Social Practices

It is noticeable that Square Victoria is a vivid public space with special characteristics that make it different from the other athenian squares. The characteristics that I focus on are; the fragmentation of square, meaning the creation of different and isolated social spaces, and the powerless approach of female visitors. Their absence from square’s public sphere leads to the weakness of their voice, as murmurings and small groups -like in the diagrams, and their short-term presence.
Based on these observations and conclusions, I worked with the medium of sound installation and actions [sound acts] as interventional practice in space. An audible representation of women directed by me, was inserted into existing conversations at the square. The intention of recorded voices’ interference was to create contact points between the separated (by gender, race and social status) public spheres of the square, causing new encounters, interactions and discussions. The designed sound acts were developed in two phases; the first concerns the correlation actions, that I did and recorded, with women coming to the square and the collection of the archived audible material derived from them. The second phase is about the interactive sound installation and the broadcasting of the audio in the space of the square, during the sound installation and action designed and implemented by me. The broadcast action is part of the new correlations and confrontations occured in the chosen social spaces.

Η πλατεία Βικτωρίας είναι ένας πολύ ζωντανός δημόσιος χώρος με ιδιάιτερα χαρακτηριστικά που την διαφοροποιούν από τις άλλες πλατείες του αθηναϊκού κέντρου. Τα χαρακτηριστικά στα οποία επικεντρώνομαι είναι ο κατακερματισμός της σε διαφορετικούς και απομονωμένους χώρους συναναστροφής και η ανίσχυρη οικειοποίηση της από τις γυναίκες, που την επισκέπτονται. Η απουσία τους από τη δημόσια σφαίρα της πλατείας έχει αποτέλεσμα την αδυναμία της φωνής τους με την έννοια του χαμηλόφωνου και των μικρών παρεών τους, όπως φαίνεται στα διαγράμματα, και της μικρής διάρκειας παρουσίας. Βασισμένη σε αυτές τις παρατηρήσεις και συμπεράσματα εργάστηκα με το μέσο της ηχητικής εγκατάστασης και δράσης [ηχητικές πράξεις]ως πρακτική παρέμβασης στο χώρο. Σκηνοθετώ των ηχητική παρουσία των γυναικών, η οποία παρεμβάλλεται στις υπάρχουσες συνομιλίες της πλατείας. Πρόθεση της παρεμβολής των ηχογραφημένων φωνών είναι να δημιουργήσει σημεία επαφής ανάμεσα στις διαχωρισμένες (ως προς το φύλο, τη φυλή και την κοινωνική θέση) δημόσιες σφαίρες της πλατείας, προκαλώντας νέες συναντήσεις,συναναστροφές και συζητήσεις. Οι ηχητικές πράξεις που σχεδιάζω αναπτύσσονται σε δύο φάσεις: Η πρώτη αφορά δράσεις συσχέτισης που έκανα και ηχογράφησα, με τις γυναίκες που συχνάζουν στην πλατεία και την συγκέντρωση του αρχειακού ηχητικού υλικού που προέκυψε από αυτές. Η δεύτερη είναι η διαλογική ηχητική εγκατάσταση και αφορά την αναμετάδοση του ηχητικού υλικού στο χώρο, κατά τη διάρκεια της ηχητικής εγκατάστασης και δράσης που σχεδίασα και υλοποίησα. Η δράση εκπομπής έχει ως μέρος της τις νέες συσχετίσεις και και αντιπαραθέσεις που προέκυψαν στους επιλεγμένους χώρους συναναστροφής.

(Διπλωματική εργασία, επιβ: Κούρος Πάνος, Τμήμα Αρχιτεκτονικής, Πανεπιστήμιο Πατρών)

This catalogue presents projects initiated by the 2019 class of the Experimental Publishing master course (XPUB), which focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks/ This version includes only the project Let’s Amplify Unspeakable Things. It is an online platform of exploration and research, regarding female voices in public and their amplification. It creates a space for excluded voices to be explored, that questions the establishment of authoritative voices — which construct exclusive speech platforms and binaries, along the assumption that voices have to be rational in public dialogues.

Proofreading by Simon Browne This essay is a reflection on the development of a feminist search tool and my involvement in its technical and conceptual aspects. It refers to the notion of feminist critical computing in public infrastructures and specifically digital libraries. It brings to light the frictions between the technical aspects of a digital infrastructure and the societal issues it comes to address. This essay studies one 1 of the prototypes of the Feminist Search Tool (FST), a collective artistic project that explores ways of engaging with items of digital library catalogues and systems of categorization 2. The specific FST I worked on is a digital visualization tool that engages with the collection of the International Homo/Lesbian Information center and Archive (IHLIA) using terms from their Homosaurus, a standalone international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary that is used to describe their collection 3. This essay highlights the tensions between technical restrictions and research questions within the working group of the FST. One such question initiated the FST group's collective research: "Why are the authors of the books I read so white, so male, so Eurocentric?", implying an absence of diversity due to missing data in libraries. A search tool is a way to bring awareness to these gaps and inclusion and exclusion mechanisms in Western knowledge collection and distribution systems. The project challenges categorization protocols in libraries and the question of who holds the power and responsibility for determining the search and retrieval process: the readers, the users or the librarians? The algorithms, or the libraries? And in the end, "what do we change, delete and keep, the users or the researchers and the library or the algorithm? Can we become aware of the search engine's short comings and make them experiential?" (Read-in, 2017). Institutional cataloguing systems have a desire to unify and universalise the collection, which often omits authors from different backgrounds, passes biases and ignores non-Western systems of knowledge. It is often impossible to intervene in the categories from the position of an outsider to the institution. A feminist perspective on data science is critical regarding the missing datasets in such systems. Who is collecting, and what, are both questions that feminist researchers are asking. The field descriptors in the dataset of the books of IHLIA's collection came from the Dutch Homosaurus. This field, that was filled in with the objective choice of the librarians, would mostly refer to the content of the books. The interface of the FST, with five categories to search within ('Race',

In this paper, I describe the artwork Radioactive Monstrosities, a web-audio interface that addresses ways of listening to collective voices and certain female-sounding voices that are perceived as inappropriate or annoying-because of the quality of their sound, their gender, the medium's distortions but also stereotypes and collective memories that they often awake. These are verbal expressions that have been associated with forms of 'monstrosity' since ancient times. Visitors of the page are invited to record themselves and choose a type of distortion to participate in, forming new imaginaries around technologically-mediated voices, which through their technical 'monstrosity', can reveal other forms of speech.

This thesis surveys the ways in which design practices can contribute to a postcapitalist transition. I study several contemporary product design projects that develop everyday tools, building systems, and fabrication machinery. Together, they encapsulate peer production, open-sourcing, and the maker movement.
These trends constitute a coherent methodology of commoning, which manifests itself in three ways: shared creation (designing in common), shared governance (managing designs in common), and shared access (holding the means of production in common). I describe how this shared valorisation of labour, knowledge, and artefacts radically alters the political economy of design practices.
How to disentangle design from capital? To what extent might commoning practices disrupt the Commodity-Machine? How do we prefigure a resilient and regenerative economy? Is there a postcapitalist blueprint for the rapid and just eco-social transition ahead? In four chapters and a concluding discussion, this study responds to these pressing questions.

Prior to the Winter Summer School, David Keuning interviewed me about my plans and expectations in regard to my collaboration with spatial designers, the decolonial critique of eco-modernism and the relation between ecological transition and social justice.

As the 2022 Artist in Residence of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, I brought together spatial designers and climate justice organisers for a week-long programme. It combined a training on just transition and an assignment to anticipate how Royal Dutch Shell infrastructure will be decommissioned and repurposed in the coming decades. This is the shortened and revised transcript of the introduction lecture, June 30th, 2022. Full publication available on AvB Winterschool website.

"Future Guides: From Information to Home" is an artistic research project on following: how to practice and theorize following. It was carried out between 2010-2014 within the Norwegian Artistic Fellowship Programme and around the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. A final exhibition of my artistic research, "Your Revolution Begins at Home", took place at the USF Gallery and Cinemateket in Bergen, September 4-14, 2014.  "Confessions of an Online Stalker", a critical reflection text on artistic results of the research, was submitted in 2015.

The study outlines the emergence of an artistic research method–combining data mining, systems for mapping, storytelling, and translation–and its application in the fields of media art, microhistory, and activism. The development of artistic works (several books, text, film, installation and public performance) become the aesthetic results of conversations, negotiations and reflections around the proceeding questions: How are tracking, guiding, following and stalking used as artistic research methods? What role does image production play in everyday life and how does it create tension between the public and private experience? How can strategies of translation provide the critical tools for experimenting with shifts between context, subjectivity and scale?

This artistic research reflects on a contemporary condition in which personal and social archives constitute a new type of city guide that challenges the official representations of cities online. It reflects on the phenomenon of documenting and sharing one’s urban life to the world online, an act reflective of a culture of making oneself and one’s life visible–thus, present–in online social networks. The work focuses on the “micro” or working on case studies, whereby the studying and following of trails of data produced by different individuals and seeing where it leads is a process of trying to establish where one "is" from other people's data. However, the effort of pinning down a location is not merely to focus–in a machinic system of (geo)precision–on the place where one might be standing but to recognize the people who occupy (or have occupied) that place in the city. It is a method of online tracking which leads to spatial tracking, from which a narrative language emerges. The question is implicitly addressed: to what extent urban media art can help us to “locate ourselves” in the mediated city by offering to trace and reveal the connections between places, people, and digital culture. But what if the connections reveal a city in crisis? The research leads to a flight to Madrid and ends up in the homes of evicted families, where anti-eviction activists use digital information to “locate” and make public the everyday effects of crisis. In the foreground of the crisis is the crisis of the home. It is there that we encounter sites of political struggle, the act of making oneself and one’s life visible becoming a strategy for collective empowerment.

The Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme is parallel to other research educations organised as academic PhD programmes. The programme intends to secure high level artistic research and leads to expertise as Associate Professor. The Artistic Research Fellowships Programme is among the first in this field in Europe. The programme offers a three-year position as Research Fellow to candidates who have completed the highest art education within their subject area.