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SI28

Writing Machines Ensemble

[ -> Projects SI 28/Writing Machine Ensemble ]

With Daan and Ema, we developed our performace for SI28's event. Writing Machines Ensemble became an experimental orchestral performance using printers and writing machines from the XPUB studio!

Explorations in Potential Musicality

With the Writing Machines Ensemble, rythm and repetition are experienced in a radically new form. Explorations in Potential Musicality is a musical journey through the sonic qualities of printers—with a strong emphasis on improvisation, yet promising dramatic intensity.

The Writing Machines Ensemble, co-founded by it's current members, is an international group of experimental musicians from around the XPUB Studio. Independent and idealistic, they focus on blending the role of 'instrument' and 'musician' in an assemblage of artistic creation, striving to find the essential musical quality in tools of writing. Since its debut in September 2025, the ensemble has performed on WORM Radio, for the 5th edition of XPUB's Special Issue Radio show, where the group's unique live scoring method was born and then the 19th of November with a public concert at UBIK, Rotterdam.

Emanuele Arrigoni, Daan Princen, Robin de Haan, Thijs van Loenhout, Claudio Castro Chaponan, Monica Olympia, Erika Model, N.E.C. (Dottie) Parson, Taxan X.Y. Plotter, Star LC-10

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SIL Language Technologies, the organization behind the SIL Open Font License

[ -> research documentation ]

After setting-up my new laptop, I contacted my friend to connect to his self-hosted server, which I refer to as the Big Black Box. Then, got to re-downloading all the fonts I had lost. I wanted to make it into a little Open Font Library on the Big Black Box so everyone from their art collective with access to it could make use of it. Then, I wanted to include an overview .txt file for those less familiar with type-related stuff, which got me interested in adding a small guide to open licenses and practices (as I am learning about them myself).

While looking into different types of open licenses, I came across the Open Font License website. The SIL Open Font License, developed by SIL Language Technologies, turns out to be a license, dedicated to the 'open development of the languages of the world', and is an American Evangelical Christian Missionary non-profit organization. That info had an uncomfortable flavor to it... Why is open language development promoted by an organization that in their mission statement describes their objective is to "Bring the word of God to all the languages in the world?" And not even as a side-note, but as the central aim to their efforts!

From there, I digressed from the Open Font Library description and started diving deeper into the politics of language technologies. My discomfort lies in the huge contrast between the ideals of Open Source Communities that I started learning about and the messaging of this organization, especially how that would influence technological development and inform visibility of language diversity. Writing for the Open Font Library, I highlighted the work of Bye Bye Binary in queer language encoding. Reading about this, I felt like a huge step was being made in the visibility of post-binary language, because they made it possible to use Open Type features to write gender-inclusive language with fonts that support it! Made possible by their Queer Unicode Initiative. Queer language encoding means that gender-inclusive ways of writing are now included in the systems of Standards that make it possible to write digitally in the first place!

I was not at all unaware of the colonial/racial charges within the development of language technologies. Still, instinctively, this felt like a huge win for language inclusivity to me. Or at least for a partial recognition for ways of expression through language that fall outside established use. That, combined with Bye Bye Binaries dedication to open-source practices, that prioritize collective ownership and creation over claiming 'intellectual property' over their typefaces, make their efforts a strong anti-colonial / queer-feminist practice. And they are not foreign to a critique of colonial implications in the technologies, licenses and practices that type development depend on. There is no such thing as operating completely independently of these forces. Still, given how heavily open-source typefaces depend on the SIL Open Font License, made want to know more to what extend they still shape language technology development today. So I did some digging into the organization behind the SIL Language Technology.

Zine idea for Extraterrestrial Publishing Fair

A few times throughout the trimester, I was reminded of Butler's Essay 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination'. Where they use the figure-of-speech of a 'copy without an original' to talk about their unease with the category of lesbian as something that should supposedly be equal to the 'I' it encloses. They proceed to deconstruct the binary notion of gender identity / sexuality, where the 'gay' category is supposedly understood as a derivative of a 'straight' original. I have to confess I could relate a lot to their explanation of their unease in this understanding. I think I unknowingly held this notion for a long time. Coming to terms with my own gender-expression has involved coming to terms with the idea that I'm not trying 'pretending' to be a gender that I am not, but I didn't really know how to express this in words.

This essay has helped me a lot in that regard. Especially when they talk about drag, not as imitating, performing, a pre-existing gender, but rather, as exposing the fact that all gender is a performance. One that only gains the understanding of a fixed identity through it's repetition.

That the semblance of fixity relies on constant repetition, especially since they relay it in this speech of a 'copy without original', made me wonder about the role of media in this construction. I imagined a copy machine that did not make use of an 'original' to create it's copies from. How would the process of making a publication look if you tried to only make copies from other copies. Every individual zine would be unidentical from all others. That would go against the intended use of the medium of a copy machine, at least partially. But hopefully would make a meaningful point about how media re-produce an idea of identicality where in reality none exists.

Bonus: If I'd use cut-ups from the essay, could that be the content and a techno-text at the same time? This figure-of-speech could also explain how the publication was made, so reflecting on it's own material condition. Wooooowww...

Fast-forward to SI29, We're reading Keywords for Radicals with Marloes. The introduction carries quite some resemblance to Butler's essay.

Deconstructing LCD screens

[ -> experiment documentation ]

In my bachelor's graduation work, I used prysm sheets from old LCD screens as pages in a book. It was the start of an interest in how media shape social/political life. And part of it was to literally take apart these screens, learn about how they work. Though the project itself was a photo book with street photography, I am starting to realize now my interest was maybe not so much in the images, but in the media itself.

Having read about media-specific analysis during the first semester gave me a way to better contextualize this. And I went back to the LCD screens to do some more experiments with them. ( and I also keep collecting them to make business cards out of them ).

Intro to CSS workshop w/ XPUB 1

[ -> Robin's HTML/CSS workshop ]

When working towards making our SI28 website, it came up that some of our classmates had limited experience with making webpages using HTML / CSS, so I hosted a little intro to get everyone up-and-running making webpages :) Lea also uploaded her web-page from the workshop on the workshop's wiki page.

We are also thinking to host CSS Parties if there is time in the course to have moments to explore different CSS properties. I made a webpage on Sergio for it. To be continued...

[ -> CSS Party website ]

SI29

web-to-print set-up for my invoices and GIT with remote on server for back-ups

A new chapter in setting up my new laptop after my old one broke...

I used to keep my invoices in my documents folder of my laptop. I also had an InDesign template there that I edited for every invoice. Both of these got lost when my laptop broke. So I have to come up with a new way.

When we learned last semester about web-to-print, I already decided I want to try to make a web-to-print set-up, instead of re-designing the whole template in InDesign. As a next step, I'm thinking of making an 11ty project, so instead of copying the html file, I can add all info in a plain text file and 11 will generate the web-page out of it, and paged.js will generate the pdf.

Next to that I can use 11ty to make one file with the overview of all my invoices hehehe.

GIT set-up with remote on Sergio

GIT set-up with remote on a server

I did a prototype to use GIT with a remote on a server to have a way to keep a back-up of files. In this case, I lost the templates I use for my invoices and the folder where I keep them when my laptop broke. I started a web-to-print set-up so I can use html / css to and print to pdf to make my invoices. And as an extra step, now I can use GIT to do versioning to keep a back-up of this set-up on a remote server, without using GitHub!

Workshop Idea (In many different iterations)

Queering our Keyboard

Setting:

We can sit around the big table in my studio. Extension chord in the middle of the table. Coffee machine and fridge close by! I'll bring erasers and stanley knives for the first part of the day. For the second part, participants will bring their own laptop.

I need to figure out the wifi, since we all use mobile data in the studio. Either people will have to use their own, or I'll give my hotspot.

Planning:

- Open the day with a quick round of introduction. And a small discussion on how people think their computer interprets language when they type.

- give an overview of what we'll do that day and an introduction into the topic. why closer examining our keyboard is a queering act.

- making our own 'script' / 'language' by cutting out shapes from erasers. This is to mimic the process of creating type casts. An intuitive introduction to the process of industrial typesetting in latin. From there we can make the connection to how that process formed the basis of digital language. The 'script' we're making doesn't have to resemble anything like a working / exhisting language. It might actually hit the point home even more that to the computer, it does not matter if the shapes we make are meaningful or interpretable as readable language.

Depending on how many we are, everyone can create 1 or 2 'letters' that we can bring together to make a collective 'script'. And we can use the erasers as stamps to show how we can use it to write language in an analogue way.

- we can digitize the font by scanning it as jpeg, either put it in fontforge directly or use another program to make vector shapes out of them.

- lunch! break for some food, (for me it would be interesting to see if discussions around the topic form naturally)

- short overview of what we did so far and how we will continue the afternoon.

- make our letters into a typeface using font forge. I'll find a protocol to share all vecotrised letters between everyone. everyone makes their own version of the font file in fontforge. There's a few ways to go about this part that depend a bit on what is possible on the technical side. So this might change a bit, but these are some options:

1. we stick to the latin character set. In the place of the unicode codepoints for latin, we put the letterforms of our own script. We generate the font into a .otf file. In keyboard software (important note on this at the bottom), we add the font to the existing Latin keyboard and export the keyboard.

-> this should be the most straight-forward way to do this. The encoding is done in the fontfile rather than the keyboard itself. But it should be able to type with the font we assigned to it. (according to Keyman's instruciton video's.

2. we use Unicode's Private Use Area code-points. In fontforge, we add PUA code-points to the fontfile, and place our characters on those. in the .otf file, you'll be able to write in both latin characters and our made up script. In Keyman, instead of replacing the latin charaters, we assign PUA code-points to the keyboard keys. We add our font to keyman, and add the PUA code-points to keys when Alt is pressed. Then, add our font, and tell it to interpret the empty PUA values with the caracters we assigned to them in the font file. -> haven't managed to make this work so far, even though keyman says this should be the way to do it. It would mean that typing with the keyboard in latin would show latin characters that can be interpreted by the computer as such, writing in our script would show the characters when typing while ALT is pressed, but the computer will only recognise the empty unicode values. 3. we do the same, but instead of PUA code-points, we use the standard latin capital letter code-points. The keyboard would be able to write in latin lowercase and our script show our characters while shift is pressed, and the computer will interpret it as capital letters.

In any of these cases, throughout the process we will have to deal with the unicode standard, the ISO standard for language names, the .otf file format, how the logic of industrial typesetting ( the erasers ) translates digitally, and why that means that Latin will neccessarily always be the default script system that other writing systems or practices must adapt to in order to work digitally, and what organisations are in charge of regulating this through these standards. I'm hoping that this visualises at least that how we use language digitally is not a given and that the politics surrounding it are quite significant. There is actually a thin line between fiction and reality when it comes to language, and these systems at the intersection between technology, politics and aesthetics decide for a big part how we come to imagine some use of language as fact, formal, fixed and others as made-up, backward, or fake.

- maybe that should be the closing speech

- the last step would be to create a collective poem using the keyboard with our made-up script. This will probably be a bit improvised, since it will depend on how far we all get with creating the keyboard. Also need to make a protocol for this.

- and then we end the day. If people like to stick around we have some drinks, have a bit of an after discussion if there's some energy left, or we play some Wii.

Timeline wise, this will probably take a full day. I'll work the scedule out it detail when I figure out the technical part of this.

Date: to be determined, it will be a weekend day, since there is a bigger chance people can make the time on those

equipment: - extension chord - scanner - wifi / hotspot - laptops (everyone brings)

- monitor - big board to sketch

- water - lunch - drinks

crowd. How many ppl can I host? Will inviting ppl with graphic design / typographic knowledge be a +?

 - graphic designers might be more familiar with typography lingo, but will generally speaking not neccessarily have awareness of the process of encoding type digitally. Might having to address typography terminology (from 0) take too much time to be able to touch specific software, web standards, (some) language politics.

- will depend on software, how well I know it myself.

 - 1 friend can help w/ fontforge, other, I need to figure out myself.

- studio mates - friend groups - if group size allows it, whatsapp / signal groups. Dear Fem Rotterdam, Snackbar Frieda chat.

Goal: to make a working keyboard that can type with our made-up 'language' (letterforms) in terms of visual representation. It won't be functional in the sense that the computer will be able to interpret the characters. But going through the steps of making a custom keyboard should show the layers of encoding and standardization that go into representing language digitally. And, mostly, it should open the awareness that digital use of language is not fixed or self-evident.

Ideally, one that could work between the devices of the people that followed the workshop that day. Otherwise, at least on everyone's personal device, and in applications that can read neccessary encoding rules...

Documentation: 1. A collective poem, typed with the custum keyboard & script. If it will be possible to communicate across devices, we use a collaborative software that can recognise the font to write the poem together. 2. all the sketches, references, etc. I use, or others bring up, that help understand how the custom keyboard works.

Communication: - make lil' announcement banner. title, time, date, location, small description, what to bring (laptop, OS, (own data?))

Manetta's feedback

- stay on 1 device to keep it smaller

- use python (can I do that?)

- emphasize the queering part: character encoding as character miming, who to mime back?

- give examples: ByeByeBinary

- it can be way smaller exercises, it can be something small