User:Robin
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SI28
Writing Machines Ensemble
[ -> Projects SI 28/Writing Machine Ensemble ]
CUPS on localhost:631, for direct printing through terminal
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
SIL Language Technologies, the organization behind the SIL Open Font License
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 lacked the words to give structure to the thought.
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...
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!
SI29 Workshop
Queering our Keyboard
The workshop will investigate how your computer knows which character to display when you press one of the keys on your keyboard. By making our own letters and making a keyboard out of them, we will encounter some of the technologies, standards and protocols involved in this process, and we will touch on some of the politics surrounding them. Our self-made keyboard will show why this part of our computer, phone, or other device, is maybe less self-evident and fixed then we might realize.
MIRAGE Installation at Extraterrestrial Publishing Fair
File:M I R A G E installation.mp4
EBM music
Last februari was my first time at Grauzone Festival. A festival centered around darker style electronic music. It was the first time I felt I deeply connected to a music genre. And themes in this music reminded me a lot of what we do at XPUB. So I wanted to add a little reflection on it here. Let's see where it leads...
.otf file format - aesthetics and technology of type
I could call my user page 'confessions of a type nerd' at this point... I spend the last weekend reading about the technicalities of the .otf file format and font rendering engines. ( It was an amazing weekend ). I'm also starting a lil research website on this for myself. It will probably pop up in sergio at some point.But, what was this rabbit hole about? To better locate how digital language goes from calculated to visual. And to what extend a western-dominant perception of language hierarchy informs that system. So far we got already. But in the .otf file, some really interesting things are happening. The 'visual' layer of language representation, consists of its own entire world of categorization and standardization ( not the surprising part ). How those categories are divided and how they are rendered, is! And definitions here are important!
.otf is the format that makes rendering 'complex scripts' possible. because, all latin-like scripts 'standard scripts' are rendered readable on any screen. but 'complex scripts' ( those are the official terminology ), can't be displayed as readable text just by referencing the drawings of the corresponding unicode points. they need to be rendered first. and the encoded behavior also exists in the font-file. the .otf format allows for adding those additional rules of behavior. they can be added as look-up's. and they reference tables with predetermined rules for properly rendering a specific script. those tables are divided into two main clusters, those for 'substitution' and those for 'positioning'.
I thought I was being original with my butler reference in relation to type. the terminology around .otf technology reflect that relation so well.. I thought I was using it as a metaphor. turns out its actually how it works.
( and yes, SIL is still around ) with their own rendering engine, since microsoft's only works on microsoft OS, Linux uses its own version, built on Graphite, the open-source equivalent, developed by SIL. So, rendering text readable on any device ( mac has its own version too ofc ) in a script that is not latin-like, relies either on Microsoft technology, or SIL's. And, with that, in order to reference the right API's for text rendering, any font-file will be tagged with a script and a language. The data for language names ( and how they are classified ), is the ISO standard, overseen by SIL. Those API's are build to accomodate a writing system's orthography. This one is also interesting. Because those rules are also adopted from Unicode, and scripts are classified by their functioning, to which every language can be adjusted. But orthographies, for previously undocumented languages are proposed to unicode and even developed from scratch by SIL as well. ( as in, on their website they write that they developed an orthography, and an entire writing system, for languages that did not have any or an 'insufficient' written form at all ). So they make it, they propose it to unicode, they render it on every Linux system. and playstation.