Tag: flossie

I’m reduced to taking notes with my phone, as my laptop battery life is not great.
i didn’t catch the name of the speaker, but she has a very impressive cv…
gender art started in ancient greece w sappho. She referenced her body and emotion. Women artists get recognised more in ethnography than art history.
Now a slide of Ada Lovelace’s program. Lovelace was the beginning of software. Sylvia Plath also represents a lack of support of women creatives. …..
Conceptual art and performance art of the 70s allowed a feminist critique. Women’s identity is opposed to a masculine tradition. New technologies allows new images and new thoughts. Ideals of masculinity and feminity are dominant in online communities. Most editors of wikipedia are men.
She is now talking aboout the anarchistic and artistic value of floss, talking about the ideology of collaborative working.
Now she is talking about the Art+FOSS book, which is really good. Fcforum.net is a useful resource for artists, tech and activism. Artists were prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws and fcforum helped them.
Free Culture has festivals like piksel in norway. They support a lot of hacker artists.
Composer Shelly Knotts has a controversial post about women in live coding on her website. Norah Lorway is also a live coder, who works collectively. She is part of the OpenLab underground London collective.
Many performers are activists. She seems to be assrting that live code is a path to utopian, collective futures.
Gender art paratice can queer technologies.

Talk by Louise Brown.
BCS is the British Computer Science professional body, representing members in the IT profession. A learned society with a royal charter and can charter people and offer qualifications and is a charity. It wishes to be the gold standard for diversity in the IT sector.
15% of the 70k members are women. There are more than 50 specialist groups, one of which is BCS Women (and another is the Open Source Specialist Group).
BCS Women is volunteer-driven group. They aim to support members and raise awareness of women in IT. trying to get more women into IT. They want to put up posters in schools around women in IT. They do Android Programming ‘family fun days’ – a one day workshop, aimed at families, that lets people try coding.
They run a Lovelace Colloquium for undergraduate women. And did Open Source taster days that they ran jointly with the Open source Group and Fossbox. They did AppInventor, intro to git and intro to python.
FLOSS-UK in the spring has a call for papers.
the BCS is also having an AGM in a few days with a foss event.
www.bcs.org/bcswomen
www.bcs.org/category/17484

They use pure data both in software, but also with paper objects and string stuck to walls
Free software changes your relation with your computer and by extension your relationship with a lot of technologies in your daily life.
The collective uses linux. Free software freed them from the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ uses. They found new uses. Their technical experience is considered less valid, but people call on them to discuss politics. This frees them to try to do whatever they want.
they made a ‘possible impossible machine.’ the first version had a terrible interface. it was made collectively by a workshop by all the participants. they had a pd patch to make all decisions. this was absurd. this is not the best way to handle negotiations.
some uses to technology have a tendency to erase the human touch.
they use old tech to resist planned obsolescence.
Gender construction: they don’t know how it works, but they know how to use it. Women there have worked to lose fear of opening the closed boxes. Open source has helped enable this.
she has talked a lot about their process around ‘errors’. failure is part of free software culture – to recognise bugs and not hide problems. there can also be a problem when people ‘celebrate’ the power of a mistake (ie the aesthetics of glitch) in that foss guys sometimes get upset about it. the speaker feels it’s a part of feminism to give less power to the ‘expert’ but to work with people who are experimenting, learning and making interesting material. Her political position is against the specialist.
minipimer.tv

twitter: @wildscreens
Digital media embedded in environment. Mediated urban space. Most common uses of big screens is commercial.
How to do something different with screens and allow people access instead of letting advertisers dictate to us?
there are some big BBC screens in the centre of some communities. 23(?) in the UK? These are supposed to regenerate communities. How will this work? Nobody knows, but we want a big screen. They are high up and it’s hard to do interactive content.
the research challenge is how to integrate the screens into the environment in a way that the community has input.
How does the public engage with them? How can they be used to interact? How can we enable open access?
Active research and iterative design process.
they did community workshops.
they came up with something like a photo booth. easy to use. people do a pose and others in remote locations copy those poses to create an interaction.
Open access is very difficult, especially things that run a long time. The technology is also expensive, which makes it hard to get access.
www.screensinthewild.org