Constant

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Splint 2023 → 2027

The program that Constant develops from 2023 to 2027 revolves around what we call SPLINT, “Speculative, Libre, Intersectional Technologies”. SPLINT is a term coined to signal Constant’s commitment for the next few years of its research programme. Namely, the intention to answer the question: What could/should be and do libre, intersectional technologies? More specifically, what kinds of devices and practices could address and counteract the systemic discriminations, oppressions and exclusions at play in today’s technologies?

Techno-disobedience

During 2023 Constant’s research focused on artistic-activist resistances against technological dominations from state control regimes as well as from GAFAM corporations.

Through worksessions, workshops and artistic research commission, Constant looked at techniques of disobedience as a means to question and resist the paradigm of an all-controlling and regulating technology.

If civil disobedience illustrates how one can and should disobey a law they consider unjust, technological disobedience was posed here as a question: what obligations do we feel are put forward by Big PATCH (Patriarcho-colonial Big-Tech progress) and what it could mean to disagree, refuse, disobey them?

In everyday life, one can already notice tiny forms of defection from the unspoken but deeply felt obligations to consume, to keep up to date, to be connected, to produce, to pose oneself as a data-subject. But...

  • Do you sometimes enter or exit from the open doors of the metro without scanning your transport card?
  • Do you keep a little manual lid covering your camera on your laptop or phone?
  • Do you always try to repair your devices before buying new ones?

From mundane individual acts to collective coordinated acts of refusal, techno-disobedience is multiple and pervasive.

Every time period carries its own need to disobey, but how is this knowledge transferred? To answer this question, we dug up previous tools of resistance to revitalise the ground and we considered how to best reclaim tech and recognise this push to be about labour, care, anti-racism, queer life and trans*feminist techno-politics.

The collective research that arised aimed to connect and cross-pollinate, find new pathways to circumvent, detour and resist the social and political expectations that come with the authoritarian turbo-capitalist frameworks of Big PATCH.

Let’s jam together sinuous paths of entangled and liveable techno-lives.

A cane, sticky notes, another body

During 2024 Constant’s research focused on the problems of accessibility of physical and virtual spaces.

Through worksessions, workshops and artistic research commissions, Constant opened up a field of technical-artistic experimentation addressing these urgent issues.

The title of this trajectory referred to several dimensions of accessibility. The cane was an example of a physical tool, the adhesive memo referred to means of aiding memory, such as a post-it note, or a voice assistant. The other body represented the collective care, formal and informal, that binds people together.

Otherworldly communications

Otherworldly communications researches how different forms of life co/exist and circulate in the midst of damage and toxicity; it is an invitation to sit in the presence of these lives, toxic but nevertheless persistent.

For this intent, Constant will initiate attempts at discerning the furious course of the mining industry, apprehending the deadly weigth of digital materiality and sensing the pernicious in/visibility of urban pollution, not as separated phenomena but very much imbricated in a ongoing stream of capitalisticolonial violence onto multispecies animations.

Seeking other ways of relating and engaging with technology than through damage, the year-long program will prompt possibilities for recognising the sensitive existences and presences other than our own by using technologies of feeling, speculative or otherwise. Hydrophones, poetry, cartography and geography, sensors, dream circles, musical instruments, etc will assist us in looking for stories of multispecies resistance.

Unbordering

Constant on tour