User:C3/XPUB2/Project proposal 2

1. What do you want to make?

A series of activities/workshops that revolve around learning and annotating in forms of cheatsheets, playing around with different tones (playful, personal, mock, dry etc.), different mediums, formats etc. Using cheatsheets as documentation and sharing practice.

4. Why do you want to make it? 

Cheatsheets are compact and lightweight, easy to jump in, they are interesting to me because they are a conduit to transfer "knowledge"(clarify knowledge), they travel a lot trough time as well because they constantly get duplicated, rewritten, screenshotted, redesigned etc.

Cheatsheets can be documentation aimed at people who are still learn something, they are mented to be used more frequently rather than encyclopedias.

Yes, they are surface level, but I feel like they are connected to action.

During my first year I learned a lot of things that I wanted to engage with for a long time (mostly bash and python scripting and the general programming concepts). It was a long repetitive and iterative process and it was, for the most part, solitary...

My approach to programming is creating small tools depending on needs/ideas, sometimes with some (diaristic) elements embedded in them (for example, I am interested in using the scripts to talk to the people to you them across time, making documentation more playful, having these scripts talk about themself in a way [through me writing to a potential person that could use them]), an approach that I feel people loose over time after the 100th time you do something, what is interesting for me is finding new ways in which the repetition does not lead to dread or boredom but still remains playful.

I expressed an interest in distributing and sharing knowledge, at the start of last year I envisioned the server as a potential social space for collective reading and writing and sharing or tools, but this did not turn out to be the case due to everyone's set of diverse interests, in short, it is not a hangout space, it was mostly a functional resource for the special issue projects.

So, while still dealing with technology, I want to try take a step back from computer-only work and try to integrate physical elements in a social way.

The goal is not only to have these cheatsheets consumed but also inspire others to make their own and potentially also make them for others, hoping this sort of system can propagate like a virus.

6. Relation to previous practice

SI26 3DS zine

#repurposing #old-devices #tactics #strategies #media-archeology #occupy

During SI26 we explored web-making as a craft (by working with html and css) and media archeology (by working with HPGL, Postscript, pen plotters and dot matrix printers).

Together with Charlie, Tessa and Eleni we overlapped these two topics for the SI project by focusing on a forgotten device from our past, the nintendo 3DS. We made a work on it by taking advantage of some outdated web-standards to show/hide information from other devices making our publication/puzzle/game solvable only through the use of the nintendo 3DS (important: we did not rely on emulation for the realization of the project, we just used simple HTML, CSS and vanilla JS).

The making of this work was a whole learning process. We had to get engaged with both hardware and software, this involved a lot of trail and error that culminated in a collection of strategies we wrote to make what we had in mind visible on the 3ds, but not on any other device.

It was a project about working within the limits, by occupying this object (like we did with the dot matrixes and plotters) we wanted to show that the devices that are catching dust at the corners of our lives are potentially interesting to work within, we wanted to invite people to get actively involved with things!

SI27 Terms of servers

#read-write-execute #servers #terminal #distribution

Terms Of Servers is a terminal based publication that runs on a temporary, communal server called cerealbox (I worked with Kim on this project).

Working with the server for the first year of our studies evoked questions of its materiality and reliability.

We wrote a script that cycles through a text we wrote together over time reflecting on these two topics. Each section of the text was intermitted by some live commands that we used to ask simple questions back at the server, showing and commenting on the results (lshw, ping, uptime).

What we did not have time to solve is the way we could distribute our work, as the terminal is our main mode of interfacing with the server, we were wondering what would it mean to occupy this technical space to distribute our writing work (that is not just text it included some live commands).

Tic-tac-toernament

A project I started last year, it is a text based (terminal) 1v1 tic tac toe program that would print the board, the moves, a generated commentary and a leaderboard on wither a dot matrix printer or a receipt printer. I was inspired by the famous work of art PenSnake by Joseph, I wanted to make a game with the dot matrix and receipt printers that could then be used for a printer/plotter gaming exhibition, to explore the notion of a what is a game through the repurpose of old technology.

The work is still in progress, what I was interested in was the possibility to print the history of multiple matches, playing with some simple text formatting, collecting usernames, commentary and messages left on the scoreboard.

7. Relation to a larger context

If you can cheat at something it means that there are some rules in place, and that there is a "proper" preferred way to do something. By cheating at those rules you can show that alternatives exist.

This reminds me of the online speedrunning community, various groups of people that gather around ways of completing a game as fast as possible.

This is made possible by discovering and sharing tactics and glitches that allow to jump around entire sections of a videogame (or skipping them entirely), breaking the overall programmed linearity/order/structure of the software (ex. by accomplishing some actions before the time they are supposed to happen).

Generally speaking this is a form of competition, ultimately people aim to break or keep their own records, but what I find interesting is that this process revolves around cheating and sharing cheats(methods) for others to see and replicate. https://wikispeedruns.com/

User:Imre/Creation Relations Workshop

Together with Imre we explored the relationship between creation (object, etc.) and creator by writing letters from the point of view of either these two figures, I have to say that it was very compelling and inspirational to lean more towards social activities with physical objects.

2. How do you plan to make it?

By both making cheatsheet and by organizing activities to make cheatsheets with others.

Via prompts, thought experiments, small puzzles, drawings, annotating, mapping.

ex. taking 3 hours to explore/share X, then having some material in place to take notes and asking participants to write as if trying to explain/share what we did to their best friend, to their grandma, to their past self, hoping to excersise some writing with the intention of knowledge sharing.

3. What is your timetable?

Nov/Dec:

• prototype some cheatsheet examples that I want to share (wiki lurking, lost in the terminal...)

• asking people around what is a cheatsheet or a cheat for them, I generally use technical cheatsheets, but they are a broad format that can be applied to many things. My aim is to explore more the format rather than focusing on a specific content that I am used to see.

Dec: prototype and try out at least two activities with both XPUB2 and XPUB1, start looking for other spaces to hold some tryouts with non-xpub people too.

Jan: If people want to leave some of the cheatsheet to me I would like to think of a system to traverse them.

??

5. Who can help you and how?

Never really did any workshop before other than one (spread over 6 meetings 2 hrs each) back in Italy to skillshare some prototyping methods with Touchdesigner. I prepared some slides to explore some concepts in the first part and then some excercises to do together afterwards.

Any tips, sharing of experiences in hosting a workshop and so on is appreciated, and pointing out to some people in the XPUB network that do this.

8. References/bibliography

• https://wizardzines.com/comics/
• Simple Sabotage
• Advice well taken, Dasha Ilina