC

1

Pamela Pfiffner. Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story. Adobe Press, 2008

160

Illustrator they were making PostScript documents by hand like TeX, programming PostScript sourcecode. It might have been in a very low tech way.
Because those were the core fonts that have been used in PostScript.
So you had Fontographer and this is yeah I mean a GUI application for
home computers to make fonts with. Fontograph

best way to work. These
are things I think that people have been aware of, it’s just now we have
some actual concrete numbers where you can turn to and say, now this is
how people are using it. There is a wide range of tasks that people are
performing with the tool, but they are really short, bursty tasks.
Every time you start up ingimp, a screen comes up asking you to describe what
you are planning to do and I am interested in the kind of language users invent
to describe this, even when they som

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 amount of money for that input, which will never be higher
than reproduction cost, but based on owning together the final product. So
you contribute design

ctually
change the context and change the message. Because you are always selfconscious of how you’re going to pay your rent and how you’re going to pay
your bills. It’s impossible to separate yourself from this context and if the
funding is coming from these directions you’re always going to self-censor
and it’s going to affect what you talk about in your choices that you make.
191

What to present, what not to present, where to place the emphasis where
not to place the emphasis, it will

ore, while they continue to capture and
accumulate the extra value. Again, how that applies to design is another
thing, I don’t think you can isolate one kind of worker from the overall
thing. The point is you have to think of where is the value coming from,
what are you really selling? Because you’re not really selling design, design
is an input. What are you really ...
What do you mean with ‘design is an input’?

Design is an input. The average consumer doesn’t buy design. Nobody
goes to

ou how to do stuff ’ and
not ‘we need you to do what we want you to do’, which is the hiring-kind
of outreach.

And why do you think Free Software doesn’t usually reach out in this way? Why
does the F/LOSS community have such a hard time becoming more diverse?

The F/LOSS community has problems getting more people and being more
diverse. To me, those are the same problems. If we would hand out flyers
to people with a clear message saying for example: here is this nice vector
drawings program

eep it very stripped down. From the beginning we knew
that people that would participate as developers or anonymous contributors were not going to be the same people that would develop a Linux
core. They are students, people just getting into programming or visual
programming. We wanted people to be able to double-click a .gml file
and than everything should verbally make sense so it is Begin stroke.
End stroke. Anyone with basic programming skills should be able to
figure out what’s going on.
ER

Did you have any moment where you had to decide: this does not belong
to graffiti or: this might be more for calligraphy tracking?
FS

The only thing that has to be in there is the format in

have an opportunity to meet
with all these writers to ask them if it is OK. So I get e-mails from writers
once in a while saying Hey, you used a photograph of one of my tags and
usually it is them feeling out where my intentions are and where I am
coming from.
It has taken a long time to gain the trust of the community I am working with. Usually when I am able to explain what I am doing and that
everything is released openly and meant to be completely free, so far at
least the people I have managed to talk toare OK with it and understand
it. Initially when people see something they’ve made being used by other
people, a lot of times it can be a point where a red flag is raised and I am
assuming there are more red flags going to go up.
FS

If you upload a .gml file, can you insert a licence?

Not yet. Right now there is not even a ‘private mode’ on the
000000book site. If you upload, everything is public. There is a lot of
interesting is

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 a problem. Even at 30 points per
seconds you can start to see the facets if you zoom in

d

not interfere with the act of graffiti writing.

I’ve been through situations where the process gets so confusing that
you can’t keep your head straight and juggle all the variables. Your eyes
and ears are supposed to tell you about who’s coming around the corner.
Is there traffic coming or a train? There are so many other things you
need to pay attention to rather than: Is this button on?
The whole project is about getting good data. As soon as you force people
to think too much about the capture process, I think it influences when

xpect any respect on the other end
of that conversation. They respect their tools, so the reason I was using camera-input was because I wanted to have a flexible system where
they could bring in anything and I could attach a device to it. Now I am
coming back to mice finally.
Now the deadline has passed, do you think the passage from wishlist to
contest worked out?
FS

I think it was a good experiment, I am not sure how clever it was. To
take a piece of culture that a lot of people don’t even look

on 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
aspect than anything else.
ER

I am still puzzled about GML and how it is at the one hand stimulating
collaboration and sharing, and than it comes back to

nd
libraries, but when it is too much of a personal style, then it is hard to share.
FS

Yes, I thought that was an interesting point. I’ve been in similar conversations on listservs with artists in the OpenFrameworks, Processing
and visual programming communities. What are the open pieces? It
makes sense to share libraries, but if I make a print from a piece of code,
do I then have to share the exact source and app for how that exact print
was made? What does it mean when I am investing money in a

coherency, Hip Hop and Free Software
are both global insurgent subcultures that have emerged from being kind
of thrown away as fads and then become objects of pondering in multinational boardrooms. So I was hoping to open you up to riff on that:
zooming out, GML is a handshake point between these two cultures, but
GML is a specific thing within this larger world of F/LOSS and graffiti
JH

36

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

251

hacker culture.
In terms of that handshake moment between the two communities, I think
that is about realizing that its not about the code and in some sense its not
about the spraypaint. There’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 o

y 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 trappings, people have assigned liberatory powers
to these movements. Statistically the G

gposts because they really want to share their ideas or because
they want to show how much cooler they are?
JH

You’re totally right and I think people in this scene are always looking
for examples of people making money, succeeding, good things coming to
people for reasons that aren’t just selflessness. People that are into Open
Source usually love to be able to point to those things, that this isn’t some
purely altruistic thing.
ER

Maybe you could take some of the hustle and turn it into som

ons?
JH

FS

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

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

I think that part is a direct connection.

And they’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

already people doing way more stuff with it than I am.
ER

FS

How does it work when someone proposes a feature?

ER They just e-mail me (laughs). But right now there hasn’t been a ton
of that because it’s such a simple thing, once you start cramming too much
into it it starts feeling wrong. But all its gonna take is for someone to make
a new app that needs something else and then there will be a reason to
change it but I think the change will always be adding, not removing.

254

The foll

her 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 actuall

coordinator of the Design Department at FBAUP, in which I proposed to
start implementing Open Source tools as an alternative to the tools we were
missing. Blender for 3D animation, FontForge for type design, Processing
for interactive/graphic programming and others as a complement to proprietary packages: GIMP, Scribus and Inkscape to name the most important
ones. I ran into some technical problems that I hope will be sorted out
soon; one of the strategies is to run these software packages on a migra

t us. It’s a kind of responsible feedback.
Using Linux in a design environment is not an obvious choice. Most
designers are practically married to their Adobe Suite. How come it is
entering your school after all?

Very slowly! Linux is finally becoming valuable for Design/DTP area as
it has been for long on the Internet/Web and programming areas. But you
can’t expect GIMP to surpass Photoshop. At least not in the next few years.
And this is the reality. If we can, we must train our students to use the
best tools available. Ideally all tools available, so they won’t have problems
wh

Internet Explorer. This will happen with the
rest (at least that’s what I believe). It’s a matter of quality and doing the
correct broadcast to the general public. Linux started almost as a personal
project and now it’s a powerhouse in programming or web environments.
Maybe because these are areas that require constant software and hardware
attention it became an obvious and successful choice. People just modified it
as they needed it done. Couldn’t this be done as effectively (or better) wi

implementation
of information technologies in their school system and developed their own
Linux Distro called Linex – it aggregates the software bundle they need,
and best of all has been developed and constantly tweaked by them. Now
Linux is becoming more accessible for users without technical training, and
is in a WYSIWYG state of development, I really believe we should start
using it seriously so we can try and test it and learn how we can use in in
our everyday life (for me this process has al

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 approac

e decided to
make the whole process into some kind of design/life experiment and that
is one way to keep figuring out how to convert a file, or yet another discussion with a printer about which ‘standard’ to use, interesting for ourselves.
Performing our practice is as much part of the project as the actual books,
posters, flyers etc. we produce.
One way a shift of tools can open up new ways of doing graphic design, is
because it makes you immediately aware of the ‘resistance’ of digital mate

initially designed to edit vector
files in SVG format. It stayed close to its initial starting point and is in a way
a much more straightforward project than Scribus. Main developer Bryce
Harrington describes Inkscape as a relatively unstructured coming and going
of high energy collective work much work is done through a larger group of
people submitting small patches and it’s developers community is not very
tightly knit. Centered around a legible XML format primarily designed
for the web, Inksca

a visible part of a new user community for F/LOSS?

I can’t say we feel completely at home in the F/LOSS world, but we have not
encountered any extraordinary forms of friction yet. We have been allowed
the space to try our own strategies at overcoming the user-developer divide:
people granted interviews, accepted us when we invited ourselves to speak
at conferences and listened to our stories. But it still feels a bit awkward,
and I sometimes wonder whether we ever will be able to do enough. Does

l-based and vectors
suddenly have a sensational flow and weight. From Pierre Bézier writing his
specification as an engineer for the Renault car factory to Levien’s Spiro,
digital drawing has changed radically.

You have a major signage project coming up, how does this commission map across
to the ethics and technologies of F/LOSS?

We are right in the middle of it. At this moment ‘The Pavilion of Provisionary
Happiness’ celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Belgian World Exhibition,
is bein

on purpose. But by opening our
sources, we can use the platform we are given in a more productive way; it
makes us less dependent because the work will have another life long after
the deadline has passed.
On this project, and in relation to the seeming omnipresence in F/LOSS of the
idea that this technology is ‘universal’, how do you see that in relation to fonts,
and their longer history of standards?
303

That is indeed a long story, but I’ll give it a try. First of all, I think the idea
o

overies of unsuspected Python/ConText
features during this development?

I can’t recall having this kind of pleasure. The revelation, at least from
my point of view, happened in the very rich articulation of a graphical intention enacted in programming objects. It remains a kind of uncharted territory,
exploring it is always an exciting adventure.
313

Three fonts are used in the book: Karla, Crimson and Consola Mono.
Three pretty recent fonts, born in the webfonts contexts I believe. What
conside

o continually work on ‘Co-position”’, a project for building
a post-gutenberg typographical tool.
5
6
7

http://www.balsamine.be/
http://lgru.net/
the international Libre Graphics Meeting: http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2013/

314

Performing Libre Graphics

In April 2014 I traveled from Leipzig to the north of
Germany to meet with artist Cornelia Sollfrank. It was
right after the Libre Graphics Meeting, and the impressions from the event were still very fresh. Cornelia had
asked me for a

lt from it. It is all these elements that come
together, I would call Libre Graphics. The term ‘libre’ is chosen deliberately.
1
2
3

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

319

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
ins

Free Software culture, and I use the term ‘culture’ because I am interested
in, let’s say, the cultural aspect of it, and this includes software. For me
software is a cultural object. But I think it is important to emphasize this,
320

Performing Libre Graphics

because it easily turns into a technocentric approach, which I think is important to stay away from. Free Software culture is the thinking that, when
you develop technology, and I am using technology in the sense that it is
cultural a

nces they promote,
between commercial and non-commercial 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,
321

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

lements
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
322

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
wit

ts
sort of perspective; things that were possible or not, get used to the kind of
humor that is quite terrible in these manuals; accept that certain things that
we thought would be easy, were actually not easy at all; and then understand
323

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 i

as the description of the process, the motivation
of why we did it, the letter we sent to Monotype, the response we got, ...
The whole packaging of the font becomes then a way of speaking about all
these layers that are in our practice.

324

Performing Libre Graphics

Libre fonts

A very exciting part of Libre Graphics is the Libre Font movement, which
is strong and has been strong for a long time. Fonts are the basic building
blocks of how graphics come to life. When you type something, it is ther

siest way to deal with
that problem: allow people to download these fonts, but in a way that keeps
authorship clear, that keeps genealogy clear, and also propagates then the
possibility of making new fonts based on someone else’s work.
325

Performing Libre Graphics

Free artifacts / open standards

It took me a while to figure this out. For me it was obvious that if you would
use Free Software, you would produce free artifacts. It seems obvious, but it
is not at all the case. There is full-fledge

ed it,
is available, and in that way you can understand how it was made, but also
there is independent documentation available that whenever a project, like
a software, doesn’t work anymore, or is too old to be run, or you don’t have
326

Performing Libre Graphics

it available, you have other ways of understanding the document and being
able to open it and reuse and remake it. What is important, is that around
these open formats, you see a whole ecosystem exists of tools to inspect, to
create,

gh teaching learning, has become really a good methodology,
it seems.
If I say ‘we’, that’s always a bit uncomfortable, because I like to be clear about
who that is, but when I’m speaking here, there is many ‘wes’ in my mind.
327

Performing Libre Graphics

There is a group of designers called OSP. They have started in 2006 with
the simple decision to not use any proprietary software anymore for their
work. And from that this whole set of questions and practices and methods developed. Ri

e. So they
might not belong. There is also a very brutal culture of harassment, of
racist and sexist language, of using imagery that is let’s say unacceptable,
and that needs to be dealt with. Over the last two years I think, documents
328

Performing Libre Graphics

like Codes of conduct have started to come up from feminists that are active
in this world, like Geek feminism or the Ada initiative, as a way to deal
with this. And what it does, is it describes ... it is slightly pompous, in the
sen

ch too fragile. They can be taken
over, but there is no promise of ... convenience? 7 And it’s also important
for myself, because the setups are really tailored to a specific use case and
4
5
6
7

using sed, stream editor for filtering and transforming text
using inkscape on the commandline
using pdftk
... distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without
even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. Free Software Foundation. GNU G

341

But I think that’s ok. In this case you wouldn’t to have a keyword reference
to the .pdf, while it’s still in the table of contents ...
What if someone would want to use one of these interviews for something else?
How could this book becoming source for an another publication?
That’s also an advantage of the quite simple source format on the Etherpad.
It can be easily converted to e.g. simple markdown, just by a little script.
I found this quite important – because at this point we’

as to keep the ‘life’ of a conversation in
the text with some things, like indentation or with graphic 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

arn 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 ve

16, 17, 159, 160
Adobe Photoshop, 279, 280
Adobe Systems, 8, 24, 101, 142, 156,
157, 159–162, 279, 291,
297, 302
Algorithm, 227, 236
Amado, Pedro, 275
Anthropology, 41, 202, 232
AOL Inc., 25
Apple Inc., 8, 23, 24, 142, 159–162
Application Programming Interface, 118,
276
Arana Catania, Miguel, 88
Arduino, 83, 226
Artist, 7–9, 17, 73, 99–101, 146, 190,
191, 213–215, 223, 224,
240, 247, 319, 323, 329

Bézier, Pierre, 303
Baker, Peter S., 351
Barragán, Carlos, 88
Beauty, 14, 23, 32, 47, 55, 5

Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.