Methods

We collaborate on research, discourse and experiments that impact public discourse and policy 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, NEoN Digital Arts, European Parliament, Hangar, Master Experimental Publishing, transmediale).

Methods are developed and documented on the TITiPI wiki. For a taste of select methods we bring and brew, see below.

Strategic Convening

• The International Trans★feminist Digital Depletion Strike: dancing on the ruins of Big Tech. March 8, 2023. Conveners: NEoN, Varia, In-Grid, transmediale, TITiPI

• 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

• Operations Rooms: bring together participants with divergent interests, and expertise across scales to study an operation undergoing digital transformation.
• Drop-in Clinics: open and site-specific structures, where invited and ad-hoc participants can discuss and analyse issues with institutional transformations through Computational Infrastructures.
• Monday Readings: reading day-to-day tools through theory and vice versa (with Martino Morandi)
• Pippi Longstrings: a view on the legal process in the EU (with Constant, Stefan Marsiske and Erik Josefsson)

Meta-methods

• Infrables articulations of what extractive digital infrastructures are, and what they are doing
• 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. (with 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

• The Long Tail of Contact Tracing
• MakeHuman: issues with an Open Source software for modeling 3-dimensional humanoid characters (with Jara Rocha)
• 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 (with Roel Roscam Abbing, Peggy Pierrot)

Worksessions

• Infrastructural interactions: community research commissions, conversations, collective analysis
• 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

• Infrastructural Interactions (with contributions by a.o.:

• Counter Cloud Action Plan An imaginary programme to benefit counter-infrastructure-makers, and imaginaries of local operators who interact with servers and institutional processes. (with NEoN, Dundee)

• The Techno-Galactic Guide to Software Observation (Constant)

• A catalog of formats for digital discomfort (Jara Rocha)

• Collective Conditions for Re-Use (cc4r): copyleft license with a difference

Creative infrastructures

• wiki-to-pdf a contraption for ongoing publication efforts (with Martino Morandi)

• bibliostrike: access and distribute texts without the nasty analytics