as part of ON/LIVE 2023

23.05. – 25.05.2023

ON/LIVE has been negotiating current questions of digital life since 2016 – issues such as net accessibility, media literacy, or gamification. This year’s edition is mainly dedicated to playful forms of gathering. In 2020 and 2021, ON/LIVE happened purely in the digital realm.

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nota e.V. & Das Digitale Foyer

OPEN CODE READING CIRCLE

(Non-Coders Welcome!)

Workshop Digital Culture Talks & Workshops

FFT, together with nota e.V., invites artists, coders, and code dilettantes to the first Open Code Reading Circle. Together, we will peruse open-source software code to discuss and comment it. Such texts are being made available online for discernment and editing – yet they can usually only be read by programmers. What does this mean for digital art and culture projects that feel obliged to adhere to open standards? How can we share knowledge without having the same technical proficiency at our disposal? Must we all become programmers?

The nota community has been exercising code dilettantism in the last few years, acquiring the practice of code writing for artistic applications. They believe: Source code should be read and commented upon in communal rounds. The ON/LIVE 2023 Open Code Reading Circle invites artists, curators, scientists, programmers, and non-programmers alike to gather and exchange in a hybrid format.
We will read the source code of the community-based nota montage software as well as the FFT Cubes software as sample texts. Both projects have been developed in interaction between artists and coders and share in their aspiration for openness. Participants are invited to bring and present their own projects.

Concept und workshop supervision: Aurora Kellermann (theatre maker, curator, code dilettante), Birk Schindler (theatre maker, code dilettante).

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nota e.V. is a working group comprising artists, scientists, and programmers who jointly develop the eponymous software as well as formats for digital knowledge transfer. They most recently presented their work at Kampnagel in Hamburg as well as at documenta fifteen. As a social, technological, and aesthetic digital rehearsal space, nota is a montage tool and an alternative to “software solutions”. nota.space initially opens a blank and seemingly infinite space in which text, image, video, and sound files can be arranged and related to each other in a multitude of ways. nota is operated via keystrokes or with a mouse, respectively, and does not require any special expertise nor coding knowledge. The shareable online spaces enable joint montage independent of locale and time. Actions will be transferred to other operators in real time. nota, with its unusual dimensions of surface and depth, offers the opportunity to carry aesthetic process over into digital space, to remove data from its familiar structures and to review previous digital practice. This is how material collections accumulate in nota, alongside proprietary artistic works and new montage techniques.

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ON/LIVE wird gefördert im Rahmen des Bündnisses internationaler Produktionshäuser von der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.