November 2016 - October 2017

  • October
  • On the 5th of October the design collective LibreObjet publishes plans for a new piece of display furniture called Peggy for Fablab/Maker-Hacker-spaces. Take up the fabbing gauntlet and make your own version!
    What is done in a fablab often stays invisible for fellow users, the infrastructure (...)

  • November
  • Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.
    On Thursday 3rd November we will start from Uncertainty Detected, a supervised machine learning script (using Python and Scikit Learn) that predicts uncertain sentences in scientific papers. By looking at (...)

  • A presentation / discussion at feminist art center La Centrale in Montreal (CA) of two projects around hybrid languages that Constant has organised over the past years in Brussels. Peter Westenberg will be presenting practices, policies, desires, complexities, and potential of the Brussels (...)

  • In this workshop organized by Luiza Crosman, a group of participants will visit the office of Constant, association for art and media. An Mertens and Femke Snelting will present the organisation, the space and some of its tools. Afterwards, the group will be free to investigate the space, (...)

  • New landscapes are in the making by how we interact with our telephones and computers. Two hundred years after Mary Shelley wrote her novel Frankenstein, an Algolit Extended group reinterpreted part of the novel using contemporary artificial intelligence, ’On Journey with Hovelbot’ in the (...)

  • During one week Constant will show her books in the framework of the exhibition ’TYPE.CODE’ in La Maison du Livre in Saint-GIlles. These books are published by Constant, made with 100% Free and Open Source and published under open content licenses. This is why they deserve the hallmark ’Book (...)

  • There are several fablabs/makerspaces/hackerspaces active in Brussels. Every lab is different with regards to its infrastructure, machines, resources and availability of materials. Some of these labs have made their own version of Peggy, a piece of display furniture. All Peggy’s are based on (...)

  • Contribution to Reading Rooms, a series of evenings dedicated to the act of collective reading organised by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
    This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format (...)

  • Algolit organises a first dive in neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Amongst others, we’ll build a neural-net dedicated computer / XMPP bots.
    Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.

  • As a contribution to the a.pass event The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting and Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver propose a day long session, aimed at aligning the a.pass computing infrastructure with the ambitions and aspirations summoned by the commons.
    Tech giants (...)

  • December
  • Constant started its worksession DiVersions with an afternoon in the Royal Museum for Art and History. Inspired by the way versions are embedded in the daily practice of software-development, we explored tools and infrastructures that invite different and divergent histories
    The program (...)

  • The collective Libre Objet will present variations of Peggy, exhibition furniture for Fablabs and Maker-Hacker-spaces.
    During the month of October, a series of labs in Belgium was asked to produce their own version of Peggy. Each working with different equipment and materials, Peggy (...)

  • On October 5th, the design collective LibreObjet published plans for a new piece of display furniture called Peggy for Fablab/Maker-Hacker-spaces. Often the lab/space is used for its infrastructure, but the objects and projects themselves stay transitory or invisible for other users. The Peggy (...)

  • In the light of the versions of the display furniture (for fablabs/hackerspaces) called Peggy, we will have a talk about ’Objects in Common’, Free/Libre/Open Design (with LibreObjet and Entropie). Also on the agenda: the deconstruction of Wally, an open source knitting machine.
    Opening at (...)

  • Algolit organises a second dive in neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Amongst others, we will put a neural-net dedicated computer to work!
    Algolit is a project of Constant, a workgroup around i-literature, free code and text.

  • January 2017
  • From October 2015 until December 2016 a worksession, an exhibition and lots more ran under the header of Objects in Common. The fablab and maker culture, conversion of digital objects to the physical realm, and the issues that come along (from geopolitical to licensing to infrastructure) were (...)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. Participants choose how to get into the topic, through reading, tutorials, code experiments, alone or in company... Impressions and experiences are shared throughout the day. (...)

  • For the first Constant_V of 2017, Pascale Barret installs a selection of artworks in the window of Constant: a catalogue and a rice wine experimentation developed during her last residency at TEMI in South Korea.
    Spending this residency between wild and urban life, mountains with shamans, (...)

  • Data-driven systems do not arrive from nowhere, into the world like magic. Like all technologies their development and deployment follows particular historical trajectories and continuities which are influenced by larger forces. In contrast, most of the research on ’social impact’ has drawn (...)

  • As a contribution to a symposium on design research organised by the department of design at the Hamburg University, Femke introduces the Technogalactic Software Observatory (TSO), a temporary study center, poetic training camp and walk-in clinic that Constant will open in the World Trade (...)

  • February
  • In the framework of Transmediale, Michael Murtaugh, Sarah Garcin and An Mertens presented how publishing activities – collective writing, editing and lay-out – lead to a pdf or a printed brochure as a reminder that digital creation can also exist without the cloud.
    In recent years Constant (...)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We will follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html ). Please (...)

  • As a preparation for and critical evaluation of a proposal by the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) for an Internet of Things Inspector, participants from Constant, Dyne:BXL, COSIC Leuven and others gather in WTC25 to test out the testbed with their (...)

  • March
  • "This is a book of translations - because translation permits dissemination - of certain selected texts which seem ti us to pose important questions, and which enable us to conceptualise our actions and our position in the future, in technology, in society, and in the network. Questions such (...)

  • DiVersions took place from 4 to 11 December 2016 and was inspired by the way versions are inscribed in daily software-practice. With 35 participants we explored how we could produce divergent histories through supporting difference. At http://diversions.constantvzw.org you can find links to (...)

  • Algolit continues to explore neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We will follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabu...). Please make (...)

  • ESPACE AUTOUR is an invitation for you to map out your personal perception of space. Those tangible spaces show the relationship to what is around you. The classic codes of communication are thrown overboard and make way for a nonverbal, physical encounter.
    Katrien shares her practice with (...)

  • April
  • From 7 until 12 June, the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory will explore practices of proximate critique with and of software. This worksession has been called an ’Observatory’ because we are interested in different ways to look at software, and at the implications of how it is currently (...)

  • Peter Westenberg and An Mertens are invited to Aalborg University, to give a workshop and a masterclass for a group of students of the Erasmus JMD program in Media Arts Cultures. This program is organised in collaboration with Universities of Danube, Lodz, Hong Kong.
    Their presentations and (...)

  • From 20 until 23 April, the twelfth edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
    Our colleagues from Open Source design caravan OSP will contribute to the meeting with amongst others Metabrasil, a two day workshop proposing to draw a parametric font using (...)

  • Algolit explores neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). Please make sure you watch (...)

  • May
  • Every year Constant commissions another designer or design collective using Free, Libre and Open Source tools, to work on the two-monthly flyers for Constant_V.
    In 2016, we invited Antoine Gelgon. He decided to use the flyers to develop and experiment with the typeface Ocr-PBI that he (...)

  • Possible Bodies interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modeling.
    From 6 until 14 May, Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha gather a transdisciplinary group of (...)

  • In the maker movement, information and sharing - primary library territory - are under scrutiny. During this session, (part of the CultuurConnect "Inspiratiedag: Focus op Makerspaces") you will get an introduction on the basic ideas and concepts behind creative commons, licenses, repositories (...)

  • Algolit explores neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). Please make sure you watch (...)

  • The Festival Mondial des Cinémas Sauvages (World Festival of Wild Cinema) is an open space and an open event traversed by contradictory currents. It aims to bring together films and practices that defy notions of property, authorship or copyright. Sometimes consciously through free licence; (...)

  • Every year on January 1, copyright expires on thousands of works that subsequently enter the public domain. In Belgium, copyright protection lasts 70 years after the death of the author and so in 2017, the works of authors who died in 1946 will be liberated. This year we welcome the creations (...)

  • Let’s Build a Library Together invites designers, artists, theoreticians, hackers, librarians and activists to join forces during an intense week of discussion, collective prototyping and exchange on the future of Public Libraries in the digital age.
    Femke Snelting contributes to the (...)

  • June
  • In 1945 the fifteen year old girl Anne Frank died in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Her diary would have entered the public domain on 1 January 2016, but the arrival of this event caused a lot of commotion. The Anne Frank Foundation, an organisation that was set up by Anne’s father, (...)

  • In a world where digital practices are omnipresent, everything is measurable, including the number of steps we make, the amount of water we drink daily or even one’s level of happiness. Self-quantification inhabits everyday practices. It becomes a game in which our body is envisioned as a set (...)

  • Do you suffer from the disappearance of your software into the cloud, feel oppressed by unequal user privilege, or experience the torment of software-ransom of any sort? Bring your devices and interfaces to the World Trade Center! With the help of a clear and in-depth session, at the (...)

  • How to defend the access to knowledge in the current intellectual property regime? Interfacing the law is an attempt to experiment with and to openly discuss shadow libraries, piratical text collections and other forms of disobedient sharing. Interfacing each in their own way with legal and (...)

  • Masterclass with Adva Zakai (Thursday) and presentation (Saturday) on the BioVision Hierarchy file format.
    BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains (...)

  • Algolit explores neural networks to see how their process can be made legible, visible, understandable. We follow up on the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing course from Stanford University, by Richard Socher (https://cs224d.stanford.edu/syllabus.html). Please make sure you watch (...)

  • Masterclass with Adva Zakai (Thursday) and presentation (Saturday) on the BioVision Hierarchy file format.
    BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains (...)

  • July
  • In the frame of the installation QUANTIFY WHOLEHEARTEDLY in the window of Constant, Natacha Roussel and the Samedies organise a feminist workshop of design of environments of personal quantification tools.
    This workshop proposes a reflection on the measurement of bodies. This pervasive (...)

  • An Mertens and Sarah Garcin will take part in .ORG, a 5 days / 5 nights residency of a collective work time that has been proposed to 50 persons, with discussions, creations, writing, hybridations, making , destroying"¦ 1 open space of potentialities, 1 space-time, 1 isolated mountain place. (...)

  • This summer, the Possible Bodies inventory travels to Hangar (Barcelona) to mutate with local affinity networks and communities of concern. During a two-week residency, the collective research will focus on biomedical 3D imaging and how it models, scans and renders "real bodies". Possible (...)

  • THIS CALL IS CLOSED The participants to the Transmarcations session are: Arkadi Zaides, Jonathan Chaim Reus, Mia Melvaer, Jerome Giller, Elvira Korman, Rajwa Tohme, Femke Snelting, Pacôme Beru /Pierre Marchand, Gabi Sobliye, Pierre Tandille, Samuel Rivers-Moore, Anne Goldenberg, Benjamin de (...)

  • August
  • During the Summer Books with an Attitude, a series of Constant’s books, will be on display. You can also find an overview on the website: http://www.books.constantvzw.org/
    Books with an Attitude are published by Constant, made with 100% Free and Open Source Software and published under open (...)

  • This summer Relearn is travelling to Rotterdam. After the organisers collected track proposals in the previous weeks, they are now looking for participants to make this week of relearning happen (29/08 - 02/09).
    Relearn is a collective learning experiment with as many teachers as it has (...)

  • September
  • Gijs de Heij, Manetta Berends and An Mertens will propose a workshop on the notion of public domain when it comes to machine learning practises, in the framework of ’Summerschool #2 Making Public Domain’ in Middelheim Museum in Antwerp.
    Read more about the program on (...)

  • This seminar was the first activity of the European project Iterations (2017 - 2020). It was organised and hosted by Hangar in Barcelona.
    The objective of the seminar was to create a framework of common ethics for the project Iterations. For doing so we worked together with practitioners (...)