We are.｡ ⋆ ｡ ﾟ ☁︎ ﾟ ｡ ⋆ in the sky, ｡ ⋆ ｡ ☁︎ there’s different types of clouds: cirrus, altus, stratus and cumulus.
The clouds live in communion with each other. There are regular ebs and flows of different cloud types passing by. The clouds are filled with important informations, storing and exchanging within and with each other, giving and taking, migrating and changing states through the different layers of the sky. Sometimes clouds rub up against each other. The frictions can generate friendly energies, exchanges of information and knowledge. Sometimes the energy can build up, and become too much to contain. Then comes the urgent cloudy need of sharing beyond the boundaries of the sky in the form of precipitation.
The clouds are home to various beings, of different shapes and sizes: the cloudwellers. The cloudwellers do not only inhabit the clouds. but are inhabited by them. Cloudwellers engage in life-sustaining symbiosis with the clouds. The clouds are composed of cloudwellers. The cloudwellers are very invested in sharing skills and knowledge, each with their own curiosity and excitement to give and receive new informations to disseminate to any like-minded beings. The air feels heavy. Something is on the horizon. A dense flow of information and energies is accumulating. A change is to be expected……….
Hot swap is a technique for recovering data from a damaged hard drive. It borrows the healthy body of another drive from the same production family in order to bypass the encryption process and make the data accessible again. It is also a very good example for explaining the HDD encryption mechanism, as it technically combines both physical and digital instructions to make it work. This workshop is based on fieldwork conducted in southern China. It maps the global electronics ecosystem from the perspective of practitioners in manufacturing regions and explores an embodied way of reimagining data storage. It begins with a lecture presentation introducing the research and basic free recovery tools, enabling participants to learn basic ways to work on their own devices. In the second part, drawing on the mechanism of hot swap, participants will be invited to design their own encryption language, exploring how this mechanism transforms memory into something that can be read in ways beyond translation. Note: This workshop does not involve repairing hard drives or recovering data. Instead, it is intended as a way to understand the mechanisms of data storage and encryption through the logic of hot swap.
data_mill explores novel ways of archiving personal data through digital weaving. Participants were invited to explore and reflect on their text messages and the relationships hidden within the data. Through a custom built tool we created a series of personal data tapestries that can act as an active living archive, reclaiming ownership of an ephemeral material.
In this workshop, we slowly explored a shared terminal [1] by connecting to a shared server via SSH [2] as a way of maintaining a server collectively. We used tmux [3], a tool that allows several people to merge into one user, navigating the command line collectively. Where people with different technical skills meet on a server, this setup requires slowness, patience and mutual understanding accross. As we experimented together, our actions were automatically transformed into a live web publication that was printed out as small (or very long zines)
[1] a text-based interface that allows to interact with a
computer
[2| a protocol to log in and control a computer over a
network
[3] a terminal multiplexer that lets you create multiple
terminal sessions, detach from them, and reconnect later, and share
sessions with other people over a network
https://codeberg.org/czkaa/tmux- 2web2print
I have a paid Claude Code at work and it’s my main interface when I build code now. My day consists now of pasting requirements as prompts, waiting for Claude to stop “auto-fabullating” and steer it a bit. I barely review the code and so do my colleagues.
i never ever actively used AI, to my knowledge
I always try to skip past the AI overview when I search something
online but sometimes I read that instead of the search results
because I am too lazy to scroll down (you can hide these AI results with
uBlock Origin:
https://github.com/laylavish/
uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist)
The only time I have ever consciously used generative AI was a ChatGPT clone at a museum a few years ago. Of course, there are plenty of ways we are all exposed to AI systems crawling through our public and private lives. And I think that’s a huge problem.
I have once been told by a colleague that an email I sent was very well written. Little did they know I spent two hours writing it with Claude.
I built an art project about AI for a client, that was defiantly AI propaganda.
Not a use but I have to admit I enjoyed the ai generated slop of Messi as as famous Irish paramilitary and revolutionary figures after Argentina beat England in the world cup.
Ortoportait is an outdoor drawing workshop held in the Heesterveld Community Garden that moves from observation to making, in a process of slow, embodied attention. Participants engage in extended contemplation of a chosen plant, guided by written instructions and questions. The host offers both scientific (ecology, morphology, phenology, physiology) and imaginative / speculative guidance. Participants shift between these two modes as they draw, at their own pace, for the length of the session. The resulting portraits of their plants will draw a collective map of the garden.
In this hands-on session, participants built a compact 3V mini vibration tool designed for DIY tech pleasure making. They assembled a mini vibrating disk motor powered by a 2×AA battery holder with switch, using simple wiring (red/black hookup wires) and basic insulation (ideally shrink tubing). The activity focused on a quick, prototype-friendly workflow; connecting electronics, and secure the components into a small build. Together, we casted & molded objects with the vibrating motor. The results were very simple and fun DIY vibrator (for the whole body), and there are many ways to build it, but this is the one we’ll use : )
Punchcards can be read by knitting machines, and in this way published. We made our own punch cards with the basic materials of paper and holemakers and bound the knitted punchcards into a little booklet—a collective published soft textile book.
Originating in northern China, Mongolia and Siberia, the brown rat has now spread to every continent except Antarctica (reaching as far as South Georgia Island near the Antarctic). They have become the most widespread rodent across most of Europe and North America, firmly established in worldwide ecosystems.
A “rat king” is a rare phenomenon in which a group of rats becomes physically tangled together by their tails, which has been recorded in many parts of the world. I understand it as a kind of glitch in everyday reality, an entanglement that appears when enough encounters and conditions allow it to emerge. Through this game, we will collectively speculate on the movements of brown rat families and explore how their migration paths intersect with climate change, colonial navigation, human expansion, global trade, and ongoing efforts to eradicate them. What other forms of glitches might emerge within this continual flow of reality?
written after going to see the Godsworth installation on Franzi’s recommendation, edited in the midst of camp ending.
Can’t you stop for a moment? See the light, and how it hits that window? Don’t you want to give it a name - ‘Fragmentation’, maybe, or ‘Ebbing of the Day’?
Our tools are set aside (yet soon to be picked up - the work is never done, it only falters, only breathes, only stops and stops and stops but never ends).
The people here were good and they are dead. The people here are dead and they were good. Still, the sun goes down and sand piles up.
and it is made of us - dead skin cells, breath, all the messy proofs that we were here and we were loved. The old and the new and the not-yet-born collide, say “whoops”, say “sorry”, say “how lucky we are to exist.”
In this format, we collectively and simultaneously wrote multiple letters and weaved together different relationships and narratives.
Do you remember that recipe reel you once stumbled across on Instagram during a late-night scroll, saved, and never looked at again? That moment—driven by a dopamine rush—is exactly where this workshop began. Through globalization and the viral spread of internet junk, recipes and the affective memories bonded to food culture have largely dissolved into a glamorized, homogenized imagery of gastronomy—one that rarely meets nutritional reality, respects cultural roots, or carries genuine meaning, but instead functions perfectly as short-term entertainment. Food culture today is consumed mostly through content, and it’s hard to trace the paths of influence while immersed in a soup of likes and algorithms. DOOM FOOD was a food design workshop that invited participants to look back at this video culture and collectively explore that gap between virtual fantasy and material reality, rewriting, reframing or retracing a selection of recipes drawn from these contents—whether it’s stuffed tulips, Gatorade chicken, or plum tree ice cream.
The Cloud—The concrete buildings, the servers, the metal cabinets, the isolating plastic, the computing units, the wires, the connectors, the zeroes and the ones, the signals, the waves,… How to represent all of that, what do we wish for seeing and thinking about these realities? How to think of storage, shared data and networks together, softly, ethically as something of the commons? *** # Towards a Culture of Gift Computing
The following principles (and associated text) were taken from Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book ‘The Gift’. We read through them together; they are the foundation on which our discussion rests.
Exercise to engage with inner control mechanisms of time or our own version of time. Hence cooking an egg without a mechanical timer. Measured time doesn’t always feel fit. When life glichtes into us, time sometimes bends. At first, this can feel confusing or destablizing. But what if, we let go of controlling time or letting time control us?
Decide on how you want your egg to be cooked, write it down. Let water boil and add an egg per person to the pot. Close your eyes, or blindfold yourself. Feel time. When you decide that it is time to take out your egg for the wished for state of the egg, you open your eyes and take it out. You do not check the timer before taking the egg out. Only check a timer after, if you are curious. Once everyone’s egg is cooked, open them and make egg salad from them.
cooked eggs chives dill mayo mustard salt pepper lemon juice Smash everything together and mix. Questions for reflection, if wanted: • Did you try to measure time? What was your technique to measure? • How did your engagement with time change over time? • Did your mind travel? Where to?
Listen back to the Cloud Grrrround Radio Live Broadcast!
https://hackersanddesigners.nl/
cloud-grrrround-radio-live-broadcast.html
Image on the right: A crochet recording of the July 22 radio show
In this collective session we fantasized together about alternative communication infrastructures. What would a world with anarcho-collective networks such as Reticulum look like? How would we interact differently with such a network? Reticulum is a somewhat new mesh networking-stack that allows you to build large networks with accesible off-the-shelf technology. This allows users to use and create a network that empowers the autonomy and sovereignty of communities and individuals, not subjected to outside control or censorship. In the process of creating this new network, we can most likely all agree that Reticulum shouldn’t become an internet 2.0. So, what different shape could this new network create? We have all the cards, we just have to play them… In this workshop we delved into what Reticulum is, set up a basic instance on our computer, discovered in what shapes it is already being used by exploring NomadNet pages together, and lastly fantasized about an alternative world where Reticulum is our main communication infrastructure, all ideas crazy and practical welcome.
We live in an era of digital hyper-individualism, which is gradually eroding the foundations of community life. In the Western world, the liberal state and capitalism have promised wellness and happiness through services and consumption, resulting in a profound void: an endless quest for self-optimisation at the expense of deep-rooted collective ties. This workshop addresses the urgent need to counter this trend by exploring alternative ways of forming emotional connections within the hyper-surveilled layers of digital labour, such as delivery algorithms, data centres, micro-tasking platforms and cloud maintenance. Working in small groups, participants were given a narrative prompt to immerse them in a scenario of invisible labour within the digital infrastructure. In this scenario, a “human package” – be it a friendship, a love affair or collective solidarity – must navigate the cold, unyielding gaze of an algorithmic surveillance apparatus. Collectively, we devised a brief message of care, tenderness or subversion and a “speculative hack” to safely route that message, exploiting the affordances and limitations of the system (e.g. encryption, symbols, system logs, sensor telemetry, gestures or data flows).
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