Workshop
Tue 20 Jun 2023

Reading Group: Katherine McKittrick’s “Footnotes–Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor” and Aymeric Mansoux’s “How deep is your Source”

Online

Participants

Femke SneltingEva Weinmayr

Reading Group: Katherine McKittrick’s “Footnotes–Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor” and Aymeric Mansoux’s “How deep is your Source”

This time we will cross read black feminist thinker Katherine McKittrick’s (2021) text “Footnotes–Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor” with the text “How deep is your Source” (2013) by media researcher, artist and musician Aymeric Mansoux.

In her text, Katherine McKittrick gives an account of her own lively practices of sourcing and resourcing knowledges and ideas:

By observing how arranging, rearranging, and collecting ideas outside ourselves are processes that make our ideas our own, I think about how our ideas are bound up in stories, research, inquiries, that we do not (or should not claim we) own.

She attempts to re-invent a practice of citation that is beyond academic signposting: “I show the images because I want to be as honest as I can about my intellectual history while also recognizing my dishonest memory. I show the images because I want to be honest about where my ideas come from while recognizing that this is also a process of forgetting.”

In the second text “How deep is your source” (2013), Aymeric Mansoux tracks the history of open source software and looks at the processes of translation that are put in place, when free software licences are applied to the field of cultutral production. His reflections are based on practical aspects addressing the problems of a simplifying and universalising one-size-fits-all approach.

While written from different perspectives, practices and concerns, we think (hope) that by bringing these texts in conversation with each other, we can find out something about a possible politics of re-use.

Reading instructions

We will read together McKittrick page 14—19 (PDF).
With Aymeric’s text we will focus on the part Towards the Borges Public License,
https://archive.bleu255.com/bleu255.com-texts/how-deep-is-your-source/index.html

Literature List

Katherine McKittrick (2021) “Footnotes, (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)”, in: Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press,. DOI: 10.1215/9781478012573-002.

Aymeric Mansoux (2013), “How deep is your source?”

Contributors

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism and Free Software. With the Brussels-based association for art and media, Constant, she experimented with Free Culture as a trans*feminist practice through performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes. Her thinking about reuse was sharpened as part of her work with the Libre Graphics Movement in dialogue with the practice of Open Source Publishing (OSP), a design collective that she co-founded in 2006.

Currently Femke works in various constellations on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists on what computational infrastructures do to collective life. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication resulted from a collective disobedient research project, which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

Femke supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht) and contributes to Nubo, a cooperative that provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services. In the context of SoLiXG, she develops Counter Cloud Imaginaries, non-sovereign institutional infrastructures and methods for infra-resistance. With the Infrastructural Rehearsals collective, she collaborates on proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches to the climate crisis, from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives.

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr works at the interface of art, critical publishing and radical education. Her focus is on decolonial feminist discourses, pedagogies and practices. From 2019 until 2022 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” (with erg, Brussels) and co-initiated kritilab, an open-source platform and laboratory for Critical Diversity Literacy at the intersection of art and education. As part of “Ecologies of Dissemination”(HDK-Valand, 2022–24) with Femke Snelting, she develops decolonial feminist practices to Open Access.

Recent collaborative publication projects include “Noun to Verb”, a PhD thesis concerned with the micro-politics of publishing from an intersectional feminist perspective that was developed and published on a MediaWiki. She collaborates with Lucie Kolb on decolonial, feminist approaches to naming and cataloguing knowledge in institutional libraries in the Global North that led to an exhibition and the online publication “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021–22); Further projects include “The Piracy Project” (2010–15, with Andrea Francke), an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and modes of reproduction.

Currently, she works as Guest Professor for Critical Access at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel Academy of Art and Design (CH) and is part of the team of the MA “Critical Social Practice in Art Education” at ZHdK Zurich. Since 2024 she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK).