Constant

Transmarcations guided tour

Peter Westenberg — 2017-11-13T18:01:11Z

During the worksession Transmarcations a group of artists and art related practitioners experiment with concepts, softwares, cartographies and representations. Much of this work is done behind closed doors. The reason for this is that it allows for new ideas and collaborations to grow in concentration.

This tour guides you along some of the work in progress. Constant members An Mertens and Peter Westenberg will present a choice of sketches, try outs and prototypes to curious visitors.

The installation Tanuki XY by artist François Zajéga will also be accessible. In this work, avatars of different kinds grow up in public. They are nourished and shaped with the help of all participating artists. By interacting with them, visitors can help transform the code of these emerging creatures.

If you want to meet Tanuki XY at other moments during the week, please send a mail to peterATconstantvzw.org

View online : http://beursschouwburg.be/en/event/...

Transmarcations talks

Peter Westenberg — 2017-11-13T17:16:54Z

This evening is organised in the framework of the Constant worksession Transmarcations that takes place simultaneously in De Beursschouwburg. Speakers A. Alexander Antonopoulos and Nishat Awan approach politics of locations and bodies, representations of biological, biographical and geographic migrational transitions. How to re-imagine lines of separations as contact zones that allow for solidarity and evolution ?

During the event, the interactive installation Tanuki XY by artist François Zajéga can be visited in the Grand Hall of the Beursschouwburg.

Nishat Awan: Topological Atlas

The politicised nature of the discourse around migration means that visual representations are often used in deliberate ways to promote certain agendas. We also live in a time of visual overload, surrounded by large numbers of images available on the net, social media etc., including computationally derived visualisations of large scale data that are being used more frequently across academia and journalism. I will speak around a new project, Topological Atlas, that explores these issues and attempts to visualise border regimes from the point-of-view of those who attempt to cross national territories. This is, of course, an ethical choice and one requiring a participative approach that attends to the politics of location. Topological Atlas takes seriously the problem of the ubiquity of the image and the disjointedness of information to produce visual narratives and counter geographies of/ at borders.

A. Alexander Antonopoulos: Trans-marcations in the Age of Trans : A personal history of the bodies, borders, practices, and passports of transition.

In my presentation of a personal journey through multiple sites of passage that intersect with an alchemically generated gender identity and transition, I will draw on new directions emerging from trans studies, queer studies, and new materialism, in order to turn attention toward the geopolitical, biopolitical, archival and historical significance of the legacy of the passport. Ranging from changes in bodily biological processes and affects to the geopolitics of movement across national border, tools will be explored for archiving personal histories and transsexual autobiography in this era of transgender-based identity and politics.

View online : http://beursschouwburg.be/en/event/...

Open Call

An — 2017-07-27T12:14:34Z

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 Kosnik, Phillipe Rivière, Seda Gürses, Paulo Alvez, Francois Zajéga, Michael Murtaugh, Pierre hughebaert, Peggy Pierrot, Pascale Barret, Alexander Antonopoulos, Nishat Awan, Simone Niquille, Joanna Moll, Florence Aigner, Co-ordination: Peter Westenberg, An Mertens, Donatella Portoghese.

Transmarcations experiments with ways to chart heres, wheres and others. This worksession situates itself at the crossing of technolgies with geographies, life's courses, bodies, terrains and deplacements.

Transmarcations is interested in the complexity that emerges when cartography meets bodies in transition. By bodies in transition we mean migrating bodies as well as bodies that engage in an internal process of change, like gender transitions. By taking a closer look at the situation of these bodies, Transmarcations questions the (ir)relevance of standards and the intrinsic presence of cultural codes. What tools do we use? What language, which parameters, conventions?

Open Call
We invite you to apply for this worksession. Potential participants come from various disciplines to create prototypes, visualisations and models of speculative body-terrain combinations. Bio-mappers, artists, gender- and migration-activisten, science-hackers, cartographers, data-miners, self-quantifiers ... are welcome to experiment together with softwares, languages, bodies, navigation and other technologies to develop methods and practices around cartography, diagramming, mapping and technological graphical representations that create place for the extra-categorical, the complexities of contact zones in which people, terrains and other agents are related.
Thirty people will take part in the worksession. Constant already invited some guests to prepare three different cases that will be presented during the worksession. We're looking for 18 extra participants.

Werksession?
Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised twice a year by Constant. We aim to provide conditions for participants with different experiences and capabilities to temporarily link their practice and to develop ideas, prototypes and research projects together. We primarily use Free, Libre and Open Source software and material that is available under Open Licenses.

Practical:
Transmarcations takes place in Brussels from Sunday 3 till Saturday 9 December 2017. Participation is free and Constant provides travel costs, lunch and hosting for all participants. If you're interested to participate, please send an email to peter@constantvzw.org with your motivation before 14 September. We will answer by 20 September latest.

You find more information here: http://www.constantvzw.org/site/-Transmarcations-.html

Transmarcations

Peter Westenberg — 2017-06-01T10:29:56Z

Transmarcations was a worksession situated at the crossing of technologies with geographies, life's courses, bodies, terrains and de-placements. I took place from 4 to 9 December 2017 in Beursschouwburg, a multidisciplinary arts centre, situated in the heart of Brussels.

Transmarcations experimented with ways to chart heres, wheres and others. This worksession situated itself at the crossing of technologies with geographies, life's courses, bodies, terrains and de-placements. It invited participants from various disciplines to create prototypes, visualisations and models of speculative body-terrain combinations. Bio-mappers, artists, gender- and migration-activisten, science-hackers, cartographers, data-miners, self-quantifiers ... were welcome to experiment together with softwares, languages, bodies, navigation and other technologies. Transmarcations developed methods and practices around cartography, diagramming, mapping and technological graphical representations that create place for the extra-categorical, the complexities of contact zones in which people, terrains and other agents are related.

Transmarcations was interested in the complexity that emerges when cartography meets bodies in transition. By bodies in transition we mean migrating bodies as well as bodies that engage in an internal process of change, like gender transitions. By taking a closer look at the situation of these bodies, Transmarcations questioned the (ir)relevance of standards and the intrinsic presence of cultural codes. What tools do we use? What language, which parameters, conventions?

The actual social political context in which the worksession took place, reminded us that mappings and data-visualisations play an important role in the monitoring of people and motions. Data analyses mark exceptions as suspect. Medical, migration and other standard forms tend to make nuanced representation impossible. People seeking asylum seem to best comply with stereotypical profiles in order to be considered as refugees. Also the complete surveillance of data traffic by (inter)national security services, coupled to the extreme extend to which internet giants profile their customers, leaves little space for diagonal affinities that can widen identification beyond demarcated camps of 'us' and 'them' .

Experimentations that put speculation, insecurity and border crossing in the centre are urgent to generate situated, non-normative imaginations of possible alliances between bodies, trajectories and contexts. Beyond statistics and analyses, diagrams, models, charts are also means to set out new orientations, to project hybrid, fantastic, utopic desires unto a physical reality.

Inspired by situated feminist geographies we questioned who is looking. Who maps, and from which perspective? We tried to mark a techno-graphical X on a map that is in continuous change. That X does not represent a destination, it stands for a logic that addresses unequal power relations between people, that propagates spaces for freedom with a richer geometry than that of the axis, the production line, the uni directional feed. We situated bodies in space and time, disturbed and re-arranged, strolled off the beaten paths and developed a relational practice of disorientations, looking besides the point, out of focus, for unexpected connections between species, surroundings, objects.

The worksession took place from 4 to 9 December in de Beursschouwburg in the centre of Brussels.

On the program among others:
* Concentrated collective workdays, workshops, moments of exchange (in presence of a.o. Pierre Huyghebaert, Pascale Barret, A. Alexander Antonopoulos)
* Excursions to relevant places in Brussels (like f.ex. The National Geographical Institute)
* An interactive installation that grew through participation, by François Zajegá in the Grand Hall
* A public evening with lectures in the Beurscafé

In collaboration with Molenbeek Formation and De Beursschouwburg
image: Attack of the panoramic jellyfish, Tom Lechner, cc-sa