Table round


Gijs: 
    living in BXL, designer and programmer, part of OSP ( http://osp.kitchen/ ).
questioning our means of production
collective using only open source software, now also creating their own software
likes visualisation LEECHER!
structure  of data is interesting, programming and feel control, interested in  other strategies, poltiical influence of visualing data he's concerned  with
interested how politics & society are influenced by internet
-> lecture on governance starting to be databased, pretends to be be neutral with research commitiees & algoritmic laws
from sovereign state to cybernetic state.. from laws to algorithms. 
what kind of software developing?
* visual cutlure: started as their own website, they use git to collaborate, with every push of git, the website is updated / diff tools to see the images
- the book Are you Being Served used OSP tool Ethertoff (HTML to PDF)
  http://osp.kitchen/tools/ethertoff/

Robert:
    from CaliforMia. organizing large quntities of video.
thinking of video on granular scale, give control to viewer video & recognize that essence of video is illusion
-> play with giving control over an illusion
projects:
*video spreadsheet project, content being referenced in spreadsheet, use them as input for relational data
spreadsheet are flat, databases are relational. spreadsheet flattens it down.
* computer representation of words
normative staitstics, regression to mediocrity
sir francis galton.. exceptional NOT mediocre! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
he  did composite images, analogue & negatives overlaying photos of  people, was cousin of Darwin, invents antropometric field...coined th  word eugenics, tracing back how humans appeared, results in finding out  which couples should procreate, idea of correlations pushed to premodern  deviated humanism
coreelate the fact of excellence of ancestors, also because they were rich or other elements that were not in the statistics
Near his death he publishes Kantsaywhere, an eugenic novel https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1111/111117-Galton-novel-Kantsaywhere-published-online
../share/texts/Sir_Francis_Galton-Kantsaywhere.pdf

-> similar to how devleopment of cities, laws... base don correlations, not causation
Martino: big data is buzzword that symbolizes this ideology
Soviet Union: Darwin theories were rejected, Trofim Lysenko (Lamarck --WP: "Lysenko's genetic theories were grounded in Lamarckism") look into soviet cybernetics cfr 'From newspeak to cyber speak
../share/texts/From%20Newspeak%20to%20Cyberspeak_%20A%20History%20of%20Soviet%20Cybernetics%20-%20Slava%20Gerovitch.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Ricardo & Ana
from Porto, design studio Maufactura Independiente, uing only FLOSS
2010 ° Open data collective, working on public information
data-design-code-typography
www.transparenciahackday.org
wanted to do visual things with data, but realized there was no data easy to use
www.centraldedados.pt
publishing platform for datasets they collected
struggled with different formats of datasets, found a tool to  convert them in 1 format (spec?)
colaborating with Open Knowledge FOundation to promote this approach
if you have different datasets, put them on github and this website can be generated for you, can be used on and offline
www.transparenciahackday.org/totonome
example of silly things they do during hackdays
main journal in Portugal published list of names for children given in 2014, a few of those names were only given to 1 person
-> dataset with names that were given & names that were not given -> created a game for names to be approved
there is a fixed list of names you can give to your child,  problematic with brasil: they have the freedom, but when coming to  Portugal, and ant to have a baby, they have to apply for a name that is  not on the list
= difficult, very bureaucratic process
www.manufacturaindependente.org/blocktype-mozfest.html
* alternative interfaces with Minecraft


http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/minecraft.gamepedia.com/c/c2/Potato.png?version=ad545c268803acdacfca5032107a48a0


Kate Rich
http://feraltrade.org
interested in collision between food & data
runs undergorund freightnetwork 
different type of datadisplay on foodpackaging = way to infiltrate homes so its a productive tool. 
shows per shipment and per pack, how much of the expenses went to farmer, douane....
since 2003
deeply modifiying trade, leading edge of capitalism
got  interested in economic side, started studying undergraduate economics  & teaching at the same time, experimenting on friends (artists &  non-economists) - interested in learning how economics think & work & think & see
'Economics Antitext book', more interesting to 1st year economics textbook than to the leading edge of today
http://www.economics-antitextbook.com/ //// http://digamo.free.fr/antitext.pdf
studying 3 year model, having to study thngs like econometrics.. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics ) relations, correlations,
 the way statistics are handled is interesting in the background. 
 
 
 Leo
 art student at ERG, studying 3rd year, interested in image
 photography leads to physics, image processing, computer vision
 the way we make images
 ca m'a mené à repenser l'image dans son entiereté, la capacité express different things
 relation  to science is interesting here, make a lot of models, made of data,  makes of thinking the world/conceptualize it, f.ex. interstellar: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_%28film%29 )  he worked with Nasa scientists, tried something strange, the Nasa  scientist did not believe in it, they took all data of 1 xxx, tried to  computate it, made representation of this 1 all?
 proved a lot of theories they created before
 thinking that image can prove a fact, ....
influenced  by visual studies, dissects the image in many fields (psychology,  physiology....), in networks (with data, keywords) - bits vs material  can be digitzed and quantified as well
netinvisu.tumblr.com

An
 ate a lot of meat with hormones i see a correlation here
and was confused with being swedish
fiction writer reluctant to learn programming because of time constraints, but couldnt resist and started learning python, doing scripts on corpuses, starting to write on 1984 orwell, creating algorithms that are the canon of algorithms that surround us (its a bit abstract) mark of chain, quicksword ? 
in  2013 group got together to look into programming and literature,  algolit, these meetings are about looking at it from the literary point  of view, now looking at the tool of Antwerp ? website is paraolipist ?http://www.paramoulipist.be/
experiment with scores and production of potential literature.


Freyja
studying law, art and phoilosophy
rearcher at KU Leuven, Law & ICT
looking into data rpotection , privacy and copyright
tries to visualize concepts behind privacy, property, autnomy
tries to understand the laws and how people deal with laws and boundaries, helps to visualise it
interesting here:
*   idea of personal data, is a concept in the directive whoch member  states have to implement: anything that can be traced back to the  individual, based on datasets we can figure out where you live, sexual  preferences 
-> look into potato data , how much french fries you eat related to insurance you have to pay; welfare
see if we can reverse engineer your privacy
you do not own your personal data, but maybe we can make you own these non-personal data, and recreate privacy that wya
* privacy
expectation  of privacy (legal term), there is ocnfusion in history where privacy  came form: some link it to building of houses, inside you have provacy,  outside you don't
queen was monitored by servants, did not have privacy, went outside to have privacy!
* autonomous systems (algorithms, vehicles, drones) and how these effect privcay & public space
* Legal status of a potato
potatos  are public domain and some are not, some are copyritght protected by  petents, have to pay them to use these seeds (Monsanto)

http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/minecraft.gamepedia.com/c/c2/Potato.png?version=ad545c268803acdacfca5032107a48a0
^^^this is copyright protected!^^^
in  US company that sells french fries to Mc Donalds, devleoped GMO potato  that doesn't spoil as quickly as others do, in EU protest against GMO
-> interested to track these, do you need to proof DNA in order to be able to ask patent?

Anne-Laure
working with private data, INAMI
has access to all billings of care of citizens in belgium, names, addresses etc
same time cowboy & indian: as statistician you want as much access to data as possible
feminist, activist, very much aware of privacy issues
respect the law. no always need to use the most up-to-date and precise data, neither the most complete (name etc, when you have SSN)
she likes her work but tshe's a kind of ?COP? police ("I'm a cop--I am helping cops")
what data hides in the billing data ?
part of Genre à côté, organises each year Pink Screens, movie festival in Cinema Nova
part of Interface 3, training for women in computing

peter
artist,  interested in the public space and its definition. video background.  representation as a means to bring an image of a neighbourhood to a  neighbourhood
representation as metaphor to bring it back in neighoburhood
the more you limit yourself in context, the deeper you get (ex. brussels), ex La Langue Schaarbeekoise
http://www.lalangueschaerbeekoise.be/
look  into hybridity of words, interview people, organise radio broadcasts:  what is said, in which context, why...  it brings people together
Rafaela is working on informal networks in a neighbourhood and see how it connects to other paarts in the world
->  ex of shop that looks Maroccan, but is not Maroccan, dates of Marocco  sell well in Brussels, but are not available during ramadan, order from  Israel, send to Africa, repackage them and sell them here!
LOOPS


Barbara
Art student Gent, Mixed Media
thesis on potato
past (colonisation), present (community project), future (what will happen, experiments with electircity)
gmo aspect (Monsanto started to patent all potatos in South America, making ID cards about this)
started  to work with engineer, working with energy of potatos 'potato in space'  at Atacama (desert, Chile) people of nasa working with telescope +  families searching their relatives' bodies, only women, women farmers  gardening potatos
families of dead people desaparecidos. (sound like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_for_the_Light, brillant documentary video)
potatoprada

Martino
studying philosophy in Leuven, because of link with technology
started hacklab in Amsterdam, reflect on technology in theory & practise
passing research over boundaries between disciplines
that brought him in contact with Constant, collaborating with Constant

Anita
Amsterdam since 7y
studied textile & design in art academy, experimenting with tools & techniques
projects in autonomous spaces
studies philosophy, 1y in belgium
in school you study productivity, optimisation...
concept of potenciality, data ideology overrides the notion of potenciality with the one of probability
working with Constant, hosted a session on Relearn summer school about geography, situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon

Natacha
bxl for 4 years, revolving around constant a lot.
Lot about sensors, sensing physical data, envision participation systems around it. 
Finished Phd on participation and ?storydata?  ("sensor data"?)
How  to deal with the networks that can be associated with sensory data.  >collected by cellphones, devices, etc we carry around
The impossibility of anonimization of certain information..  
Before also building small communities around some sensory data that can be collected

Nicolas
"trying to see what can be relevant".
now mostly busy around archive together with Michael Murtaugh ("whose laptop is there"), busy on a http://activearchives.org/ .
Artists  collecting huge archives of images and sound. No easy way to show  those, also for copyright issues or other legal constraints.
Busy  developing algorithms that harvest and try to make sense of the data  without showing hte data itself in its orignal format. Algorithms can  describe what is in an archive without showing it.
Using and understanding algorithms.

Wendy
you will see her.
degree on english and dutch literature, unfortunatley not computational linguistics.
busy with hacked knitting machines. stand at fosdem, with its gender unbalance. 
knitting machines, one pixel is one stitch.
Working on human-to-human protocols, sometimes human-to-machine.

Stamatia
naples
interested  in potatos, potato invasion in Naples - fastfood selling Dutch french  fries, battle between defenders of traditional Naples food & french  fries
intrested in philosophy, Gilles Deleuze/Alfred North Whitehead, semiotic father Charles S. Peirce about logics/ help!
notion of 'importance', what moves beings - today is data
when you have data fo something, you're abstracting something about this
interested in how the notion of data and software are affecting all the different aspects of our life
relation between data & art (analysis of choreographers using software), "human without body" notion
software for writing choreografphy and motion sensors capturing dancers performing and turning that into data
what happens when movement becomes data? when movements are patented, f;ex. mobile phones? can be patented & sold
notation systems! 
blog James Bridle, new aesthetic, based on the way computers perceive the world
also interested in economic influence , High Frequency Trading(velocity of procesisng machines taking ethical decisions... that affect our lives), more and more detached from mateiral economy
teaching a course, 'the Algosociety'
"I'm here to learn"

Hans
atm legal researcher at VUB.
background in activism, first enviromental and then peace movement. activist experience have been influenced a lot by technology. 
in terms of organising social movements, will talk about this research 'data & power'
playing with data and what you can do in a political way

Juliane
we are all leeches
active in BXLug, Brussels Linux user Group
lazy mathematician
as mathematician the ideology is difficult to detach from economy.. 
is member of Samedies, Women & Free Software samedi.collectifs.net  : http://samedi.collectifs.net/ 

Johnny McHugh
humanieties, e-government
developing OS tools now, with hackerspace.be (Brussels)
semantically orientated, CMS in place, organising information, would be good to use these large datasets

Julie
Student at PZI Rotterdam
research performativity of networks

Didier Demorcy
documentary maker, radio/installation
interested in non-academic knowledges, folk
working with people in relation with animals
lives in countryside, starts to be a shepard (sheeper)
has collective vegetable garden, transformation of food (bread/cider...)
grows potatos


http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/firefox_wicca.png

http://XKCD.COM ROX (even more fun > http://www.ted.com/talks/randall_munroe_comics_that_ask_what_if )
http://www.tylervigen.com/ (correlation does not imply causation)

Johhny