Techniques Text working title "Federated/Distributed Map of Nomadic and Situated Practices" NEED A NEW TITLE? ?? How to create a mapping tool for nomadic and situated practices? Mapping relational infrastructures. Traces from a collective mapping exercise.

If you want to co-write the text, please put your name on the list: Ciel Grommen, Vermeir & Heiremans, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Clémentine Vaultier, Loes Jacobs

Multiple levels of darkness. How do we manage the tool. Between us (artists and institutions designing and uploading), new artists (uploading), audience (visiting the website), funders, AC ...

28/01/2023

Introduction

the FEDERATED is a partnership that since autumn 2022 is working on a cartographic portal. It currently consists of one punctual collaboration between three artists (Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Clémentine Vaultier), an artist duo (Kalteen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans) and three small artist- or curator-run organisations (f.eks; Skal Contemporary and Nadine). This text voices our collective concerns that are guiding an ongoing working process that could generate more agency for our ephemeral, embodied artistic practices. The mapping protocol in the making needs to reconcile curatorial and artist perspectives, as well as organizational forms that can be defined as small self-run organisations or as a temporary project-based affiliations between a number of individual practitioners.

Finding a balance between a visible agenda and its invisible counterpart, which is inevitably reflected in the practice of mapping as a dark infrastructure, was a primary concern that ultimately initiated a collaboration with Atelier Cartographique, a cooperative that describes itself as “commited to centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.“ Our collaborative map making endeavour would need to incorporate a practice of counter-mapping that continuously would code-switch between the geo-localised god’s eye view of mapping, and a critical disruption mapping that can subvert an idealistic but nevertheless brutal ambition to model the world after the beliefs of its makers. Our counter-map would account for what we all find important within our embodied art practices: the flow of time, narratives, histories, relationships, situated knowledge derived from direct observation, emotions, collaborations, discussions…

All partners are mostly working in public space. We also give most value to processes and want to accomodate a wide variety and range of people, places, things, archives... Our discussions bring us to a map that aims to make our interconnectedness visible, as well as our collaborations and communications with each other. In a series of dialogues we elaborate on things that we found inspiring, or that we found relevant and could share. These conversations will reveal the limitations of our ambitions, and the points where those ambitions converged. And then they will briefly address all the details and practicalities that we had to deal with in a way that transformed what can be considered a dark infrastructure into a relational one.

27/01/2023

Text writing with Loes, Ciel, Max, Clementine and V&H

Here is the first conversation, more to follow...

1. CONTINUE ON ‘DARKNESS’ and CURATING or not

Ciel: Is it not a contradiction when we say that we do not need to be transparent in everything and at the same time say that we try to avoid new enclosures?

Max: Well, I think obscuring something is not a problem when you are in relation to each other, when you talk about it. If you don’t have access to something than we can call it an enclosure. For example we don’t know about the code Atelier Cartographique will use to create the mapping tool. We can communicate our wishes, and AC mediates their knowledge through the workshops we are doing, for us to understand what the code can do, without us knowing how to code.

K: Transparency is not synonymous with openness and equal access. Transparency can also create forms of dominance and violence. Think about unmediated hate speech on social media, about Meta’s CEO speaking about their goal to promote radical transparency in individuals, obviously trying to procure more data from the behavioural experiments they conduct with their algorithms. We do not need to be totally transparent, we do not need to show all our tactics and be transparent about all our possible agendas. This does not necessarily create an enclosure. (See also quote of Gielen, common practices often better stay under the radar)

R: ruangrupa, the Indonesian curators collective at the last Documenta spoke about the strength they derived from speaking with different voices, many different people and from different perspectives to the institution to avoid the hegemony of the institution to overpower them.

Ciel: How addressable are we to the visitors of the map? I mean to whom can visiting public or other users address a question. Who is responsible? Who can you ask if and how one can participate in the map making for example?

R: Yes, all these questions will be important to pose ourselves when the mapping tool is implemented.

C: There are multiple levels of darkness, and how we should address it. A darkness possible between us, between us and AC, and between us and possible future contributors and users of the mapping tool.

K: Yes, I find that important that the dark and transparent, are not considered as oppositional black and white, but that there are different shades of grey. And that dark can be a positive force as well and transparency dangerous or ambiguous. Part of having agency for our individual or collective practice can be exactly about what Ronny was saying about the multi-voices tactics of ruangrupa. They spoke about, what I would call ‘creolisation’, it is the practice using different types of languages, like slang or changing the hegemonic English word in another language. It is addressing hegemony from an under the radar position, which creates forms of agency.

R: There also can’t be full transparency in our map making, as we are in the middle of the process, and basically are still in the unknown.

M: Yes, exactly, there is this notion of uncertainty, we are all talking into the dark.

Ciel: We could say that the horizon reveals itself by our progressing journey.

C: When I thought of how the atlas of ovens should appear on the mapping tool, I first thought that all the documents we have should be uploaded there, but now I think making a selection is better instead of making all the documents available to all.

Ciel: Yes, that is a question you always have when you organise a participatory project. Do you give all the tools to everyone, or do you make a selection?

R: When you look at a singular project on the map, for example one walking project, you see something created by the artist or curated by nadine. When you see the documents of all the projects at once on the map, it is a new narrative that can be created by a public.

C: I think it should not be seen as voids between the projects that can be filled in with narratives. It has to be supported by a network I think, for example f.eks doing a walking project with the atlas of ovens. Maybe that is not a new narrative, but rather a relation?

R: Yes, but the public can still start to link things, even if we did not intend a link or relation there. The interpretations can be made by the visitor of the map.

C: Do we need to curate the links more? What is the value of us putting the overlaps and proximity between our projects?

Ciel: We can make a collage of linking several documents, but the visitor can see another link and can make his/her own collage.

R: In the book Rayuela the author suggests another reading from the usual reading of a book, but then you find out you can read the book in any way you want to.

M: Yes, indeed, the reader can follow the intention of the author, or choose to read or look otherwise. The same can happen when connecting projects on the map.

R: Generative knowledge production??? RONNY AANVULLEN

C: How do we define the proximity between the different ‘islands’, the geo-locations on the map where the practices took place. Who defines the forms and exact places of these islands?

21/01/2023

Added 3 new conversations, based on the discussions we had on 19/01 This should find a place/order in the conversations written out from the lecture... references to Piranesi, Tupaia etc... could refer to a note where we can add more info...

TO DO for EACH of us: -personal perspectives on why collaborating on the mapping -what means a relational infrastructure for us?

Short overview of things we will do: the questions of Clementine/Tyson/Loes USE TEXT LECTURE for CONVERSATIONS CODE is still problem, not clarified, discussed How to govern the map in the future, maintaining it alone is not the same thing Accessibility of the map: curated or open access. On invitation? A common with specific rules?

CONVERSATION 1: From where do we speak, orientation point of view

M: From which perspectives do we speak in this text? Is it the perspective, so to speak from Tupaia’s (create a separate explanation) canoe? Who is navigating the boat? Do we speak from the point of view of the river (Reclus?)? Do we show multiple perspectives? In the case of Tupaia the perspective is very different from a Western perspective. In stead of an abstracted God’s eye view, Tupaia’s map making starts from the navigator and his canoe. His canoe is fixed in space, and it is the world around that is moving and dynamic. He thus overrode an abstract singular and central perspective.

Cl: Are we the map makers, the users and the readers, the public at the same time? There are complex layers of perspectives. We are partly fictitious characters that are ourselves and multiple selves at the same time…

R: A fiction that is ‘real’. We are entities that are at the same time individual artists, and collectives and organisations. It should be clear that this text is about a process, developing a yet unfinished map, about the ambitions we have and the hurdles we met and will still meet…

L: We could use the existing lecture (said in intro?) as our basis, and try to transform the existing text fragments into a more dynamic dialogue among us.

R: Should we then randomly choose names from the people in our collective and let them ‘speak’? We are a collective of people and the ideas and discussions and reports were created together, they are shared.

Cl: But isn’t that contrary to the idea of a ‘federated’ approach? Isn’t it better to talk as ‘we’, and talk about the journey we went through together?

K: Federated means that you work together, that you mutualise, but that the individual’s or the different organisation’s voices do not get smothered under an hierarchical voice.

C: A ‘We’ does not really ‘exist’, we are all different voices. It is necessary I think to give names. This also shows that we are still discussing, we are indeed in the middle of a process.

M: Yes, we can speak about polyphony: each keeps his or her own voice, but then a fictional dialogue will be difficult.

K: But it is not necessary that the individual voices literally render what one exactly has said? The polyphony can be partially fictionalised. We can be transparent about this, we can say that we choose this format for our text, and that we choose for ‘fictitious ‘characters…that are ourselves. We can say that we ‘gamefy’ a bit the conversation.

L: Then do we also fictionalise the possible dissonance between us?

CONVERSATION 2 on dark infrastructure

K: After our lecture at the Winterschool in Ghent Lewis Tyson (is this explained somewhere or we can abstract it?) asked us why we talk about dark infrastructure as something negative, as a monster and enemy, the heart of darkness. Can it also be a positive force?

R: We do not want to reveal our strategy and information to all. Some parties are opponents to what we do. It is like the Israeli army reading the strategies of the Situationists. It can be dangerous to show too much information. Common practices are sensitive to ‘capture’. Think about commodification, gentrification, creating a idealistic vision of a ‘community’, a we-feeling that resonates with nationalism, and so on…

K: A quote of Gielen and Dockx captures this idea of staying under the radar as a positive force: “In order to survive in the long run, communal practices had therefore best remain invisible, ‘secret’ or clandestine. Stealthy, slumbering underground, and under the skin: these are the characteristics by which an ideology spreads and persuades the best. It is called poetica.” p66

M: The white pieces on the Piranesi map could be the so-called dark infrastructure. What separates the ‘islands’, I mean the different practices on the map, is a void, and at the same time also this void is packed with meaning. There the relationships between us can be situated. That is a positive value.

K: I would focus on trust as a positive value within this ‘darkness’, it is like with Tupaia’s map, you have to navigate through situations that are difficult to understand, you try to understand the coding and modelling of digital map making, and you want to trust each other that you can find ways to communicate, find a way to translate this knowledge into something we can get our heads around. When Tupaia was asked to draw islands on a pre-set western Mercator map, he choose not to do this but to create a totally new model in order to be able to translate and share his embodied knowledge on how to sail the sea.

M: Yes, that’s a good point. For me this would mean that you can be at ease with the unknown, the monster... The unknown is often obscured, and one should avoid it, it is too much risk. Trust can overcome this fear of the unknown, if the trust comes from both sides of course.

Cl: Might the trust also come from an audience visiting the map?

L: Yes, I think so. We are showing the process, we are allowing people into the kitchen when everything is still a mess, there is the dark monster of not knowing where we go and the invitation to join in on the experiment. It counters the notion of ‘learnification’, a type of education that is focused on the acquisition of certain predefined knowledge goals. where everything should be known in advance. No real experiments, no drifts or unplanned excursions, no mistakes and disasters, no speculation and no surprises. (More accurate definition is needed here - based on the notes we took of Tyson's lecture)

Cl: I want to ask again why we are convinced that making a digital map together is a good idea, even if the relation of power in relation to coding is not (yet) transparent?

C: We are confronted in our lives with the digital. It has become all powerful, a force that is everywhere. You cannot say we go for a walk in the woods without Google scraping the data of your whereabouts from your smartphone.

R: The tactics of the situationists of re-using the city as a revolutionary gesture that changes everyday life, is almost unusable today with camera’s and smartphones all over the place, and those gestures have been re-appropriated by influencers, Instagram image makers, guerrilla branding. These tactics have become part of the so-called society of the spectacle.

K: Even if we are critical about the digital map, we cannot retreat from the digital as if it does not exist. It is a parallel world and in the future it might even become a dominant world. Even so, we can still learn from the situationists and try to practice some counter-mapping at the same time. In our reading about the Tupaia map, we can find an excellent example in there as well… Tupaia refused to use the Mercator projection map that was set up for him as it could not account for time, for narration, for embodied knowledges. In the new representation he devised, the same islands can be seen twice, which from a western viewpoint is illogical. But his map showed how the islands could appear in different voyaging chants, so his map could not be understood as a singular spatial arrangement, but as a sequential narrative of different voyaging routes ultimately creating a visual palimpsest.

L: Yes, and on a practical level, we want to create a mapping tool together that will be functioning for the longer haul, and also one that functions for collaborating online with people from different countries and cities…This federated approach and international collaboration is hard to achieve with material versions of a map…

Cl: I want to ask again something about the public. Our map is Open Source, but should we make it accessible for everyone or should it be curated?

R: That is a difficult thing, but I am afraid it has to be curated, as we do not want to monitor the map all the time for people adding hate messages and so on. Although, it is important that we don’t close it off to new possible participants. We could consider to appoint a curatorial group, that is not anonymous but known to all participants and that can change over time.

C: When I speak about the map making project, people are asking me where the art work is in all this.

K: I see, how can we give a good answer to this? The things we want to upload in the map are obviously representations of walks or other events that took place. The walks themselves are real encounters with places and people, and there you can situate the ‘art work’ if you wish. But once there are many walks uploaded on the map, I hope the reader will then construct his own meaning…

M: Yes, this reader could then become an ‘author’ himself, creating his/her own narrative constructions. The map functions on many levels, on individual and collective levels.

Cl: Can we speak about all of us as collective author as well then, even if we have our individual voices?

K: Well, during the process of discussing the map, and during the workshops we already had together, I think it is fair to say that our vision has developed in that direction. What became more and more a priority was to build an infrastructure for commoning, mutualism, and thinking about governance structures. From the beginning we spoke about creating more agency for our ephemeral practices, about working together and improving our conditions of production, but perhaps that was more in the back of our minds, whereas now it has become a priority, right?

R: There is this quote that we read a few days ago by Rudi Laermans: “Artistic cooperation first and foremost requires the co-definition of a descriptive common, a set of terms- be it concepts or metaphors, well defined theoretical propositions or loose images—allowing mutual understanding and facilitating communication during work. Yet of even greater importance is the joint production of a value common, however contextual or temporary.”

M: Right, but he also talks about value dissonance. And we have to say that we are not there yet, the map is still only there in our discussions. Will we agree on its value once the code is written and it starts to function,… when it becomes concrete?

L: I think we value also the process. I hope the map will succeed and it will come online, but even if we are not completely happy with it, I think we agree we did something valuable…

Cl: There are still more questions than answers, as we are in the middle of the process of trying to create the map together. Can we say that we achieved already another level than a pure functional map? Indeed we have been discussing a lot about agency, collaboration, creating a federated infrastructure…

K: In the text we are writing here together we are also opening up the process of collaborating. We are trying to find out what it will become by doing this together. We try to find common goals and common values, working through the different ideas and visions, frustrations and disagreements…This is a strong and vulnerable position at the same time…

CONVERSATION 3, on RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Cl: I would need to have more conversations about the relational concepts relating to our mapping, how do we define those?

K: With the TUPAIA map (Make a piece of INFO on Tupaia) we have some wonderful point of departure and inspiration. The researchers writing about Tupaia’s map speak about ‘performative collaborative knowledge production.’ Tupaia and the crew on the Endeavor actively worked together on the map and were convinced that they where able to communicate and translate the very different knowledge traditions. Tupaia worked on new system of representation, so his collaborators would grasp the navigational knowledge better. This common knowledge production was only possible through the long term collaboration on a complex task and the trust they had in each other.

M: I like this quote from Dardot & Laval : "…one has to affirm that only the practical activity of humans can bring forth common things, in the same vein as it is only this practical activity that can produce a new collective subject…” p 137

L: We should be aware that we, the co-authors of the map, can find the tool we design effective and inclusive for our goals, but that from the outside it can be seen as dark in the negative sense. How do we invite other possible practioners, users, viewers? Do we have to make them aware of rules we impose, are there ways to participate in the content making or updating? How do we extend the invitation to others?

M: Yes, it is also a question of scale, shared interests and available resources. We are now in a conceptual experiment, but practical realities are rather different.

K: We refer to the map as a possible ‘commons’, which is regulated, without, we hope, it becoming an enclosure. Everyone contributes to a common reciprocally. Work already done on the infrastructure should be recognised, as well as the invisible work that might need to be done by the users, but also by the coders like maintenance, repairing bugs in the system…

R: Yes, and indeed, in a digital commons, for example the creation of open software, there are costs to maintain and update it. There is a complex infrastructure necessary, people need to be paid to do it. So you need resources for the upkeep of this commons…

M: And when you talk about rules, who is going to implement those rules? Commons can also become unbearable when there is too much social control.

L: Thinking of ‘dark infrastructure’ after our working sessions, for me dark infrastructure in the negative sense is a place (digital? online?) where not everyone is welcome (allowed). A place for ‘the incrowd’ where everybody (everyone, as not everyone there has a body) speaks a common language, and that language (code, jargon, way of conversing) stays in that place. The only way in and out is the gate called an interface (designed by the dark infrastructure). The dark infrastructure decides what and how much is shown of the place.

Cl: A map of a dystopian relational infrastructure…very dark…

L: Opening up a dark infrastructure is a common aim for transparency, and sheds light on what is otherwise not seen. Sharing the making process of an interface eases the understanding of the infrastructure and allows for a common language to be found for all involved. Trust is an important factor in this process as not everyone needs to master all knowledge, yet must be willing to share their knowledge. An (online) map is not only a 2D representation of space, it is also a container of code with an attached decision system of representation behind (hidden) in it. Collectively learning about what map making is, starts with what we want from a map and not the other way around, I.e. what a map (already) is and what it can be for us. Designing a map making tool therefore unravels dark infrastructure and brings to light the structure behind it.

K: Yes, we can bring in the Tupaia map as an example here again. They needed to trust each other in translating the ‘code’ into the map. In the 18th century that code was not digital of course, but a way of representation, and the agenda hidden behind that representation, which was linked to the state power, cartography and colonisation. What was interesting was that a cross-cultural translation happened in their collaboration. Very different world views and agendas needed to be translated.

M: In our case, during the workshops we have with AC, we are allowed into ‘seeing’ how the code translates our ideas, without knowing the code. We do this through the finding of a common language, the creation of the tree structures, the discussions. We are not there yet in making the map, we know that there will always be a knowledge gap. Only trust can bridge that gap.

Cl: How can the map not only be a visual structure but also an encouraging tool for narrating?

K: Still a big question, how to translate Tupaia’s counter-mapping for our own goals, and switch the map from a tool of navigation, orientation to a tool of narration. Tupaia's ancestral oral stories helped him to navigate. Tupaia made a map for Cook that is a story telling device. However his own way finding did not need a map, the stories were enough, together with the embodied knowledge he derived from the waves, the sun, stars, the flight of birds etc… What is special about the new representation he creates from scratch is the translation he made of all this knowledge on a 2D map. Embodied practices and narratives combined with a 2D western representation system…

M: You can look at the map from a technical point of view, or rather from the viewpoint of the relations that form around it. The relational infrastructure.

R: Relational infrastructure as a concept became our glasses to look through. Even walking became a relational infrastructure. Or a PhD can be seen as relational infrastructure, it is all about conditions. We start from this perspective, and how can we detail this…

C: Editing and publishing a book together, is from my experience a real relational endeavour. It creates an intense exchange of knowledge for all participants. When this book is ready, the network created slightly loosens and needs another project in order to stay in touch. I believe the map as a publishing tool actually permits us to continue this process, since the continuous use of the platform (uploading, looking for relations, ...) asks the group to continue to exchange, to continue to relate. So the map needs a dynamic colophon: clear authors, curators, programmers, and their contact information, to create the possibility of a user to ask/relate to the people maintaining the infrastructure.

L: For me the ‘dark’ in the more positive sense here is the incompleteness of the map, the possibility to be changed, added, ... The unknown new relations that can be found...

M: Piranese's map of Rome is a very good example, dealing with this notion of incompleteness. It depicts a map of Rome, once chiselled on a large stone, but subsequently fallen apart. Piranese arranges some pieces of the map onto a sheet. Different fragments of Rome appear like islands in a sea. It is a good reference because the projects of our partners are sometimes geographically very far apart (Belgium, Denmark), the area between them not being very relevant.

C: Interesting about the Tupaia map is that certain islands could appear twice on the same map. I thought that on our map, a territory like Brussels can also appear several times, but the perimeter of the island will be different according to the project that is depicted. However I think it is important that the cut-out will always refer to the same 'shared' geo-referenced map, so it will show also the markers of other projects on it.

M: When you look at the Piranesi map, how do you define the border of the ‘islands’, the different locations where projects take place? Would the different islands overlap?

R: If everything is pre-defined, like every ‘island’ reaches to the next one, than it becomes limiting. There can’t be then another project in between them in the future. We are talking about the ‘islands’ like Ghent, Brussels,…where projects take place… not about the layers in one city…

C: Would it be interesting, if possible, to organise the islands of our map every time differently by choosing certain “relations” to stand out more? For example when I want to see a geographic ordening (Brussels island close to Ghent island, …), or if I want to see a thematic ordening, or according to the form of the practices: protocols, guided walks, installations, … So the general map does not have a fixed form but is dynamic and adaptable by the user himself.

19/01/2023

MEETING with Max, Clementine and V&H about the text:

TO DO for EACH of us: -personal perspectives on why collaborating on the mapping -what means a relational infrastructure for us?

Short overview of things we will do: the questions of Clementine/Tyson/Loes CODE is still problem, not clarified, discussed How to govern the map in the future, maintaining it alone is not the same thing Accessibility of the map: curated or open access. On invitation? A common with specific rules?

How do we want to set up the text: idea: a conversation between us. Here a test:

M: From which perspectives do we speak in this text? Is it the perspective, so to speak from Tupaia’s canoe? Who is navigating the boat? Do we show multiple perspectives?

C: Are we the map makers, the users and the readers, the public at the same time? There are complex layers of perspectives. We are partly fictitious personages that are ourselves and multiple selves at the same time…

R: A fiction that is ‘real’. We are entities that are at the same time individual artists, and collective’s and organisations. It should be clear that this text is about a process, developing a yet unfinished map, about the ambitions we have and the hurdles we met and will still meet…

K: We could use the existing lecture (said in intro?) as our basis, and try to transform the existing text fragments into a more dynamic dialogue among us.

R: Should we then randomly choose names from the people in our collective and let them ‘speak’? We are a collective of people and the ideas and discussions and reports were created together, they are shared.

C: But isn’t that contrary to the idea of a ‘federated’ approach? Isn’t it better to talk as ‘we’, and talk about the journey we went through together?

K: Federated means that you work together, that you mutualise, but that the individual’s or the different organisation’s voices do not get smothered under an hierarchical voice.

R: A ‘We’ does not really ‘exist’, we are all different voices. Is it necessary I think to give names. This also shows that we are still discussing, we are indeed in the middle of a process.

M: Yes, we can speak about polyphony: each keeps his or her own voice, but then a fictional dialogue is difficult.

R: But it is not necessary that the individual voice is so literary what one exactly said? The polyphony can be partly fictionalised.

K: We can be transparent about this, we can say that we choose this format for our text, and that we choose for ‘fictitious ‘characters…that are ourselves. We can say that we ‘gamefy’ a bit the conversation.

M: Do we also fictionalise the possible dissonance between us?

Another test for a dialogue fragment, still need to decide where it fits:

K: After our lecture at the Winterschool in Ghent Tyson asked us why we talk about dark infrastructure as something negative, as a monster and enemy, the heart of darkness. Can it also be a positive force?

R: We do not want to reveal our strategy and information to all. Some parties are opponents to what we do. It is like the Israeli army read the strategies of the Situationists.

C: It can be dangerous to show too many information.

M: The white pieces on the Piranesi map could be the so-called dark infrastructure. What separates the ‘islands’, I mean the different practices on the map is a void, and at the same time also packed with meaning. There are the relationships between us. That is a positive value.

K: I would focus on trust as a positive value within this ‘darkness’, it is like with Tupaia’s map, you have to navigate through situations that are difficult to understand, you try to understand the coding and modelling of digital map making, and you want to trust each other that you can find ways to communicate, find a way to translate this knowledge into something we can get our heads around.

M: Yes that’s a good point. For me this would mean that you can be at ease with the unknown, the monster.. .The unknown is often obscured, and one should avoid it, it is too much risk. Trust can overcome this fear of the unknown, if the trust comes from different sides of course.

C: Might the trust also come from an audience visiting the map?

K: Yes I think so. We are showing the process, we are allowing people into the kitchen when everything is still a mess, there is the dark monster of not knowing where we go and the invitation to join in on the experiment. It is counter to ‘learnification’, a type of education where everything should be known in advance. No real experiments, no mistakes and disasters, no speculation and no surprises.

more later....

Added by Katleen 18/01/2023 Some quotes that are of interest to our mapping praxis (from: Commonism, A new aesthetics of the real, eds. Nico Dockx & Pascal Gielen.)

-Antonio Negri says “ You need to make a distinction between common goods (beni comuni) which can be object of ownership and the common (il comune) as in ‘commonwealth’ which is a production, something formed by the common from within and cannot be owned. p103 -A quote from Dardot & Laval: “The common must be thought of as a co-activity, and not as a co-membership, co-property or co-ownership”. And “ Against the modes of essentializing the common(…), one has to affirm that only the practical activity of humans can bring forth common things, in the same vein as it is only this practical activity that can produce a new collective subject…” p 137 -A quote by Rudi Laermans: “Cooperation only instantiates the praxis of commoning when driven by a common cause.”p138 “Artistic cooperation first and foremost requires the co-definition of a descriptive common, a set of terms- be it concepts or metaphors, well defined theoretical propositions or loose images—allowing mutual understanding and facilitating communication during work. Yet of even greater importance is the joint production of a value common, however contextual or temporary.” “Assessing together the worth of what has been jointly produced makes up the core of artistic commoning…-yet it is also a practice in which value dissonance may prevent the co-creation of a value common”. p139

Added by Katleen 18/01/2023 Comments from Tyson and other participants on the lecture in Ghent

Dark Infrastructure? Is this always the enemy and the monster, the heart of darkness? Or can dark infrastructure in your case also be something positive? Perhaps darkness can prevent an enclosure? Perhaps we need darkness for sharing and mutualism? The unknown, in-transparent can be a force. It is about trust and being able to translate the languages to understand each other. Like with Tupaia: trust that knowledge can be transferred, even if the knowledge is so different, almost impossible to translate and so on…

Why making a digital map if the relation of power in relation to coding is not transparent? We are confronted in our lives with the digital. It has become all powerful, a force that is everywhere. You cannot say we go for a walk in the woods without google scraping the data of your whereabouts from your smartphone. The tactics of the situationists of re-using the city as a revolutionary gesture changing everyday life, is different today with camera’s and smartphones all over the place, and those gestures being re-appropriated (influencers, instagram images, guerrilla branding…). We want to create a tool together that will be functioning for the longer haul, and functions for collaborating online with people from different countries and cities…

When the map is Open Source, will it be accessible for everyone or curated? We do not want to monitor the map all the time for hate messages and so on, so it will be ‘curated’. Although we don’t want it to be closed off to new possible participants. Tyson: the Studio D website was hosted by the university website because of fear of constant monitoring, but was still hacked.

What is the orientation point of your mapping project? Who is riding the boat? Is it like with the Tupaia map? The river, the canoe, the fish are the centre of perspective? Where is the art work in this? We are building the map beyond the individual ‘art works’, the individual walks etc… We try to build an infrastructure for commoning, mutualism, governance structures. We speak about ‘value sovereignity’, the individual that needs to sustain him/herself while maximising mutualisation, by trying to improve our agency, working together, improve our conditions of production. On the other hand the individual walking practices are all encounters with the real world, debating real issues.

References they suggested:

Bmooc online course for arts only speaking with images. You never know where you are and you never ‘understand’ fully. Another way of experiencing an archive, only with images.http://www.bmooc.be/about

Professor Don Idhe, Filosophy/ Postphenomenology speaks about multiple world views in gaming. An I-view and an in-the -world-view.

Linda Knight: Inefficient mapping Inefficient mappings are created from gestural, drawn markings that are created in situ. The maps are produced while still, or while walking and moving. The mappings record affective relations within the milieu, in ways that do not emanate from the human but through ethically entangling with, observing, and modestly witnessing (Haraway, 2004) the already-movements of matter and/in spaces. The mappings are inefficient because trying to capture lively movements in entirety is impossible and futile. Partial recordings, or what Dennis Wood (2013) terms the “inefficient map” (maps that do not attempt to include everything but focus on aspects) can record such things as affects and the diverse pedagogical happenings that take place through the interactions and interactivities of matters, times, movements, spaces, and scales. Inefficient mapping is a non-representational account of the milieu, from noticing some of what goes on. Inefficient mapping does not claim to represent a truthful or whole account of the time-place. https://lindaknight.org/inefficient-mapping/

comments Clementine 16/01/2023, comments Ciel 19/1/2023

If the article starts with you starting the proposal, then growing into a progressive "we", I was thinking it would be nice to have at least one moment for each group to talk from their perspective on how they jump in or any other event that can be interesting to talk about from a subjective perspective. For instance, for me that would be the moment we discussed the "relational infrastructure" term, questioning the tautology with Ronny, that would express my interest in the project, and would help define the concept from a concrete question ?!

ADD personal perspectives to the lecture/draft

I've noted a few things while going through the ethertoff, some might be unimportant details...

I tried to use the questions of Clementine to give some partial answers and to start a kind of CONVERSATION? Good idea as a model for our text??? The text/questions of Loes below the lecture can be also used for a conversation...

Clementine: First and general feeling : I would need to have more conversations about the dark and relational concepts, how we define those.

yes, let's for example discuss here the remark we received: why is a dark infrastructure always perceived as a monster? Can it be a positive force for our mapping project and our practices as well? And indeed let's discuss and define better the relational infrastructure. With the Tupaia map we have some wonderful point of departure,comparing what they tried to achieve with their performative collaborative knowledge production. (I Added a SYNOPSIS on Tupaia's, the most relevant for our project, below the lecture)

Dark into relational into dark again ? Be aware that we (co-authors of the map) can find the tool we design effective and inclusive for our goals, but that from the outside it can be seen as dark. How do we invite the users/viewers of the map to be aware of the rules, to participate in the design making and content making. How do we extend the invitation, should we regulate it ? A question of scale, interests and resources ? Conceptual experiment vs. Practical realities.

We refer in the lecture to it as a possible ‘commons’, which is regulated, without we hope, becoming an enclosure. Everyone contributes to a common reciprocally. Work already done on the infrastructure should be recognised, as well as the invisible work of maintenance…

Making/editing/publishing a book together is often a real learning endeavour. It creates an intense exchange of knowledge for all participants and new relationships. When this book is ready, the network created slightly losens and needs another project in order to stay in touch. I believe the map as a publishing tool actually permits us to continue this process, since the continueous use of the platform (uploading, looking for relations, ...) asks the group to continue to exchange, to continue to relate. So the map needs a dynamic colophon: clear authors and contact information. The possibility of an active user to ask/relate to the programmers and conceptual authors of the tool. For me the dark here is the incompleteness of the map (as also Loes answered), the possibility to be changed, added, ... The unknown new relations that can be found...

Vincent's quote : in the last sentence he says both human and thermal, while human is thermal - Since thermal is what unites everything, rather be “human and non-human” ? We could find a better inclusive sentence. Also, this quote might be very specific to the ovens research, like “radiates” towards community when explaining "relational infrastructures". I think that could be used anyway but it would be also good to think of new metaphors for mapping.

Agree: thermal is too specific here. Agree.

The question of the authorship of documents we use. As we appropriate them, they become collaborators. In the Atlas of Ovens, we use a lot of documents for which we don't necessarily have the rights for. Is it something we should resolve at our own practice level or is it something we could collectively think of with the map ? We experimented that using a document when we could reach the author is really beneficial for our research, but isn’t an easy task to do. A good document is one that creates a relationship ?

This ‘clearing’ is a huge job, which can’t be centrally governed in the mapping tool. As you say, crediting a person for his/her work creates a relationship, positive or negative… Can be worth the effort.

When we say that our map « Is emancipated from utilitarianism and functionalism » I’d rather say something like “try to be - to tackle ” because it isn’t fully. Generally speaking, I would be more at ease with talking about the map with the future tense since the experiment is still pretty much open-ended, we didn't find solutions (yet) only questioning.

Yes, agree, more questions than answers, as we are in the middle of the process of trying to create the map together. I think we achieved already another level than a pure functional map, as we have been discussing a lot about agency, collaboration, creating a federated infrastructure…. In the text we are writing we are also opening up the process of collaborating on something we are trying to find out what it is by doing this together. Try to find common goals and common values, working through the different ideas and visions and disagreements…This is a strong and vulnerable position at te same time… Agree.

Is there still a plan to also introduce this aspect of different characters, think on how we present ourselves, we / us / one or the other ? I have the impression this form could be rather confusing to introduce the complexity of the article's content.

Yes, agree, it was a nice idea, but indeed confusing… Agree.

Question about the orientation point - Interesting about Tupaya is that certain islands could appear twice on the same map. I thought that on our "mosaic" map, A territory like Brussels can also appear several times, but the part of Brussels that is cut out will probably be different according to the project/gesture which defines its own perimeter (piece of geolocalised map), so its own perspective on the world). However the cut-out will always refer to the same 'shared' georeferenced map, so it will show also the markers of other projects on it. - Is it a possibility that organisation of the different pieces of maps on the opening page could also be arranged by the user/viewer of the website? Maybe by clicking/choosing certain “relations” to stand out more?: Ex.I want to see a geographic ordening. (Brussels island close to Ghent island, …) Ex. I want to see a thematic ordening. (property projects, heating, …) Ex. The form of the practices: protocols, guided walks, installations, …

Title I think we need a better and shorter title. Some directions: Tupaia, Mosaic, Archipelago, worlds of art, Worlding, what knots knot knots, to the Mordor

Text structure: I think it is a good idea to start the article with the description of different walking practices, (like you did). I would also give some space to the activistic motivation as a starting point. Maybe that should become clear from our dialogues ? Its maybe more the actions and ways of dealing with them in our dialogues that will show the activism than announcing the activism in advance

20230113 Lecture at WInterschool: Education of the Senses / KULeuven – LUCA Gent – 10 January 2023

Federated Map of Nomadic & Situated Practices (working title)

presentation Vermeir & Heiremans Loes Jacobs (Nadine)

partner organisations atelier cartographique, f.eks, nadine, skal contemporary partner artists ciel grommen, maximiliaan royakkers, clémentine vaultier, vermeir & heiremans

INTRO

1/Introduce yourself.

2/Introduce Partnership

This presentation voices the collective concerns of a partnership that are guiding a ongoing working process on the development of a mapping tool that would generate more agency for our ephemeral, embodied practices.

Maps are shaped by the conventions and power relations of their time, rather than having a neutral and disinterested scientific perspective. But questioning the power and authority of maps can generate an opportunity to use them as tools of disclosure and awareness.

That insight was the beginning of a conversation with the Brussels-based Atelier Cartographique. Atelier Cartographique was our partner of choice because of their critical approach to mapmaking both from a technical (open source) as well as from a comprehensive point of view. Theirs was a research proposal that consists in the conception of protocols for collecting and generating data embodied in various cultural contexts without erasing that context information or specificity.

In order to be able to work with AC, we have brought together a number of practices with a mutual interest in developing a mapping tool. All current partners were already loosely or more closely associated with Jubilee. Many of our peers have rather ephemeral practices that often are inscribed in a specific local context but take on a nomadic approach.

Next to ourselves and AC the partnership we set up around this project currently consists of one punctual collaboration between three artists (Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Clémentine Vaultier) and three small artist- or curator-run organisations

f.eks Skal Contemporary Nadine

Developing a mapping tool as a collaborative endeavour between different artistic practices, some more from a curatorial perpspective other from an artistic perspective; some organised in small self-run organisations others organised as a temporary project-based connection between a number of individual practitioners, promised to be a complex process.

We will talk about different things that we found inspiring, that we found relevant and could share, about the limitations of our ambitions, the points where those ambitons converged. And then we'll briefly address all the details and practicalities that we had to deal with in a way that transformed what can be considered a dark infrastructure into a relational infrastructure. We will end our presentation with a dialogue on the different forms walking as an artistic form takes. But taking a step back - and what better way to activate our senses - we'll start with a short walk.

WALKING > can become NOMADIC PRACTICES

1/V&H: Inspiring history in the arts: situationists Walking has an inspiring history in the arts, as well as in literature and philosophy. Balancing between artistic, educational and flaneurial practices, it not only generates a sensory experience, a physical way of being in the world. Walking also creates a new, shared space in which the questioning of apparently fixed ideas becomes possible. This radical space of imagination puts all participants on a more equal footing, a sound basis for an exchange of ideas.

2/Loes: -Presentation & Production organisation -Walking Biennial -Not a guided tour -Creatie en Co-Creation method with an audience -Protocol walks

3/V&H: case in Ghent: Cempuis In our practice we walk through the city's material infrastructure, and link those material 'anchor points' to an 'intangible heritage': ideas of philosophers, politicians and artists who lived and walked in the neighborhoods bwe traverse ourselves.

Giving a 'voice' to the resource in the shared public space triggers the imagination of participants and opens discussions on values. ”More than mere things, natural landscapes and built environments are cultural touchpoints. They involve us in care for the public good.”i As a research method, walking generates 'situated knowledge' and creates a context in which the public is not merely a participant, but becomes a co-author.

Walking immediately involves the public in the process. The public is invited to add their own stories to the walks. Because of this and its site-specific character, the research generates 'situated knowledge'. The research takes the form of an open process, the outcome of which is a negotiation between the various people involved in this process. As method it allows audiences, peers and experts to be directly involved in a relational, place-determining and non-hierarchical exercise. Walking creates a direct involvement in the present context, generates interactions and thus a joint output: the data that the walks produce, both visual, discursive and digital.

Mapping/Walking/Education One of the inspiring figures for our mapping project was the Brussels-based French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905). In his lessons he never used two-dimensional maps. Instead he started from the observation of the nearest stream. Based on his book Histoire d'un ruisseau (1869) he practiced an 'intuitive geography,' one that was in direct contact with its environment.

Geography takes up a central role in alternative learning, with walking as an alternative didactic method. Anarchist geography saw maps as a means of creating subjects rather than empowered citizens. The great tradition of anarchic education swears by the axiom that the best learning happens... through the Soles of our Feet.

(this was for the mini-walk in Ghent) case in Ghent: Cempuis // Reclus // St Lucas Schools clashing of educational ideological systems summer school for teachers – experience-based education leçon de choses // orphanage: first anarchist school that experiments with these new methodologies based on the ideas of Reclus

(adapted by Loes on 29/01/2023) WALKING or ON NOMADIC PRACTICES

V&H: Walking has an inspiring history in the arts, as well as in literature and philosophy. Balancing between artistic, educational and flaneurial practices, it not only generates a sensory experience, a physical way of being in the world. Walking also creates a new, shared space in which the questioning of apparently fixed ideas becomes possible. This radical space of imagination puts all participants on a more equal footing, a sound basis for an exchange of ideas.

L: Around 2014 nadine was connected to a group of Brussels based artists who were very active in public space, using walking, travelling, or mobility in their artistic practices as methods or ways to create, and in some cases connect to an audience. That year we initiated the Wandering Arts Biennial, a platform where artists could gather to share these practices, but also, to find an audience to present them.

V&H: Walking immediately involves the public in the process. The public is [in our walking practice] invited to add their own stories to the walks. Because of this and its site-specific character, the research generates 'situated knowledge'. The research takes the form of an open process, the outcome of which is a negotiation between the various people involved in this process. As method it allows audiences, peers and experts to be directly involved in a relational, place-determining and non-hierarchical exercise.

L: In this direct involvement of the public, people become co-creators or companions in the research. As an organisation it’s interesting to find the right language for the public to take part in such walking practice. Next to this participatory and co-creative practice, we also communicate about walks that were created for an audience to experience ‘after’ the walk is already made, i.e. after the creative process has taken place. This can exist with or without the artist present, and with one or more people walking. Of course in all cases, these are experience driven artworks. They exist because they are walked. The more they are walked, the more layered (in time, in narration) they become.

V&H: Walking creates a direct involvement in the present context, generates interactions and thus a joint output: the data that the walks produce, both visual, discursive and digital.

L: This is why the creation of a (online) tool for mapping, and therefore inevitably archiving, is interesting and raises pertinent questions about the very nature of ephemeral nomadic practices and their existence off- and online.

V&H: As well as on public space. In our practice we walk through the city's material infrastructure, and link those material 'anchor points' to an 'intangible heritage': ideas of philosophers, politicians and artists who lived and walked in the neighbourhoods we traverse ourselves. Giving a 'voice' to the resource in the shared public space triggers the imagination of participants and opens discussions on values. “More than mere things, natural landscapes and built environments are cultural touchpoints. They involve us in care for the public good.” (Reference?)

L: I think the non-hierarchical perspective is very important here. The (temporary) horizontal organisation created during your walks, make it very different from classic didactic guided tours.

V&H: Geography takes up a central role in alternative learning, with walking as an alternative didactic method. Anarchist geography saw maps as a means of creating subjects rather than empowered citizens. The great tradition of anarchic education swears by the axiom that the best learning happens... through the Soles of our Feet. One of the inspiring figures for our mapping project was the Brussels-based French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905). In his lessons he never used two-dimensional maps. Instead he started from the observation of the nearest stream. Based on his book Histoire d'un ruisseau (1869) he practiced an 'intuitive geography,' one that was in direct contact with its environment.

L: The refusal of 2D maps, reminds me of the different maps we distributed during WAB. Not all nomadic practices are geolocated points on a map. There are many artists who create protocols for walking (or moving) through public space. The starting or ending points are unknown, and people navigate following certain protocols, like descriptions, counting mechanismes or even using tools such as dice to make decisions. It’s a good challenge to implement these walks on the map.

V&H: [we can close this part possibly with coming back to where we started, the situationists]

MAPPING: ATELIER CARTOGRAPHIQUE

All of the partners have expressed a specific interest in developing a mapping tool, so one of the first things we did was each of us to make a note on our specific desires and needs that we projected in this new tool, as a first briefing for Atelier Cartographique to better understand what kind of tool needs to be developed. There was clearly a lot of overlap between the different lists, but after a series of exchanges this resulted in a 'unified briefing proposal' in which we describe the map as an archival and publishing tool.

It would contain visual markers that would be interconnected so that the map could also function as a storytelling device that can narrate not only place and distance, but also relations, histories, agency, empiral approaches. It would allow partners to share knowledge with each other and their public(s). Each partner also required a proper visual identity. In short the map would act as a digital portal and provide access to different layers of content through integrated anchor points. This interactive layer would lead visitors to essays, discussions, images, videos, archival documents...

That insight was the beginning of our conversation with the Atelier Cartographique, but very soon in the process things started shifting and other priorities came to the foreground.

Atelier cartographique is a cooperative that describes itself as “commited to centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.“ The cooperative is a technical provider for public administrations with a mission to build and maintain a spatial data infrastructure. The cooperative tries to advance a political agenda within this mission building a balance between this agenda and meeting its financial needs,repairing the ship while it sails as a matter of speaking. This balance sometimes involves trade-offs.

The visible and explicit agenda prominently includes:

• Questioning the technologies used.
• Making systems intelligible and tangible.
• Shaping a common vocabulary for talking about things and taking into account the implications of talking about one thing rather than another, or that this or that term will be visible or invisible within the infrastructure. This work is mostly done in research projects, in academic contexts, outside of commissions of different administrations.
• Accompanying development, and even preceding it, by producing the richest possible social interactions despite the rather vertical context. The technological platform does not exist as a disconnected entity (as a dark object) but must be appropriated by its users in order to be instantiated as an actor in its own right.
• Refusing to bend to standardized tools without questioning the relationships of exchange and power at work in the dynamics they provoke.
• Trying to understand how aesthetic issues intersect with the whole of the technical and political processes in progress.

The hidden agenda gathers more contrasted components:

• Understanding better who builds Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for what, for whom. Swarm the preliminaries necessary to get rid of the tradition of military and colonial exploitation, now reproduced, distorted and amplified by the gafa platform economy.
• Digging into how to build GIS and visualization systems that distort the relations of domination inherent to Haraway's notion of God's Eye.
• Postulating that another geography, other data structures can emerge, resistant to extractivism. Going beyond the most direct questions of surveillance, asking what is data extractivism made of?
• Probing the appropriation of tools by others with a focus on questions of limits, issues, difficulties, roughness of tools, expectations of technology. Studying how difficult it is to get out of these expectations.
• Questioning the ambition to produce GIS and mapping? What technological and visual fascinations are involved?

DARK INFRASTRUCTURE

From the above agenda it becomes clear that our discussions with Atelier Cartographique started from an understanding of maps as a ‘dark infrastructure.’

Map making as such has a very long history that testifies of an idealistic but nevertheless brutal ambition to model the world after the beliefs of its makers. You could say that Google Maps and Google Earth are the ultimate disruptors of the Enlightenment belief in the transparent, objective reality of the map. But even before google there have been a lot of map makers that held different convictions on mapping.

We decided to look into early fissures that fundamentally question the maps of Ribeiro (15..) that split the world in two parts, the East for the Portugese empire, and the West for the Castillian world of Charles V, or the maps of the Flemish map maker Mercator (15..) that projected the globe in a way that made navigating the seas west and east more efficient... to give but two examples.

We already mentioned Elisee Reclus. Réclus' approach was a form of decolonising mapping. His was an empirical approach: it is better to first go into the landscape and head for the river closest by. There he would gather clay, model the landscape, understand it with his hands and then go to an abstraction of the landscape which was in his case a globe.

A second very inspiring case is the Tupaia map. In a first instance three issues inspired us: the meeting of different systems of representation in an unique effort of collaboration (Mercator & Polynesian); map as a narrative device; the cano as a central fixed point with all things surrounding it as mobile.

SHORT ELABORATION Tupaia’s rehabilitation as master navigator only came with a sustained decolonial movement and cultural renaissance across the region which strove to recover Oceanic knowledges displaced by imperialism and missionary activities. One part of this renaissance was to recover the ancient technique of Oceanic wayfinding. In many ways this inverted the globalized conception that travelers move in static, objectively surveyed and classified worlds. Rather, its core cognitive strategy has been to imagine the canoe as fixed in space, and to dynamise the world surrounding the traveler. The resulting bearings on island-to-island voyages needed to be constantly reconfigured, to “the attribution of directionality to all the heterogeneous inputs from the sun, stars, winds, waves, reefs, birds, weather, landmarks, seamarks, and sealife.” And additional techniques to ‘fish up’ islands from the horizon came into play, first and foremost strategies of “expanding the target […] by looking for patterns of ocean swells, flights of birds, cloud formations, and reflections of the underside of clouds” (Turnbull 1997, 556).

Over the past 30 years, researchers on Tupaia’s Map accordingly began to suspect that the chart combines Western mapping conventions with distinctly Oceanic modes of geographic orientation. Tupaia’s Map is an absolute masterpiece of cross-cultural translation. Whereas the Europeans on Cook’s expedition failed to understand any of the complexities of Polynesian navigational practice, Tupaia must have acquired a rather thorough understanding of Cook’s navigational strategies. And he – who never saw or needed a map before he dealt with Cook and his crew – devised a cartographic system from scratch which allowed him to document the vast extent of Polynesian navigational knowledge in a Western representational form.

A map can become a critical tool, thinking about representations, creating agency, countering dark infrastructures and (power) relations. The so-called Tupaia map inspires us for our collaborative map making for several reasons:

2/share and create knowledge, starting from our embodied practices of walking: NEEDS & DESIRES

6/Tupaia’s map is an attempt at communication and collaboration between different world views and representations SHARED LANGUAGE with AC

3/contradictions: a practical mapping tool, geo-locating walks in space, on the other hand this way of representation does not fit our embodied practices. It does not account for narratives, does not show relations, the fleeting of time, and the encounter with real spaces. PRACTICAL & META level

4/Tupaia’s map is an attempt to bring the contradictions together: mapping and counter mapping at the same time. It is the clashing and translation of representational systems, the clashing of abstraction and embodied knowledges in one map.

5/Tupaia makes map making into a narrative device, and into a relational infrastructure RELATION BETWEEN PRACTICES

1/critical view on mapmaking - transform a dark infrastructure into a relational one

7/It is a performative knowledge production system that interests us in our collective endeavour and search for a relational infrastructure that can activate and create some agency for our practices. AGENCY - INTERCONNECTEDNESS

WORKING PROCESS

Before going too deep into this laborious work it was important to continue asking ourselves what we value most and what this project is aiming for. Do we really value efficient data storage and traceability? Is archiving a series of singular documents related to the different practices our highest ambition? And if there is something to trace, isn't it rather the relationship and not the source document in itself, meaning that our map should rather highlight the context in which we found the document than the document itself? Or the context in which we use it?

Another issue that all of the partners, and in particular in relation to Atelier Cartographique, invested a lot of energy and time in was the development of a shared laguage. For none of us working on code is not what makes our clock tick. We do see the potential of a mappig tool from a more conceptual point of view. Choices were between two programs: cartofixer and waend. Atelier Cartographique tried to explain the ins and outs of both, their respective advantages and limitations.

Cartofixer is primarily aimed at civic, social, artistic and activist initiatives. It takes the form of a series of technological tools that are activated in collective moments (workshops) intended to support the implementation of observation campaigns, the collection of data, their visualization, and the publication of maps. Through these devices, cartofixer encourages the creation of common, specific, situated knowledge, by and for the subjects concerned by the spatial/territorial issues that are discussed during the collection, during the creation of maps, and during their publication.

Our initial discussions turned out to be very frustrating. It all remained too abstract and none of us could even start to imagine what kind of mapping tool could be developed from either program. Since we couldn't find our way between the basic atoms of GIS (geographical information system): dots (points), lines (non-closed shapes), polygons (closed shapes) and the relations between the three shapes, we decided to discuss the possibility of different approach.

If we were going to use one mapping tool together, it was key that we would boil down our different needs and desires to a limited number that work out for all the aspiring mapmakers around the table. We came to a decision that the map should work on two levels: on the one had it needed to be practical, but on the other hand it also needed to have meta-level as well. We made a new resume about why we would engage in a mapping project. The ideas that came up pushed the publishing, but even more the archiving function to a lower ranking in the hierarchy.

1/ tool for sharing & activating knowledge and narratives

2/ capture the nomadic / performative

3/ art / architecture / public space / social practice / ecology

4/ connecting different communities

5/ publishing opportunity / documents & narratives : immediately open to show the process

6/ tool for archiving

7/ layered structure / overlap / connections

8/ added value / interconnectedness

Developing the tool would henceforth be initiated through a series of workshops that Atelier Cartographique would set up with us, which proofed to be extermely useful for developing a shared language. These workshops would concretise all the notions that had been brought to the table. Topics for the workshops were conceived in a way to clarify for AC as well as for the partners what the mapping tool could generate, how it would work, and how it would look. AC sent us an update of the quote, integrating a series of 10 workshops, and a proposal for a working program, including days dedicated to workshops, development and design, and in final stage finetuning and testing. The timeframe would be between end of November and end of February. We all agree on this planning.

So far our meetings had been online. For the workshops Pierre proposes to meet live in the AC office. From experience that works better. The workshops can be hybrid, providing online presence for thse who can't make it and for the non-Belgian participants. Not ideal but no other solution.

What do we want to avoid? -Decontextualization > situatedness of practices > also situatedness of sources -Traceability > idea of incompleteness and continuous evolution should be visible What do we want to reach?
-map as a vehicle for our own projects AND for our collaborations (federated approach) -map to show the relationships between objects, narratives, journeys, and partnerships -map to create more agency for our immaterial pratcices -how not to create enclosures/dark infrastructures and openness to new practices, -but with acknowledging the work already done on the basic infrastructure -and the invisible work to maintain it...( a commons with clear rules of use and access?) -map a a 'relational contract'.

The workshops were split up in two parts, one addressing an inventory of materials, the other the issue of visual identity. Visual identity would be limited to the possibilities that are offered by a series of built-in tools. At the same time different users need to be identifiable, so it is clearly a two-sided issue: possibility to connect and differentiate between projects will be an exercise in balance. In that way the mapping tool opens up possible readings that go beyond the individual contributions, yet it does not deny thes singularity of contributions. The mapping tool we started to have in mind balances between contributing to a common layer, and filling out a specific project layer. A choice to share or not, and the level of sharing...

When writing this text we're still working on part one. While we were discussing, Pierre had been drawing, in that way trying to split up basic elements of the mapping tool. See IMAGE.

1/Inventory of materials: map as an archival tool AC would need to have a view on which materials we will want to bring into the map. For this first workshop each of us would print out some samples of information that they imagine being uploaded on the map. This would clarify our different practices, and our diverse needs from concrete materials. It would allow to regroup these materials based on certain things they have in common, and on how they can be connected to the map.

We did a modeling workshop in two groups. We started conceiving forms of generalisation for the different objects, texts and images that we had brought together, and the possible relations between them. The idea was that starting from the discussed imaginaries, these different objects, relations need to be 'located and characterized.' The interacting objects need structuring in order to be able to be activated afterwards when using the map. Basically at this point we started making out the content that would be offered in the mapping tool. Goal of the workshop was to identify different layers and elements, aiming to visualize the materials that were in front of us. In short we needed to define: Objects / Relations / Characteristics and imagine them as dots / lines / polygones.

Trying to motivate us to dive into this endeavour Pierre Marchand gives us a bit more context. An information system is built with structured data: Description / Properties will define different 'types of things.' The idea is that we discuss the imagenaries you have in mind and from there together model them into different 'types of things' AC will not do that for you, but with you. The idea is that we discuss the imagenaries you have in mind and from there together model them into different 'types of things' This is a very important exercise, because the structure that we will develop together will define the uture possibilities of the mapping tool.

We need to converge on a common language. The exercise results in a series of A3 with tree structures. After this initial exercise we regroup and both groups go through what was noted on the A3. The exercise turned out to be very useful for participants to not only better understand their own projects, but relate them to a map: what should go on the map. In a second instance it clarifies what our projects concretely share with each other. Names and properties allow different forms of overlap to become apparent.

AC has used our input in the modeling exercise to already start programming the mapping tool. The visualisation of the programming is an A3 page with a series of tree structures, some of which are linked to each other with an arrowed line. We go through the tree structures and discover many overlaps. Having worked in two groups resulted in giving different names – classes – to similar concerns. We discuss which classes respond best to our common interest and elimnate almost half of the classes. AC has corrected the programming and this is the new visualisation. See IMAGE.

It is clear that there would be a great many documents. Question is what to include in the map: some docs will be integarated in the map, while others will be visible as links that appear on the side panel of the map. Again we raise the question Why do we want to bring these practices into a map?

Nomadic and situated practices is what we share. These consists of different projects, all of them defined in space and time: eg. a bike tour, an exhibition, a festival. Each project makes use of external sources, both visual and textual: eg. a picture of an oven, an excerpt from a letter of Proudhon...

How do we deal with source documents. It is not about creating a double of our websites. It is not about storing archive (all our source documents) in the map. We all agree that the map should not be doubling up with our general website. So the source, eg. oven picture/lettre, does not need a singular space, but we can link to it on another website. The image of the oven in itself is not interesting, but the link between the two projects (ovens and spa) becomes the point of interest. The image should be contextualised. The objects/pictures/narratives start to function as 'relational infrastructure.'

How to we show the different relationships and collaborations on the map, e.g. V&H doing a 7 Walks project with F.eks in Denmark. F.eks doing a project in Spa etc... We wonder if these will become visible in a second layer? We want to highlight and enforce the relations that (can) exist between different places, between places and projects, between projects and projects, and between the different partners and practices, yet our nomadic and situated artistic practices also have something to reveal about a place itself, and our practices remain singular approaches. We find ourselves in a paradoxical position, if not contradictory. > How do you mean?

At that point we start discussing what we've named a federated approach: how can these relations be an added value to us (as partners)? How does the 'federated' map create agency for our practices, how does it generate visibility. If you know V&H, can you get to know about Nadine's projects? How does the 'federated' map allow sharing of content and information, sharing a critical approach for all partners involved? Eg. an announcement can be shared by all of us via the map.

The reason for the mapping tool to exist becomes that it should create an agency that goes beyond an individual websites, individual newsletters and beyond announcements on social media that can be shared among more people. On the map you can highight different relationships/activate immaterial practices...

How would it 'involve' the public, reader of the map? All markers should always be visible: the shared map becomes the consistent underlayer. This means no seperate maps for each partner. Ex. if you want to focus on Nadine’s Kunst&Zwalm, an oven project in Zwalm (unrelated to Nadine’s festival) should also potentially be visible. All these connections need to be made visible, active, federated... what would be needed for that in terms of which information we need upload.

At the same time we wonder how not to become self-referenced. How can the mapping tool remain open to new users, or even an audience? How to create a 'commons' with clear rules of use, content, access?

Conclusion of our discussion is that we focus on highlighting the relation between documents. They only get a surplus value if they concretise relations between the different partners. They become testimony of a dynamic, an agency that goes beyond one artist or organisation. The docs that are integrated in the map show relationships between our practices. In that way the docs are part of and generate multiple narratives rather than just being a doc in a database, that in the end is merely an accumulation of 'autonomous' docs. The documents becomes 'relational' objects.

RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

All partners are mostly working in public space. We also give most value to processes and want to accomodate a wide variety and range of people, places, things, archives... Our discussions bring us to a map that aims to make our interconnectedness visible, as well as our collaborations and communications with each other. It creates more agency for our ephemeral practices and could function as what we've named a relational infrastructure. In that way the map can even become a tool for federation. Let's briefly expand on that.

“When we use the term "relational", it is not in reference to Nicolas Bourriaud's "relational aesthetics" but rather to a taking into account the socius of the practice. “Relational” therefore designates the systemic interlacing of beings – in the sense of participants, neighbours, students, etc. – , tools, resources, fuels and energies, both human, thermal, etc.“ (Vincent Meessen)

With the mapping tool we will design a discursive protocol where historical sources come to dialogue with each other, testify to the narratives and events that we organize, and allow the transmission of knowledge or questions via situated stories. We explore how maps function not only as containers of geolocated knowledge but also as relational infrastructures. More than simple technical carcasses that support information processes, maps radiate out to communities and can support new forms of social relations.

What would help us to define the conditions necessary to form partnerships that embody what we would name a ‘relational infrastructure’. These can not be merely about economic conditions and financial flows, which are only one part of the whole ecosystem. It also implies alternative forms of governance. How to organise and how to share, yet avoid free riding? How to define responsibilities and maximise mutualisation? How to account for invisible work, and allow for the distribution of benefits to all the contributors who generated value. How to define relations of property?

Our relational and contextual approach allows for collective activations of the map. These form artistic proposals that go beyond the digital as medium and subject, but carefully take into account their relationship with the digital environment that supports these practices. The mapping tool invites social bonding and knowledge sharing as well as a more intimate way to relate to any resources that support its activity. We want to develop it as a multiple access tool, generating multiple perspectives that are interconnected, yet also singular.

HOW WOULD IT LOOK??

In an interview Justin Bennett critiques the maps that are used for sound walks. He states that geolocalised dots cannot account for the time of sounds or the walks. The map cannot represent time and movement. The sound walk is just a dot on a map. What you have is rather a geolocated archive of sounds recorded all over the world.

Justin had sent us two links with mapping practices. One link offered a additional step towards the devlopment of our mapping tool. One defined a small part of Amsterdam as a project area. It was shaped as a triangle, and reminded us of one of the constituting elements of a situationist map that brings together different parts of different cities. These parts are then linked with each other using arrows that indicate the 'atmospheric flow' between the different parts. See IMAGE.

Max responded to this by showing us a map of Rome drawn by Piranesi. It was a mapping of Rome but visualised as broken parts of a marble floor that had different parts of the city drawn onto them. Link to Piranesi maps: https://socks-studio.com/2018/11/04/forma-urbis-romae/ See IMAGE.

We could say that the ‘white space’ in between the geolocalised, archived walks and stories, is the space with most agency, activating the relationships and collaborations we have with each other, being critical and aware of new enclosures this might generate. This raises the question how to open up to new participants and collaborations? We start to see this collaborative experiment as a case-study towards a federated approach. How can we collaborate, how can we create agency and visibility for one another, how do we make collective decisions, all this without losing our ‘individuality’, but trying to find common values, aiming for co-operation, mutual support and emancipation.

Our contextual artistic practice generates art that does not erase the primordial role of the tool produced. The map is emancipated from utilitarianism and functionalism but has become a real engine of encounter, discussion and narration. Intangible social practices can be developed and empowered through approaching them as materials and infrastructures that condition these practices. Advocating the principle “Enable value sovereignity while maximizing mutualization,”ii our mapping tool acknowledges the need of the individual to sustain her/himself and yet create a solidarity economy by the mutual distribution of collectively generated values among all contributors.iii

CONCLUSION

As artist duo, we first intended to realise a digital map that would act as a critical cartographic portal that would echo our walking practice. But our initial idea evolved substantially. We wondered if a collaborative mapping approach, working with small and artist-run organisations, wouldn't be more empowering. Finding a balance between a visible, explicit agenda of mapping (e.g. does it emanate political views) and its invisible counterpart (e.g. does it perhaps create a new enclosure?) – mapping as a dark infrastructure – which is inevitably reflected in the practice of mapping, was our first concern. Therefore this collaborative mapping will also have to be a practice of counter-mapping. We need to continuously code-switch between the geo-localised god’s eye view of mapping, and the critical map that can subvert this. This counter-map accounts for what we all find important within our embodied art practices: the flow of time, narratives, histories, relationships, situated knowledge derived from direct observation, emotions, collaborations, discussions…

When thinking about mapping as a collaborative endeavour, it opens the possibility to counteract the possessive qualities that mapping often incorporates. Our approach is aiming for a partnership in which our immaterial practices gain more agency. But rather than increased visibility (a geo-localised archive of the practices), the relationships between our organisations and practices will become the main focus of the mapping tool.

-to be done: CODE IS POWER -future relation with AC -maintenance / storage -distribution -financing

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20230113 KEY WORDS - LECTURE Education of the Senses / KUL-LUCA presented by Vermeir & Heiremans and Loes Jacobs (Nadine)

INTRO IN LUCA

1/Introduce yourself.

2/Intro Partnership: collectives – embodied practices maps – conventions & power relations of time of production conversation AC very short – longer when speaking about Mapping

Partnership V&H Ciel&Max&Clementine V&H over Scott and Anne Nadine

3/Intro Presentation -collective concerns of a partnership -ongoing working process -a mapping tool -agency for our nomadic practices -end with different forms walking as artistic practice

-invitation to a short walk.

WALKING

1/V&H: Inspiring history in the arts: situationisten and Reclus

2/Loes: -Presentation & Production organisation -Walking Biennial -Not a guided tour -Creatie en Co-Creation method with an audience -Protocol walks

3/V&H: case -giving 'voice' to material 'anchor points' - linkingto an 'intangible heritage' -in Ghent: Cempuis -imagination of participants – shared space -process-oriented and open structure -relational, place-determining and non-hierarchical exercise.

-mapping / walking / education: an anarchist pedagogy: -Reclus - Learning Through the Soles of our Feet: education as a form of emancipation -rich Brussels history of alternative learning but also in Ghent -Cempuis: summer school – clashing of educational/ideological systems IN LUCA

MAPPING - ATELIER CARTOGRAPHIQUE

-desires and needs -questions around collectivity, mutualism and the distribution of value -a digital portal and provide access to different layers of content through integrated anchor points: essays, discussions, images, videos, archival documents...

1/conversation with AC: “commited to centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.“

-questioning the power and authority of maps -but also tools of disclosure and awareness.

-visible and explicit agenda:

1.         - Questioning the technologies used. 
1.         - Making systems intelligible and tangible. 
1.         - Shaping a common vocabulary for talking about things and taking into account the implications of talking about one thing rather than another, or that this or that term will be visible or invisible within the infrastructure. This work is mostly done in research projects, in aca demic contexts, outside of commissions of different administrations. 
1.         - Accompanying development, and even preceding it, by producing the richest possible social interactions despite the rather vertical context. The technological platform does not exist as a disconnected entity (as a dark object) but must be appropriated by its users in order to be instantiated as an actor in its own right. 
1.         - Refusing to bend to standardized tools without questioning the relationships of exchange and power at work in the dynamics they provoke. 
1.         - Trying to understand how aesthetic issues intersect with the whole of the technical and political processes in progress.

-hidden agenda:

1.         - Understanding better who builds Geographic Information Systems (GIS), for what, for whom. Swarm the preliminaries necessary to get rid of the tradition of military and colonial exploitation, now reproduced, distorted and amplified by the gafa platform economy.
1.         - Digging into how to build GIS and visualization systems that distort the relations of domination inherent to Haraway's notion of God's Eye. 
1.         - Postulating that another geography, other data structures can emerge, resistant to extractivism. Going beyond the most direct questions of surveillance, asking what is data extractivism made of? 
1.         - Probing the appropriation of tools by others with a focus on questions of limits, issues, difficulties, roughness of tools, expectations of technology. Studying how difficult it is to get out of these expectations. 
1.         -Questioning the ambition to produce GIS and mapping? What technological and visual fascinations are involved?

2/Dark Infrastructure

-discussions with AC started from an understanding of maps as a ‘dark infrastructure.’ -long history of mapmaking -to model the world after the beliefs of its makers:

Google Maps and Google Earth are the ultimate disruptors of the Enlightenment belief in the transparent, objective reality of the map.

-early disruptors: -see Elisee Reclus -also Tupaia map: the meeting of different systems of representation in an unique effort of collaboration (Mercator & Polynesian); map as a narrative device; the cano as a central fixed point with all things surrounding it as mobile.

-workshops interlink with Tupaia map:

2/share and create knowledge, starting from our embodied practices of walking: NEEDS & DESIRES

6/Tupaia’s map is an attempt at communication and collaboration between different world views and representations SHARED LANGUAGE with AC

3/contradictions: a practical mapping tool, geo-locating walks in space, on the other hand this way of representation does not fit our embodied practices. It does not account for narratives, does not show relations, the fleeting of time, and the encounter with real spaces. PRACTICAL & META level

4/Tupaia’s map is an attempt to bring the contradictions together: mapping and counter mapping at the same time. It is the clashing and translation of representational systems, the clashing of abstraction and embodied knowledges in one map.

5/Tupaia makes map making into a narrative device, and into a relational infrastructure RELATION BETWEEN PRACTICES

1/critical view on mapmaking - transform a dark infrastructure into a relational one

7/It is a performative knowledge production system that interests us in our collective endeavour and search for a relational infrastructure that can activate and create some agency for our practices. AGENCY - INTERCONNECTEDNESS

WORKING PROCESS

Before going too deep into this laborious work it was important to continue asking ourselves what we value most and what this project is aiming for. Do we really value efficient data storage and traceability? Is archiving a series of singular documents related to the different practices our highest ambition? And if there is something to trace, isn't it rather the relationship and not the source document in itself, meaning that our map should rather highlight the context in which we found the document than the document itself? Or the context in which we use it?

-start: 'unified briefing proposal' -archiving a series of singular documents - relationship between docs -development of a shared laguage. -cartofixer - Frustrating: basic atoms of GIS (geographical information system): dots (points), lines (non-closed shapes), polygons (closed shapes) and the relations between the three shapes

-boil down to practical + meta-level 1/ tool for sharing & activating knowledge and narratives 2/ capture the nomadic / performative 3/ art / architecture / public space / social practice / ecology 4/ connecting different communities 5/ publishing opportunity / documents & narratives : immediately open to show the process 6/ tool for archiving 7/ layered structure / overlap / connections 8/ added value / interconnectedness

-What do we want to avoid? Decontextualization > situatedness of practices > also situatedness of sources Traceability > idea of incompleteness and continuous evolution should be visible

-What do we want to reach?
1. map as a vehicle for our own projects AND for our collaborations (federated approach) 1. map to show the relationships between objects, narratives, journeys, and partnerships 1. map to create more agency for our immaterial pratcices 1. how not to create enclosures/dark infrastructures and openness to new practices, 1. but with acknowledging the work already done on the basic infrastructure 1. and the invisible work to maintain it...( a commons with clear rules of use and access?) 1. map a a 'relational contract'.

CONCRETE WORKING PROCESS

1/an inventory of materials & visual identity. go beyond the individual contributions but not deny singularity of contributions.

Pierre - basic elements of the mapping tool. See IMAGE.

2/modeling workshop: different objects, relations need to be 'located and characterized.' -we needed to define: Objects / Relations / Characteristics; imagine them as dots / lines / polygones. -converge on a common language. -a series of A3 with tree structures.

3/modeling exercise starts programming the mapping tool.

4/many overlaps eliminate almost half of the classes. See IMAGE.

-Question is what to include in the map: some docs will be integarated in the map, while others will be visible as links that appear on the side panel of the map.

-Again we raise the question: Why do we want to bring these practices into a map?

-Nomadic and situated practices is what we share. What to include in the map.?

-How do we deal with source documents: relations between become important

-How to we show the different relationships and collaborations on the map: -agency beyond an individual websites, individual newsletters and beyond announcements on social media that can be shared among more people -highlight and enforce the relations between different places, between places and projects, between projects and projects, and between the different partners and practices, yet our nomadic and situated artistic practices also have something to reveal about a place itself, and our practices remain singular approaches.

We find ourselves in a paradoxical position, if not contradictory.

-What would be a federated approach: relations as added value: singular & common values

How does the 'federated' map allow sharing of content and information, sharing a critical approach for all partners involved? Eg. an announcement can be shared by all of us via the map.

-How would it 'involve' the public, reader of the map?: use / function

-How not to become self-referenced.

-How can the mapping tool remain open to new users, or even an audience?

-How to create a 'commons' with clear rules of use, content, access?

Conclusion of our discussion is that we focus on highlighting the relation between documents. They only get a surplus value if they concretise relations between the different partners. They become testimony of a dynamic, an agency that goes beyond one artist or organisation. The docs that are integrated in the map show relationships between our practices. In that way the docs are part of and generate multiple narratives rather than just being a doc in a database, that in the end is merely an accumulation of 'autonomous' docs. The documents become 'relational' objects.

RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

All partners are mostly working in public space. We also give most value to processes and want to accomodate a wide variety and range of people, places, things, archives... Our discussions bring us to a map that aims to make our interconnectedness visible, as well as our collaborations and communications with each other. It creates more agency for our ephemeral practices and could function as what we've named a relational infrastructure. In that way the map can even become a tool for federation. Let's briefly expand on that.

-map as a critical tool: thinking about representations, creating agency, countering dark infrastructures and (power) relations.

-"relational", not in reference to Nicolas Bourriaud – relational aesthetics but: “Relational” therefore designates the systemic interlacing of beings – in the sense of participants, neighbours, students, etc. – , tools, resources, fuels and energies, both human, thermal, etc.“

-how can maps function not only as containers of geolocated knowledge but also as relational infrastructures. How to define relations of property? -the conditions necessary -not be merely about economic conditions and financial flows -alternative forms of governance: share, avoid free riding? define responsibilities and maximise mutualisation? How to account for invisible work, and allow for the distribution of benefits to all the contributors who generated value.

HOW WOULD IT LOOK??

-Justin link mapping practices - a small part of Amsterdam See IMAGE.

-a situationist map See IMAGE.

-Piranesi's map of Rome See IMAGE.

-‘white space’ in between geolocalised, archived walks and stories -avoid risk of new enclosures this might generate: open up to new participants and collaborations? -a case-study towards a federated approach: how can we collaborate, how can we create agency and visibility for one another, how do we make collective decisions, all this without losing our ‘individuality’, but trying to find common values, aiming for co-operation, mutual support and emancipation. -relational and contextual approach allows for collective activations of the map as a multiple access tool, generating multiple perspectives that are interconnected, yet also singular.

Emacipate the map: -functionalism > a real engine of encounter, discussion and narration. -empowerment of intangible social practices: materials / infrastructures that condition them -“Enable value sovereignity while maximizing mutualization,”

CONCLUSION

1/artist duo: digital map > a critical cartographic portal > echo our walking practice.

2/partnership: collaborative mapping

-balancing between mapping & counter-mapping: code-switch between the geo-localised god’s eye view of mapping <> the critical map to counteract possessive qualities

-more agency for embodied art practices: the flow of time, narratives, histories, relationships, situated knowledge derived from direct observation, emotions, collaborations, discussions…

-a geo-localised archive of the practices <> increased visibility of the relationships between our organisations and practices

-to be done: CODE IS POWER -future relation with AC -maintenance / storage -distribution -financing

SYNOPSIS with relevant concepts for our mapping inspiration: TUPAIA
 https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/iaa-alc/tupaias-map.html#c455961


The so-called Tupaia map inspires us for our collaborative map making for several reasons:

-It embodies a critical view on mapmaking: from a dark infrastructure to a relational infrastructure -We find in it a way to share and create knowledge, starting from our embodied practices of walking -We find in it the contradictions that we meet ourselves when working on our map: on the one hand we need a practical mapping tool, geo-locating walks in space, on the other hand this way of representation does not fit our embodied practices. It does not account for narratives, does not show relations, the fleeting of time, and the encounter with real spaces. -Tupaia’s map is an attempt to bring the contradictions together. It is mapping and counter mapping at the same time. It is the clashing and translation of representational systems, the clashing of abstraction and embodied knowledges in one map. -Tupaia makes map making into a narrative device, and into a relational infrastructure -Tupaia’s map is an attempt at communication and collaboration between different world views and representations -It is a performative knowledge production system that interests us in our collective endeavour and search for a relational infrastructure that can activate and create some agency for our practices.

What is Tupaia’s Map and who was Tupaia? Tupaia was a priest from a family of master navigators in the Society Islands, born around 1725 and trained in the sacred knowledge and navigational learning in eastern Oceania. This knowledge consists of oral legends and sailing instructions from Polynesian exploration voyages of the past 800 years which extended as far as to Hawaii in the North, and New Zealand in the South. Around 1760 Tupaia had to flee to Tahiti, due to local warrior battles. When Captain James Cook spent three months in Tahiti on his first circumnavigation of the globe, Tupaia decided to join the crew of the Endeavour on their return voyage to Europe. He collaborated with various members of the crew of James Cook’s Endeavour, between August 1769 and February 1770. To this day, the identity of many islands on the chart, and the logic of their arrangement have posed a riddle to researchers. The map underscores the extent and mastery of Polynesian navigation, it is also a remarkable feat of translation between two very different wayfinding systems and their respective representational models.

Countering the map’s gods-eye view

Keen to learn from Tupaia the exact location of islands he spoke about, the Europeans on Cooks ship began by setting up a map for Tupaia. This involves imagining an abstracted, central bird-eye perspective on Oceanic space that is thus fixed and strategically covered by an invisible grid of lines demarking latitude and longitude. Then they asked Tupaia to take over, and to draw the other islands he said he knew, surely assuming that he would follow their cartographic model. We have become so naturalized to the Western approach to modelling geographical space that it is important to remind ourselves how artificial it actually is. It conceives of a world that is abstracted from the traveller, objectivized and fixed in two-dimensional cartographic representations. In order to be able to rep- resent larger geographic surfaces in small scale, it needs to flatten out the earth’s spherical shape by using one or the other of a whole range of possible projection techniques. Nautical navigation to this day relies on the so-called Mercator style of projection, as it is faithful to angles and concomitant bearing patterns that are paramount for navigational orientation (while it distorts the size and shape of spatial surfaces). The ship’s movement can then be traced by determining its pos- ition in the spatial geography, ideally by means of objective measurement. For these purposes, the earth’s surface is imagined to be covered by a grid of invisible lines of two orientations: the first marking the distance or latitude from the earth’s poles, the second marking the longitudinal distance from an arbitrarily fixed mer- idian. The prime meridian with which the Endeavour’s crew operated was not acci- dentally set on Greenwich, London. The entanglement of state, science and cartography, of which the choice of Greenwich is evocative, was the outcome of joint processes of cognitive and social ordering that were exerting increasing power in the closing decades of the 18th century, when the Endeavour embarked on its voyage.

A new cartographic model to translate and share embodied knowledge

Tupaia, however, chose not to continue with what was set-up for him. Not, presumably, because he did not understand how the Europeans did their maps. He chose not to because their model was not compatible with the way in which Polynesians navigated, how they conceived of the relation between the traveler and the world, how they found the smallest islands across the vast Pacific without instruments or maps, drawing on a sophisticated astronomy, deep knowledge of the ocean, and a profound ancestral connection in oral tradition. In order to still be able to share his knowledge of Oceania with Cook and his crew, Tupaia therefore designed a completely new cartographic model from scratch.

The two geographical and navigational knowledge systems brought to the chart by Tupaia and the Europeans obviously did not gel. This did not so much concern actual navigational practice. In producing the chart, however, their fundamental cognitive and representational models of conceiving the relation between traveller and world must have come to the fore. Tupaia requested a little word at the center of his chart, precisely where the cardinal axes cross: e-avatea (“Eawatea”), signifying “the noon” in Tahitian. To cut a much longer story short: In Tupaia’s cartographic system, avatea marks a bearing to the north. It references the direction of the sun in its highest position at noontime (which south of the tropic of Capricorn, and most of the year south of the equator, points due north). Tupaia thus overrode the cardinal logic the Europeans set up for him: For the islands he subsequently drew, north would no longer be ‘up,’ east ‘right,’ south ‘down,’ west ‘left.’ North would from now on be in the center of the chart. What he thus also overrode is the logic of a singular, central perspective. Tupaia must have learned that Cook and his crew inevitably measured their bearings by identifying the angle between the actual course taken and a bearing to the north. The sextant, in turn, was employed for three interrelated pur- poses, each achieved by measuring the height of the sun above the horizon at noon- time (avatea). First, it helped to confirm the exact timing of local noon, a moment that was then marked by eight strikes of the ship’s bell. Second, since the sun in its meridian position points duly to the true geographic, rather than the magnetic north (or south in the northern Hemisphere), it served to correct the compass bearings. Given the spectacle of avatea and the ritual observation of the sun’s northern bearing day after day, Tupaia must have assumed that his European interlocutors understood this category best. And he was generous enough to translate his knowl- edge of star and sun courses replete with all other variables of Polynesian wayfinding into something drastically less complex: the rough bearing for island-to-island travel set in relation to a positional north which provides a common reference point for all of his voyaging paths.

The avatea system Tupaia used was irrelevant in traditional Polynesiuan way finding. He used it as a device for translation. Tupaia mastered chants that followed star ancestors in their sky journeys. Tupaia attempted to translate the unique epistemic model of Polynesian voyaging into the categorically different epistemic framework and representational model of Cook’s maps and Cook’s compass. Only by acknowledging that the map is a collabora- tive work, in which Tupaia attempted to translate his ‘sea of islands’ into a European model, will avatea begin to make sense.

From an abstracted world to the traveller as fixed and the world as a dynamic moving space

In Tupaia’s logic, there is no singular orientation abstracted from the traveller. True to his wayfinding tradition, the center of observation is always the va‘a (canoe). Rather than imaging an aloof bird-eye perspective, Tupaia must have invited his European collaborators to situate themselves in the chart, on a va‘a at any of the islands he subsequently drew.

The final key to understanding the new cartographic logic Tupaia set up is that he drew traditional voyaging paths, for travel from island to island. Where these paths are placed in the overall composition of the chart matters little: A path can essentially begin anywhere on the map. What matters, rather, is the relational position of islands to each other on such a path, in the sequence in which they are travelled to.

Tupaia did not at all place his voyaging paths from island to island randomly. He translated his much more complex system of reckoning and wayfinding – an embodied practice using a whole range of variables from directional stars and constellations to seasonal winds, the angle of swell patterns to the hull, bird flight routes for island finding and many more – into something drastically less complex so Cook and his crew might understand. [p. 89] He basically translated the bearings for purposeful island-to-island travel into the logic of Cook’s compass.

This is how Tupaia’s Map can be read: Viewers are invited to situate themselves in basically any one of the islands Tupaia drew, and to then trace two imaginary lines from their position. The first points to avatea (the sun at noon) marked on the chart by the crossing of the cardinal axes (basically the direction to which the needle of Cook’s compass would point). The second imaginary line is toward the target island on a traditional voyaging route. The angle measured clockwise from the first to the second line, between the direction to avatea in the map’s center and the target island en route, provides the right bearing to set the course. It can be expressed in degrees from 0° to 360°, and thus translated into the terms of the Western compass.

Translate in a new map and counter-mapping at the same time

By the standards of maps in Mercator projection as Cook used and drew them, the islands as Tupaia drew them seem to be all over the place: Islands thousands of kilometers apart appear right next to each other, islands which should be to the south of Tahiti appear in the northern quadrants, small islands can have very large outlines, etc. Polynesians exclusively measured distance by the time it took to travel, not, as Cook would have and as his maps indicated, by the geographic space they traversed. As a function of time rather than space, and dependent on seasonal variation and direction of travel, distance was impossible to map for Tupaia, but would have been part of his oral commentary. Tupaia’s Map is an absolute masterpiece of cross-cultural translation. Whereas the Europeans on Cook’s expedition failed to understand any of the complexities of Polynesian navigational practice, Tupaia must have acquired a rather thorough understanding of Cook’s navigational strategies. And he – who never saw or needed a map before he dealt with Cook and his crew – devised a cartographic system from scratch which allowed him to document the vast extent of Polynesian navigational knowledge in a Western representational form.

Map as narrative device-Tupaia’s narrative geography

Polynesian wayfinding in many ways inverted the globalized conception that travelers move in static, objectively surveyed and classified worlds. Rather, its core cognitive strategy has been to imagine the canoe as fixed in space, and to dynamise the world surrounding the traveler. Specific seasonal star, sun and wind positions provided situational and relational bearings for travel, memorized by master navigators with the help of long navigation chants. The resulting bearings on island-to-island voyages needed to be constantly reconfigured, to “the attribution of directionality to all the heterogeneous inputs from the sun, stars, winds, waves, reefs, birds, weather, landmarks, seamarks, and sealife.” And additional techniques to ‘fish up’ islands from the horizon came into play, first and foremost strategies of “expanding the target […] by looking for patterns of ocean swells, flights of birds, cloud formations, and reflections of the underside of clouds” (Turnbull 1997, 556).

In Oceania’s oral culture, narrative was the primary tool to memorize and transmit complex accounts of interconnected voyaging routes through the sea of islands. These accounts would have been replete with their respective star (and sun) courses, with bearings, instructions for seasons for travel, the expected quality of swell, winds, sea marks and other indispensable information for reckoning and island finding. In other words, Oceanic geography was, like Oceanic history, genealogy and all other matters of education, a narrative art, taught and memorized through the recita- tion of chants. Legends of famed ancestral voyagers were used as mnemonic blueprints for active navigational purposes. It is a geography of ‘moving islands’, where not the world but the pahi is imaginatively fixed at the centre of a thoroughly dynamic universe. On a set star or sun course target islands may then emerge from the ocean and move toward the traveller, or move away and sink again into the sea when no longer en route. he also managed to translate his embodied and narrative geography with amazing accuracy and precision into the representational model he conceived from scratch. The same islands can often be seen twice. They reappear in a range of voyaging chants detailing ancestral routes through the sea of islands. It is only within the singular representational model of a (Western) chart that this appear illogical. It is vital, therefore, to read Tupaia’s Map not as a singular spatial arrangement, but as a sequential narrative of different voyaging routes ultimately creating a visual palimpsest, united only by their joint reference to avatea in the centre of the chart. Embodied knowledge on a single 2D map The Europeans’ invitation to collaborate on a new map depicting Oceania at large must have been, first and foremost, a challenging but fascinating intellectual enter- prise. How could one possibly squeeze a whole world of interconnected voyages, each replete with distinct star and sun paths, a range of astronomical markers, the spe cificities of lunar season, the directions of currents, swell, winds, cloud formation, sea life, birds, ancestral traditions, a whole cosmology and way of navigational life, on a single flat sheet of paper? It was a challenge that Tupaia was ready to take on. From a knowledge organized pri marily through embodied narrative, informed by a categorically different sense of relation between self, personhood and the world, drawing on a completely different cosmogony. On the European side, Cook’s voyages roughly coincide with the gradual formation of the monadic, bounded subject of the Enlightenment, already on its way to becoming the hallmark of (capitalist) global modernity. Tupaia’s sense of self, by way of contrast, would have been far more inclusive, incorporating, among many other things, himself as historical person, and his ancestors.

The map making was a truly collaborative project

The collective map making was undertaken around the drawing table of the Endeavour’s great cabin. Ancestral traditions were entered on the map, Tupaia eventually annotated his chart, not least by asserting his own genealogy as master navigator and by affirming his new alliance with the British. Tupaia’s recorded his genealogical origins to contextualize the 1770 encounter between the Endeavour’s crew within the longue durée of Pacific history. This begs the question of why Tupaia agreed to draw the chart: after all, his knowledge as navigator was highly specialized and ritualized within a strictly stratified society, to be transmitted only between master and a chosen disciple. Tupaia’s world had changed as a consequence of domestic political upheavals.When the opportunity arose to travel with Cook and Banks. Tupaia must have been ready and keen to extend his horizon once again, both in the sense of trying to further understand how the strangers managed to navigate his seas, and in the sense of voyaging on and beyond the ancestral routes. Tupaia was not exceptional in this respect. His participation in the joint project was certainly of his own free will, while taio bonds with Banks per- mitted him to part with his knowledge. Tupaia was fascinated by European models of representation. This map was jointly worked upon by these men convinced that meaning can be conveyed – however com- promised – across the beach; and that Tupaia actively sought to render his geographical and naviga tional knowledge in a mode of representation that could be grasped by his collaborators.These processes of collaboration and necessarily improvised acts of translation between the ‘apparently incommensurable knowledge traditions’ have enabled Tupaia’s Map. We need to understand such acts of translation ultimately as performative and fostered by the sustained collaboration of actors on complex tasks such as the joint navigation of a sailing vessel through an archipelago or the drawing of a map. It is an act of performative, collaborative knowledge production.

What does a dark infrastructure mean to us ? And why do we need to rephrase it into a "relational infrastructure".

How does it apply in the field of map-making?

(text by Loes added 09/01/2023)

What does a dark infrastructure mean to us ? Thinking of ‘dark infrastructure’ after our working sessions, I came up with the following meaning: A dark infrastructure is a place (digital? online?) where not everyone is welcome (allowed). A place for ‘the incrowd’ where everybody (everyone, as not everyone there has a body) speaks a common language, and that language (code, jargon, way of conversing) stays in that place. The only way in and out is the gate called an interface (designed by the dark infrastructure). The dark infrastructure decides what and how much is shown of the place. And why do we need to rephrase it into a "relational infrastructure”? Opening up a dark infrastructure is a common aim for transparency, and sheds light on what is otherwise not seen. Sharing the making process of an interface eases the understanding of the infrastructure and allows for a common language to be found for all involved. Trust is an important factor in this process as not everyone needs to master all knowledge, yet must be willing to share their knowledge.
How does it apply in the field of map-making? An (online) map is not only a 2D representation of space, it is also a container of code with an attached decision system of representation behind (hidden) in it. Collectively learning about what map making is, starts with what we want from a map (and not the other way around, I.e. what a map (already) is and what it can be for us. Designing a map making tool therefor unravel dark infrastructure and bring to light the structure behind it.

Use these and above questions for conversation? How can a map not only be a visual structure but also an encouraging tool for map making, for narrating? How can a map become a polyphonic instrument? How can a map become a polyphonic narrator? How can a map be an organising structure?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X8xtBCUuuI

General ideas around map-making

General and historical introduction to the “dark infrastructure” of map making: - Colonial implications of Mercator projection. the critical approach of the anarchists towards mercator and 2D mapping (see Proudhon, Elisee Reclus as anarchist geographer, and their approach to situated knowledge-the map of the territory made in clay, before looking at a 2D map.) - Tupaia map as very interesting case: combining two kind of mapping logics, putting the boat central, relationships are drawn…use of situated knowledge for wayfinding and mapping, like journeys of fish and birds, the constellation of stars and planets. - Decontextualization > situatedness of practices > also situatedness of sources - Traceability > idea of incompleteness and continuous evolution should be visible

-map as a vehicle for our own projects AND for our collaborations (federated approach)
-map to show the relationships between objects, narratives, journeys, our practices and our  partnerships
-map to create more agency for our immaterial practices
-how not to create enclosures/dark infrastructures and openness to new practices, 
but with acknowledging the work already done on the basic infrastructure
and the invisible work to maintain it...( a commons with clear rules of use, content and access?)
-map as a 'relational contract'.

- map as a formal experiment / a metaphor for a shift of focus from individual project to an ecology : co-creating above our own practices.

PARTNERSHIP: how it came about (we should discuss if or to what extent this needs to be part of the text)

relation with AC - partnership different socio-economic contexts return of investment for AC

Vermeir & Heiremans : Since end of September 2022 the Flemish Government confirmed a project grant for our project Learning Through the Soles of our Feet we have been working on the development of a mapping tool. Before we received the official news, and in preparation of the application, we had been discussing possible ways to develop a mapping tool with Atelier Cartographique (AC), a Brussels-based cooperative that describes itself as “commited to centering creative and collective forms of life, living, and worldmaking that exceed the neoliberal logics and resist the market-driven forces to commodify human experience.“

One of the things that came out of our conversations was the necessity for us to find partners to finance the development of this new tool. AC was our partner of choice because of their critical approach to mapmaking both from a technical (open source) as well as from a comprehensive point of view. Theirs was a research proposal that consists in the conception of protocols for collecting and generating data embodied in various cultural contexts without erasing that context information or specificity. Unfortunately the price tag connected to their work would be too high for us to manage on our own resources, even with an art production grant from the Flemish Government.

So we decided to look for practitioners whom we suspected to have compairable needs and interests in developing a mapping tool. We knew we didn't have to look very far, since many of our peers have rather ephemeral practices that often are inscribed in a specific local context but take on a nomadic approach. (and already overlap in many ways with your "field") Next to ourselves and AC the partnership we set up around this project currently consists of three small artist- or curator-run organisations, one punctual collaboration between three artists, and one individual artist practice. The partnership has a international dimension, two of the partners being located in Denmark, and one in Holland. The producer of the tool would be Jubilee, the platform of artistic research that we cofounded in 2013. All partners were already in loosely or more closely associated with Jubilee.

Developing this partnership also meant that we, as intiating artist duo, needed to take a step back. It didn't seem to make a lot of sense that we, in working with AC, would be the only ones deciding on how the mapping tool would function, what it would produce, its aesthetics, etc. All of the partners have a specific interest in developing a mapping tool, so one of the first things we did was to each of us make a note on our specific desires and needs that we projected in this new tool. From there it was but a small step to discuss the possibility of writing an article on map making collectively, with all partners and in close collaboration with AC.

(text by Loes added 09/01/2022) I met Vermeir & Heiremans in April 2022 to discuss a possible collaboration with nadine, as we offer support to contemporary artists in different ways - exhibition space, financial support, punctual gatherings with peers, curated platforms. That first encounter could have lasted many more hours as we discovered a lot of overlaps in artistic practices, methodologies and points of view on how to represent ephemeral practices in the cultural field. With the difference of nadine being a structure that hosts and Vermeir & Heiremans a creating collective, we concluded it was a good moment for a collaboration. With the methodology of walking being the common thread, three collaborative pathways were set out: an exhibition in our space n0dine in Brussels where artists can experiment with (re)presentations of nomadic practices, a participation of nadine in the setting up of a cartography tool, and a participation of Vermeir & Heiremans in the biennial Kunst & Zwalm curated in 2023 by nadine and manoeuvre. This text focuses on the cartography tool and the unraveling of dark infrastructures but the other pathways are necessary to mention as they testify a way of working that follows the reality of artistic practices and common interests of people (rather then hollow words of cultural programs).
The reason for nadine to join the creation of a cartography tool is two-fold. As a map maker we are in need of a unified identity for our maps and a user friendly digital tool that can create maps on demand for communication purposes. As an artistic platform we support many forms of maps, from geolocated walks to nomadic protocols, the idea (utopia?) of a shared tool that is transparant and adapts to the reality of artistic representations and collaborations (within a 2D digital framework) is something we absolutely want to support as a structure that supports nomadic practices. The conversation attached to this discussion is of importance and I’m grateful to Vermeir & Heiremans for the invitation to take part. As so often the case with the practices we support, the process and research is as important as the output or result.

some background info about nadine & AC nadine saw AC come to life while collaboration with founding member Pacôme Béru. In fact, one of the first map making experiments was in the framework of the travel project ‘default’ where a group of artists travelled the folds of a trainmap of Europe by bike. Pacôme, together with Pierre Marchand, created a physical map that was taken on the first travel. It showed a 20 km wide line that was the fold of the map. The physical map was 20m long and showed all villages on and next to the fold. For the project Buratinas, a solar powered boat, Pacôme and Pierre created a web tool that collected all images taken on the boat. A server hosted all geolocated images and the web tool automatically placed them on the waterways map of Belgium. The interest for cartography brought together a lot of people in Brussels and gatherings such as ‘cartoparty’, 'cartofixer', brought together likeminded people to think together about mapping, its politics, economies and power. The tool ‘waend’ was a researchproject on how to make an interface to make maps. I see this collaboration as a continuation of these ideas, with a more focus on the nature of the artistic practices.

would be nice to have a small list of examples of our initial "more personal" goals

Atelier cartographique, as a technical provider for public administrations with the mission to build and maintain a spatial data infrastructure, tries to advance a political agenda within them. The cooperative tries to build a balance between this agenda and meeting its financial needs (repairing the ship while it sails). This balance sometimes involves trade-offs.

The visible and explicit agenda prominently includes:

• Questioning the technologies used.
• Making systems intelligible and tangible.
• Shaping a common vocabulary for talking about things
• and the implications of talking about one thing rather than another, that this or that term will be visible or invisible within the infrastructure. This work is done in research projects, in academic contexts, outside of administrations.
• Accompanying development, and even preceding it, by producing the richest possible social interactions despite the rather vertical context. The technological platform does not exist as a disconnected entity (as a dark object) but must be appropriated by its users in order to be instantiated as an actor in its own right.
• Refusing to bend to standardized tools without questioning the relationships of exchange and power at work in the dynamics they provoke.
• To try to raise how the aesthetic stakes cross the whole of the technical and political processes in progress.

The hidden agenda gathers more contrasted components:

• To pierce better who builds the GIS (Geographic Information Systems), for what, for whom. To swarm the necessary preliminaries to get rid of the tradition of military and colonial exploitation, now reproduced, distorted and amplified by the gafa platform economy.
• Digging into how to build GIS and visualization systems that distort the relations of domination inherent to Haraway's God's Eye.
• To postulate that another geography, other data structures can emerge, resistant to extractivism. Beyond the most direct questions of surveillance, what is data extractivism made of?
• Probing the appropriation of tools by others
• with a focus on questions of limits, issues, difficulties, roughness of tools, expectations of technology. Study how difficult it is to get out of these expectations.
• Question the will to produce GIS and mapping? What technological and visual fascinations are involved?

This article voices our collective concerns that guided the working process, the inspiration that we found relevant and could share, the limitations of our ambitions, the points where those ambitons converged, and then all the details and practicalities that we had to deal with in a way that transformed what can be considered a dark infrastructure, more on that later, into a relational infrastructure.

As you can imagine, any collective process is quite time consuming, and is in need of a specific way of organizing. All of us working in an environment that values horizontal decision making didn't simplify the process. Next to busy agenda's it was one of the principle challenges that we were confronted within this project, but before going there, let's first get inspired about map making. What drove us here? And where did we meet?

Our discussions start from an understanding of map making is a ‘dark infrastructure.’ Map making has a very long history, and with Google Maps and Google Earth as the ultimate disruption of the Enlightenment belief in the transparent, objective reality of the map we decided to look into early fissures in its idealistic but nevertheless brutal ambition to model the world after its own beliefs. The maps of Ribeiro that split the world in two parts, the East for the Portugese empire, and the West for the Castillian world of Charles V, but also the maps of the Flemish map maker Mercator that projected the globe in a way that made navigating the seas west and east more efficient, are but two examples.

TUPAIA MAP A beautiful example of how a different view of the world was able to generate an at the time bearly noticed, but in hind sight and also for our project incredibly fascinating interstiches in how map making could cover the surface of the planet, is the Tupaia map. Tupaia was a Polynesian mapmaker. Overlaying a Mercator map on his trip with Cook with his own way-finding and orientation knowledge based on direct experience of navigating based on reflections on clouds, the pathways of fish and birds, planets and stars.

ELYSEE RECLUS As a second example: Go into early thinking and work of anarchist geographer Elisee Reclus and his scepticism towards 2D mapping with our partners. He refused to use these maps as their projections are deforming the world and he would create globes and promote a direct experience of the landscape.

• Situationist Maps (the naked city, Guy Debord)

• Piranesi map of Rome - a collage of fragments

https://socks-studio.com/2018/11/04/forma-urbis-romae/

mapmaking is no longer about geographers and mapmakers (Peters map) but the IT programmer has become the central figure. AC is not only mediator but almost as a condition to work on this... silly question : why does it have to be online ?

WORKING PROCESS & GOAL OF THE PROJECT Online meetings – reporting – physical workshops Workshops are dedicated to finding out what the mapping tool should be able to 'produce,' allowing space for more conceptual discussions on how we approach working on this project collectively, and thus taking the tool from being a dark infrastructure to becoming a relational one. In other words this was no longer about map making and cartography.

The goal is to map nomadic and situated practices and look for connections and relationships between them. A partner can be an individual or a collective (occasional or fixed) of artists, or an organization, an institution… A partner is an author: responsible for the published content, owning the authorship rights of the published content. Each partner has one or more “situated” or “nomadic” practices that it wants to map. There is the "Atlas of Ovens" by the occasional collective Clémentine Vaultier, Maximiliaan Royakkers and Ciel Grommen, "7 Walks" by the artist duo Vermeir & Heiremans, ...

A practice can be ongoing, or can be finished, but has probably a fixed starting point, namely from the moment it got its title? (Question: What about the difference between the institutions and artists as partners related to authorship? Probably institutions will publish content by other artists? Will the artists then be responsible/owing the authorship for the published content? And what about AC as partners? Or do we need consider them differently?)

A practice contains different manifestations/gestures, that are specified in space and time. The "Atlas of Ovens” consists of a series of events (bustours, reading rooms, baking rituals…). “Seven Walks" consists of an number of guided walks. Sometimes the same walk is repeated with other invited experts. The map functions as an archive or as an agenda/invitation for these projects. How do we differentiate between future and past projects?

A project is geolocative by a dot or a line on a map, since this property of “situatedness” and “nomadic” is what brings us together. (Is there is possibility to include a project that is not geolocated?). We agree that the graphic form of these projects take will be different and authored. One project can naturally be a collaboration between different partners: eg. Nadine will curate a walk of Vermeir&Heiremans.

This cartographic exercise aims specifically at highlighting and enforcing the relationships that exist between our different partners, practices and projects. It becomes therefore an interesting exercise to think about graphic elements that can characterise a (visual) identity and that is at the same time able to be combined: a particular stamp for a certain practice, a characteristic font for a particular partner, a line for another... (Finding a common graphical language and a vocabulary of interrelationships)

WORKSHOPS & OUTCOME

Until here, we agree and things are clear.

We agree to find common ground in order to develop this tool, and not remain on our singular position

But then, we start looking at each project individually, and we discover that each project is in itself is a collection of different (material) entities with other authors, our sources: eg. an text fragment of Proudhon, an etching of a fire ritual, ... These sources can be a link between two partners: for instance Clementine Vaultier included a drawing in the Atlas of Ovens that she has found in the museum of Spa when participating in a walks of Vermeir&Heiremans. How do we store these source documents? Should we make a database that everyone can use? From a coding logic, dividing things into its smallest (undividable) unities and storing these as unique source documents would be the most logical way.

Apart from the most efficient data storage, this approach also allows the coder to generate a complete overview of all projects and practices that eventually make use of this source, and in this way visualize how a certain entity/document links different projects.

However, this step-by-step unraveling of a particular practice into its components (its projects and its source documents) also leads to difficult qualification and categorisation exercises. For instance: is an image of a composition of drawings a project or a source document? depends on its use ?

Before going too deep into this laborious work it is important to ask ourselves what we value most and what this project aims for. Do we really value efficient data storage and traceability? And if there is something to trace, isn't it rather the relationship and not the source document in itself, meaning that our map should rather highlight the context in which we found the document than the document itself? or the context in which we use it.

mediate between intellectual content and the technical tool also for AC it is experimenting with tools to make it work AC methodology working process: deconstructing content and then raligning it with programming language

RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE some notes from the text of Max and Clementine?

a tautology?? encounter between the mapping project and the atlas of ovens

When we (Ciel, Maximiliaan and Clémentine) started pinpointing the term “relational infrastructure” within our collaborative artistic research trajectory, it was during discussions around the necessity to find a term which would fit the angle we were looking at at our technical objects : ovens. Brought by Maximiliaan after Keller Easterling, it followed the previous temporary and approximate term we had, being “intimate technologies”.

Using relational infrastructures to describe ovens (as well as our atlas, and later the map ?) means that we try to approach the objects and unfold to what extent they can help for social bonding and knowledge sharing as well as a more intimate way to relate to any resources that support its activity.

care and use and skill to maintain the platform skill: we should learn basics - not only offer money (or find a way to trust the person who knows?) who hosts the infrastructure

infrastructure - not only material

generates as one but also functions as one

We have a hunch that our current collective mapping project will facilitate a deeper elaboration of the idea of a relational infrastructure. This could play out both on the level of the development of the tool, as well as on the level of the future use we – and maybe new partners that want to step in - will be making of the tool, referring to the actual production of different maps incorporating different layers and different users. We think our practice-based, experimental mode of mapmaking situated in the interstices of art and design, is a performative aspect that questions its shadow side.

Interconnecting songlines O'Rourke

How to open up the project to new agents? future expectations/ambitions project or platform: can become something else: white between the piranesi fragments is the interstice - the structure that gives security. balance between informal learning and structural security formal tool with informal organisation

constructing vs using tool AC gatekeepers

punctual collaboration structural

building the tool maintenance cost

multiple access tool multiple perspective, what are the many doors ? what kind of agreement is underlying ? what is a shared practice ? distributed practice?

an ecology of practices : - what we share (milieux, conditions, exigences, subsides) - what diverges (our own path, obligations) how to create a platform, support and visibility of these types of trajectories that don't fit in individual spaces. create a map which connects

games to disrupt the process? precarity of the project: on how we function as artists

an organisational form that defines the future of the tool

spatial meetings - visible on the map? should the partership be visible in the map what is happening behind the mapmaking

common space / alive / relevant continuity

FORM conversation essay

relational aspect needs to be incorporated in the text does it need characters? is the character the good focus to work on ? minimal composing elements in the partnership - more focus on the link between the characters what could embody these relations? our perception on the other, on what makes us want to connect ? what are the different types of relations (cf. Ciel - reciprocical, parent, sibling, neighbours...) of bridges ? how do we travel from a space to another

WE : collective person there is different "we"s + question of enclosure, exclusion, what is out the map ?

a list of maps that inspire us (an atlas of maps, could serve as illustrations ?) the sketches made during the process with AC

what about the actual places we meet ? the concrete relational infrastructure that supports the project, that we experience all together through the project. AC offices, the carpet, etc.