Methods

We collaborate on research, discourse and experiments that impact policy and public discourse as well as reconfigure socio-technical practice. Throughout we assume a tight coupling between what to address and how to address it. Developing methods for relating between different kinds of expertise, experimenting formats for convenings and alternative infrastructural toolsets.

These methods have been developed over the years by members of the institute with different collaborators, communities and artist organisations (Constant, The Darmstadt Delegation, Possible Bodies, The Underground Division). They have been iterated over the years, traveling across academia (Carnegie Melon, Dagstuhl, FAT*, KU Leuven, Princeton, NYU), civil society (EDRi, Ligue des droits humain, OSF) and public institutions (Council of Europe, ecole de recherche graphique, European Parliament, Hangar, Master Experimental Publishing, transmediale).

For a list of select methods we bring and brew, see below.

Strategic Convenings

• Clouds are Not an Option: a gathering of strategic partners to discuss the rise of cloud infrastructures, their political economy with an exploration of their impact on policy. Conveners: Martha Poon, Seda Gürses, Femke Snelting.
• Optimization and its Miscontents: counterpolitics of surveillance capitalism, transmediale 2019. Conveners: Z. Blace, Baruch Gottlieb, Seda Gürses.
• The Feminist Server Summit: Gathering of DIY and independent server projects discussing the potential of a feminist server practice. Convener: Constant

Tool Clinics

• Monday Readings: reading day-to-day tools through theory (Martino Morandi)
• Pippi Longstrings: a view on the legal process in the EU (Constant, Stefan Marsiske and Erik Josefsson)

Meta-methods

• Queer Analytics: methodologies for partial reparation... or not
• The Possible Bodies Inventory: a shared context to pay attention to the apparatuses that make so-called-bodies appear and co-relate. (Jara Rocha)
• ROCK REPO: Getting closer to the unstable stories of particular ROCKS as told through scientific, poetic, public and technological discourse. (The Underground Division)

Bug reports

• MakeHuman: issues with an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters
• We have always been geohackers: Triangulated visions of the earth in Gplates with critical software and interface analysis, poetics, and theoretical text materials. (Possible Bodies)
• Issues with modifier mechanism, UTS #52: Feedback on an Encoding Proposal; reporting on the implementation of Unicode's Skin tone modifiers
• The Long Tail of Contact Tracing (TITiPI)

Worksessions

• The Technogalactic Software Observatory: A week long session on the observation of the multiple scales of software, the industries and communities that produce it and their devastatingly relational political economies. (Constant)
• Collective Conditions: Experiments with the generative potential of codes of conduct, bugreports, licenses and complaint procedures. (Constant)
• Cqrrelations: Poetry to the statistician. It is science to the dissident. It is detox to the data-addict. (Constant)

Tactical Publications

• Queering Damage
• The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation
• The Optimisation Workbook
• The Catalog of Formats
• Collective Conditions for Re-Use (cc4r): copyleft license with a difference

Creative infrastructures

• etherbox: collaborating with digital tools in digital spaces (Varia, Constant and others)
• bibliostrike: access and distribute texts without the nasty analytics