nooo.relearn.activating.the.archive v _____ v _____ _ _ v _____ v ____ ____ _ ____ \| ___"|/ |_ " _| |'| |'| \| ___"|/v | _"\ v v| _"\ vv /"\ v | _"\ | _|" V | | /| |_| |\ | _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | | | |___ /| |\ v| A |v | |___ | _ < I | __/ / ___ \ v| |_| |\ |_____| v |_|v |_| |_| |_____| |_| \_\ |_| A/_/ \_\ |____/ v << >> _// \\_ // \\ << >> // \\_ ||>>_ \\ >> |||_ (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__) (_P_)(_A_)_D_) (__) (__)
Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: VISIBILITY: - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it. PRIVACY: - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. RETENTION: - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely. - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests. ACCESSIBILITY: - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups. - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies. If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. <!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Methods of active documentation
What's the active part of documenting Relearn?What does it mean to re-activate a collection of files? Does it mean to execute them again? To read them again? To simply look at them again? Does the material change while we observe it? Do we change while observing the material?
Relearn is intentionally self-reflective. Almost every year there have been attempts to re-examine and redress itself. 2017 was no stranger to that. In the Networked Archive track of that year, the word *rumination* came up a lot. The track participants had the image of a cow's stomach in our minds, the four different chambers that it consists of: Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum, Abomasum. The first two chambers are the major site of microbial activity that break down digest the material. After the cud is regurgitated, then swallowed again, until completely mixed (or activated) with saliva, it is then sent to the omasum, where it's broken down into the smallest elements possible to be pushed into the abomasum, the 'real' stomach of the cow. Further digestion takes place here. If Relearn were a ruminant, what would these chambers look like? Would the material ever reach the 'real' stomach? Is there any 'real', 'final' stomach? Do we ever finish digesting what happens during Relearn or are we stuck in a kind ofgastric purgatory?
The files and traces that are left after every Relearn could be seen as extensions of a collective memory: notes that were taken in passing are now the only marks left by the thoughts that passed through, snippets of code that lay dormant in the repository, pictures of unidentified gestures which now seem alien, or group photos reminding of who was there. They sit in different hard drives: the hard drive of the server hosting the Gitlab repository and the hard drives of the participants' day-to-day computers. They are in that sense not passive at all. But you could say that they're not active either, as nobody is paying attention to them or remembers that they exist.
How to approach the Relearn 2017 *dump* of images, scripts, etherpad traces and more? We are in a kind of chicken-and-egg situation: how to introduce Relearn while taking into account what Relearn is, or better yet, how Relearn works, in the very way of doing this?Our intuition is thata lack of "essence" might be a defining feature of Relearn. As the diversity among the various editions demonstrates, Relearn can be seen as a process more than as a "thing". A radical anti-essentialist approach to Relearn can be formulated as a question: what's the process of describing a process?
With this question in mind, we started looking at the traces left in various hard drives, servers, and online pages… Wetook an investigative, forensic approach. We started tagging, looking at metadata and producing more of it, conscious that while the material is unable to speak for itself,it is also a trigger for us to recall memories stored somewhere in our wetware hard drives.
One of the consequences of activating a previous event is that we spend time together again. Reading the *call for tracks* is a way for us to pick up conversations where we left them off in 2017, thus activating/reframing the question of learning/relearning in a collective setting. It turns it into a reroam-over-time (where *reroam* has been a recurring name for moments of meta reflection on Relearn, during Relean). What were the motivations, curiosities or urgencies that led us to organising and initiating Relearn in 2017? Are they still the same? How different are they now?
[to ingest and to regurgitate]
We believe the act of activating can also be an act of mediation. An important element to describe Relearn with is its temporality: short bursts of togetherness anticipated by longer periods of organisational work. There is no stable institution or structure behind Relearn to mediate between people or over time. When there is no one to organise, the spam emails grow in numbers, like wild weeds in an unkept garden. We hope that activating and mediating Relearn through this document format enables thinking about it in a perspective of years instead of a perspective of weeks. By activating a previous edition of Relearn we hope to continue the conversation around collective practices, of which rumination is one.
There are three kinds of addressees for this document: diving into the files lets us take into account what permeated Relearn before 2017 and what was passed on afterwards. We hope this will reignite the subjects within our own networks, including the Relearn network, where it can be read as an extended email to the mailinglist.
At the same time, we felt excited to revisit the Relearn 2017 conversations and inscribe them into a document that could speak to people with similar affinities, who may decide to organise their own experiment.
And last but not least, one of the constantsof many editions is the difference in the way participants experience this time together. Like any process of joining a new group, for first-time relearners it can often be a bit intimidating, a bit awkward, to understand what are the habits of said group and to share your process with someone else. We hope that this document might feel like having a conversation with a previous relearner, while being outside in the sun, waiting for tea to boil.
<!--
[Something that is not touched upon is the role of learning in our practices? Or the relation between learning and our practices.]
---- text writing notes that need to be ported in or left aside ↓
During Relean, finished outputs are not required. This is very clear in the materials we analyzed, that can be seen as threads, which extend out of relearn. Were we trying to connect the threads more than following them to see where they lead to.
where is the data stored? What does collective memory mean? various hard drives, but also physical traces, "souvenirs", mental images, oral anecdotes, etc. that reactivate each other. Active archiving means incentivizing such "activation". ware, hardware, software and wetware.
what does activating mean? (A spectrum of activating) [i would keep this] 1. activating convo between relearners 2. making the archive legible to non-relearners or wanna be relearners 3. providing access and foster distribution 4. ????
How does the activation happen? conversation between things and people, inter-activation, inter-enactment
passive data, info > activated by looking at it "“situated knowledges”. The idea, developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of particular people make truth, Haraway argued. The scientists in a laboratory don’t simply observe or conduct experiments on a cell, for instance, but co-create what a cell is by seeing, measuring, naming and manipulating it." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth
files are constantly active? technically speaking?
multiple levels of activation (interrelated) [i would keep this] 0. material that sits somewhere, but nobody knows were, nobody looks at it 1. looking at the material 2a. annotating the material
- injecting annotations (images [in the files], call for tracks [in the text])
- organising, adding order, making sense (etherpads)
2b. making it legible (introducing, design, playfulness in the way we do this to reflect relearn?) 3. producing new material (oral histories etc.) 4. picking up conversation / producing situation that is new and old at the same time 5. give it to others 6. connecting to other experience that are out there (articulate position)
A little too active documentation: mistakenly adding the hidden bashrc files when too rapidly commiting files to the git before taking offline the complex.local server at the end of Relearn 2017.
What's the active part of documenting Relearn? What does it mean to re-activate a collection of files? Does it mean to execute them again? To read them again? To simply look at them again? Does the material change while we observe it? Do we change while observing the material?
Relearn is intentionally self-reflective. Almost every year there have been attempts to re-examine and redress itself. 2017 was no stranger to that. In the Networked Archive track of that year, the word *rumination* came up a lot. The track participants had the image of a cow's stomach in our minds, the four different chambers that it consists of: Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum, Abomasum. The first two chambers are the major site of microbial activity that break down digest the material. After the cud is regurgitated, then swallowed again, until completely mixed (or activated) with saliva, it is then sent to the omasum, where it's broken down into the smallest elements possible to be pushed into the abomasum, the 'real' stomach of the cow. Further digestion takes place here. If Relearn were a ruminant, what would these chambers look like? Would the material ever reach the 'real' stomach? Is there any 'real', 'final' stomach? Do we ever finish digesting what happens during Relearn or are we stuck in a kind of gastric purgatory?
The files and traces that are left after every Relearn could be seen as extensions of a collective memory: notes that were taken in passing are now the only marks left by the thoughts that passed through, snippets of code that lay dormant in the repository, pictures of unidentified gestures which now seem alien, or group photos reminding of who was there. They sit in different hard drives: the hard drive of the server hosting the Gitlab repository and the hard drives of the participants' day-to-day computers. They are in that sense not passive at all. But you could say that they're not active either, as nobody is paying attention to them or remembers that they exist.
How to approach the Relearn 2017 *dump* of images, scripts, etherpad traces and more? We are in a kind of chicken-and-egg situation: how to introduce Relearn while taking into account what Relearn is, or better yet, how Relearn works, in the very way of doing this? Our intuition is that a lack of "essence" might be a defining feature of Relearn. As the diversity among the various editions demonstrates, Relearn can be seen as a process more than as a "thing". A radical anti-essentialist approach to Relearn can be formulated as a question: what's the process of describing a process?
With this question in mind, we started looking at the traces left in various hard drives, servers, and online pages… We took an investigative, forensic approach. We started tagging, looking at metadata and producing more of it, conscious that while the material is unable to speak for itself, it is also a trigger for us to recall memories stored somewhere in our wetware hard drives.
One of the consequences of activating a previous event is that we spend time together again. Reading the *call for tracks* is a way for us to pick up conversations where we left them off in 2017, thus activating/reframing the question of learning/relearning in a collective setting. It turns it into a reroam-over-time (where *reroam* has been a recurring name for moments of meta reflection on Relearn, during Relean). What were the motivations, curiosities or urgencies that led us to organising and initiating Relearn in 2017? Are they still the same? How different are they now?
[to ingest and to regurgitate]
We believe the act of activating can also be an act of mediation. An important element to describe Relearn with is its temporality: short bursts of togetherness anticipated by longer periods of organisational work. There is no stable institution or structure behind Relearn to mediate between people or over time. When there is no one to organise, the spam emails grow in numbers, like wild weeds in an unkept garden. We hope that activating and mediating Relearn through this document format enables thinking about it in a perspective of years instead of a perspective of weeks. By activating a previous edition of Relearn we hope to continue the conversation around collective practices, of which rumination is one.
There are three kinds of addressees for this document: diving into the files lets us take into account what permeated Relearn before 2017 and what was passed on afterwards. We hope this will reignite the subjects within our own networks, including the Relearn network, where it can be read as an extended email to the mailing list.
At the same time, we felt excited to revisit the Relearn 2017 conversations and inscribe them into a document that could speak to people with similar affinities, who may decide to organise their own experiment.
And last but not least, one of the constants of many editions is the difference in the way participants experience this time together. Like any process of joining a new group, for first-time relearners it can often be a bit intimidating, a bit awkward, to understand what are the habits of said group and to share your process with someone else. We hope that this document might feel like having a conversation with a previous relearner, while being outside in the sun, waiting for tea to boil.
<!--
[Something that is not touched upon is the role of learning in our practices? Or the relation between learning and our practices.]
---- text writing notes that need to be ported in or left aside ↓
During Relean, finished outputs are not required. This is very clear in the materials we analyzed, that can be seen as threads, which extend out of relearn. Were we trying to connect the threads more than following them to see where they lead to.
where is the data stored? What does collective memory mean? various hard drives, but also physical traces, "souvenirs", mental images, oral anecdotes, etc. that reactivate each other. Active archiving means incentivizing such "activation". ware, hardware, software and wetware.
what does activating mean? (A spectrum of activating) [i would keep this] 1. activating convo between relearners 2. making the archive legible to non-relearners or wanna be relearners 3. providing access and foster distribution 4. ????
How does the activation happen? conversation between things and people, inter-activation, inter-enactment
passive data, info > activated by looking at it "“situated knowledges”. The idea, developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of particular people make truth, Haraway argued. The scientists in a laboratory don’t simply observe or conduct experiments on a cell, for instance, but co-create what a cell is by seeing, measuring, naming and manipulating it." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth
files are constantly active? technically speaking?
multiple levels of activation (interrelated) [i would keep this] 0. material that sits somewhere, but nobody knows were, nobody looks at it 1. looking at the material 2a. annotating the material
- injecting annotations (images [in the files], call for tracks [in the text])
- organising, adding order, making sense (etherpads)
2b. making it legible (introducing, design, playfulness in the way we do this to reflect relearn?) 3. producing new material (oral histories etc.) 4. picking up conversation / producing situation that is new and old at the same time 5. give it to others 6. connecting to other experience that are out there (articulate position)
A little too active documentation: mistakenly adding the hidden bashrc files when too rapidly commiting files to the git before taking offline the complex.local server at the end of Relearn 2017.
-->
nooo.relearn.call.for.proposals-proposal-footnote v _____ v _____ _ _ v _____ v ____ ____ _ ____ \| ___"|/ |_ " _| |'| |'| \| ___"|/v | _"\ v v| _"\ vv /"\ v | _"\ | _|" V | | /| |_| |\ | _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | | | |___ /| |\ v| A |v | |___ | _ < I | __/ / ___ \ v| |_| |\ |_____| v |_|v |_| |_| |_____| |_| \_\ |_| A/_/ \_\ |____/ v << >> _// \\_ // \\ << >> // \\_ ||>>_ \\ >> |||_ (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__) (_P_)(_A_)_D_) (__) (__)
Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: VISIBILITY: - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it. PRIVACY: - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. RETENTION: - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely. - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests. ACCESSIBILITY: - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups. - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies. If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. <!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Tracks
Whatever might be going on during Relearn, we tend to focus on processes over outcomes[^1]. However, research themes are important to provide entry points into collective research. Thematic tracks (usually simply called tracks) are subject proposals which are put forward during the week in different ways, some more technical, some more discursive, some more exploratory.
[^1]: The goal of Relearn is not to be collectively productive, instead it is left up to each participant to determine the rhythms and patterns in which they want to operate. The session attempts to construct a playful space where if something like work happens, it is for the sake of curiosity and does not require the participants to perform acts of closure, finitude or functionality. The motivation for this can be found in Relearn's history: one of the reasons for starting it in 2013 was a reaction to those *work sprints* that go under the name of *workshops*. Open Source Publishing (OSP – mentioned here as the initiators of Relearn 2013) was and is often invited to give workshops in various art and design schools, but one reoccurring condition of these *workshops* is the desire to produce objects, often in print form: publications, posters or collections. This partially comes from the need to be able to grade and score students' work, but it has become clear that working to these end goals hinders the focus on research questions. Later, this became an idea to address during Relearn. Clearly stating that making finalised things is not a requirement at Relearn lets participants spend their time exactly where they desire, not constrained by conditions imposed by production.
*Tracks* is a deliberately loose word used for a subject, an approach or a set of material allowing participants to influence and orient the direction of collective work. A track is the word that has been used to ensure that everyone involved realises that diversions are encouraged and that one can decide to take alternative routes. Tracks in that sense is meant to resonate with tracks or pathways in a forest. Some of those tracks are more close to being roads and even appear on the map, but others are more serendipitously created as people start to follow the same path more often, pushing the leaves and branches on the floor to the side. They start to leave a trace and create a track for others to follow. Others are less visible, but marked with signages that indicate direction. Some of these tracks carry histories with them, while others are yet to be discovered, thus defined. As such, the strive for this kind of learning can be interpreted as a walk we undertake together, that is short-lived, but whose discoveries are potentially continued in different places, traversing into the day-to-day lives of the walkers.
We start suggesting this metaphorical use of the term track while writing about the 2017 edition. The term has been used since the first edition, but has never been explicitly described. It became a transversal element of Relearn without a fixed understanding of what it could be.
Tracks are prepared in advance. Most Relearn iterations involved an open call for tracks. In some cases these tracks were proposed by people coordinating Relearn itself, but more often than not, track submissions came from people beginning research into a topic and wanting to bring the topic to a wider group of people to develop the subject further. Track organisers are typically asked to bring enough material to make their questions understood, but no more than that. By using the word track instead of workshop, we try to call for proposals of subjects, attitudes or techniques, that can be collectively explored. During Relearn some tracks (borrowing from versioning software vocabulary) have been forked, signifying a split, a deliberate change in direction, a disambiguation or a deeper exploration of a sub-topic.
This openness for input/take-overs from others directly relates to the wish of displacing roles of the teacher and learner (see notes expanding the *call for tracks* text). A secondary, yet key ongoing experiment, is the idea of track travelling: encouraging participants to take part in tracks and then visit other tracks. It emphasises not only the lack of focus on production, but other aspects too: active documentation, sharing of topics and giving participants a chance to benefit from all the subjects being researched at Relearn. An expression of this—and something that has been done deliberately—is when a track initiator leaves the track they originally started, to join a different one.
Various moments of sharing spring up throughout the length of Relearn. They assist in communicating to the rest of the groups what each track traveler is busy with and become an invitation for external questions. These moments help track travelers move to other focuses, or take ideas and processes from other groups. It is notable that these sharing moments are not scheduled and do not happen regularly. They also tend to happen organically, often the sharing of updates happens throughout meals and breaks.
Relearn 2017 hosted a new type of experiment related to tracks; to put track proposals in conversation with one another and see what type of situation it would yield. As a response to the open call, we received thirteen proposals, of which five were eventually unable to join the week. The remaining eight were at different points in their development. In an attempt not to exclude any tracks, we discussed each proposal at length and noticed some common interests or similitudes in approaches. We then reached out to initiators and asked for their permission—and interest—to being put into dialogue with other initiators.
The motivation to do this was manifold: to provide the space to all those who had submitted a research initiative to find collaborators and to follow curiosities alongside each other, intersecting or multiplying; to make the track preparation process less solitary; to open up some of the research strands in order for more people to be able to join; to already form connections between participants; or serendipitous research encounters. Indirectly, we were also influenced by the notion that we had put forward in the call: co-autonomies, but this was more of a reaction to the topics that were proposed, not a planned move to enact the term.
We aimed to create an open conversational space where the experiences of those involved could inform the directions of the week. To break open the teacher-student duality by learning about your track partner's practice. Instead of a merge, the idea of having research questions be shaped by each other was a means to open up the organisational work and destabilise norms of knowledge production. This involved some risk taking: different ideas on how to lead the tracks had to be negotiated and the combination could have possibly diluted the focus of the original proposals. Time was also an important constraint; to be able to devote a week to re-learning is already a significant luxury, but to find moments to plan and plot outside of this frame was not as easy for everyone. Collaboration requires togetherness and agendas mirroring each other, and it is rarely free of frictions. In this sense, combining tracks came with more work for everyone involved in the organisation of the week.
We went one step further in this attempt: once we had received approval from all parties in the new partnerships, we opened an etherpad document[^etherpad] for each collaboration. In each pad, we included the proposals from each party and proceeded to include our observations and explanations of why we felt it appropriate to join the topics. Our proposal was for the track initiators to use that space to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously on the cross-sections of their subjects.
[^etherpad]: Etherpad is web-based software that allows for multi-handed collaborative writing and editing of texts in real time. The software is heavly adopted by Relearn and many of its supporting organisations, Varia, Constant, OSP. The consistent use of etherpad stimulated two Relearn transversal projects: [Ethertoff](https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/osp/tools.ethertoff), developed for and used during Relearn 2013) to turn etherpad into a writing interface for a wiki-type website; and [Etherdump](https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/aa/etherdump) a converting and archiving tool of all pads in an etherpad installation.
Four tracks resulted:
- *Ransom Headlessnesss in the Design of Language* looked at the interplay between design and programming languages.
- *Versioning the Networked Archive* explored the link between networked communities and archives starting from practical examples such as the Poortgebouw archive, or the Github archive.
- *Not-So-Utopian Open-Source Pedagogies* combined a critical examination of utopian conceptions in open source software with constructive methods for the organisation of groups.
- *Collective Care Transmission Forms* dealt with healing in cyberspace from a critical feminist materialist perspective, communal care in digital environments and the transferral of aural thoughts and expression.
The outcomes were less ambivalent, we felt: bridging the tracks meant that the organizers had to gain an in-depth understanding of their intentions through the collaboration and to have an oversight on the connections as well as on the digressions of the two topics.
A later, further risk was taken from these resulting tracks (and their pads): the tracks pads, containing track proposals and new information from the established contacts, were made public and used to invite participants to contribute in the secondary call for participation. Those considering to respond to the open call for participation would be able to see the topics in their latest version, and even, if they so wished, to already propose corresponding questions or contribute material. The ideal scenario we were trying to create here was a collective research environment that could traverse the fixed time of collectivity by extending the discussion to before and after.
An observation from the specific track attempts from 2017 is that it was easier to create discussion points between individuals than among groups. Some track proposals were submitted by groups of people. In those instances, the collaborative work done by the initial group was more complex to bridge into a new, bigger group, no doubt due to the already complicated work done in multiple people proposing a single track. Frictions also arose when discussing their common grounds. It is also notable that we were not always able to consider these frictions as points of interest, opportunities to observe collaborative practices. These, as well as the extra quantity of work and coordination it implied, makes us wonder if these experiments worked. Looking back, we would procede with more caution and be more hesitant about pairing up individuals with / and / or groups of multiples without providing a dedicated space (beyond an online editor) for that. Dedicating a full week in the summer to Relearn is complicated enough as it is, investing extra time in preparing a track together can be too exhausting.
When Relearn 2017 ended, no time beyond the practical disassembly of the spaces we used was planned or budgeted. We, as a group of organisers debriefed lightly, took time to publish (problematically ! cfr. *a-little-too-active-documentation* notes) the etherdumps and information from the local server on shared text & code versioning platforms, but not much beyond that. Relearn 2017 happened on the first week of September, so the traditional September rush ensued.
The Rotterdam edition of Relearn also marked five consecutive years of the summer research project, after which there was a year of silence. Meanwhile, Varia—as an idea, as a group and later, as a space—, was in full development, and various previous Relearners were meeting in multiple different contexts, Barcelona, 35c3, Computer Grrrls, Constant worksessions, etc.
Relearn 2019 was re-initiated with experiences from previous years in mind. A desire not to continue the format, but to address the time and energy requirements to organise an iteration. Relearn 2019 was re-initiated as a curve of short two to three day sessions, spanning several cities, over a longer period of time.
<!--
Relearn 2019
Tracks
---
- What is a track, from our perspectives?
What is a track not?
Based on our own oral memories from 2013, 2014 and 2015 / operating within a historical understanding of the term / self-chosen habits with a past
* displacing roles of the teacher/learner
* openness for input/take-overs from others
+ connected to a practice, tracks tied to input/output
- Various approaches to tracks
- Track travelling
- Track conversation as an experiment
- Relearn 2019: edition as track
---
From the text about the Parallel School in Extra Curricular - horizontality in power relations between skills to express a position or opinion and those who are less good in that. Or between people who have knowledge about a subject already and those who have not. - exercise of loosing individuality, to seek the collective
model of curating model of openness breaking open the workshop format similarity with hackerspace organisation (everyone feels free to add their workshop)
---
Easy self-institutionalization A website is very convincing. It's easy to appear bigger then it is. How easy things are in sleep mode, or terminating. Where do these alternative learning situations live? Thinking of Evening Class falling apart these days ... The relation to infrastructure with longer term horizons (Constant, OSP, Varia) supports the continuation of Relearn.
---
---
From thefreedictionary.com, a list of idioms showing the metaphors through which tracks are understood in the English language:
a track record
along the beaten track
around the block
back on track
be off the beaten track
be on the right track
be on the right/wrong track
be on the wrong track
be on track
cover (one's) tracks (up)
cover one's tracks
cover tracks
cover your tracks
dead in (someone's or something's) tracks
dead in one's tracks
dead in or an animal's tracks
down the track
drop in (one's) tracks
drop in one's tracks
drop in tracks
fast track
fast-track
follow in (one's) tracks
follow in someone's footsteps
follow in tracks
from the wrong side of the tracks
from/on the wrong side of the tracks
get off track
get the inside track
give (one) the inside track
halt (someone or something) (dead) in its/(one's) tracks
have a one-track mind
have the inside track
hot on (one's) tracks
hot on (one's) trail
hot on somebody's/something's tracks/trail
hot on the track of (someone or something)
in (one's) tracks
in tracks
inside track
inside track, the
jump the track
jump the track(s)
keep on track
keep tab
keep track
keep track of something/someone
keep/lose track
lose track
lose track of (someone or something)
lose track of something/someone
make tracks
off (the) track
off the beaten track
off the track
on the beaten track
on the fast track
on the right tack
on the right track
on the track of
on the trail
on the wallaby (track)
on the wallaby track
on the wrong side of the tracks
on the wrong tack
on the wrong track
on track
one-track mind
other side of the tracks
put (one) off the track
put off the track
railroad tracks
right side of the tracks
side of the tracks
stop (dead) in (one's) tracks
stop (someone or something) (dead) in its/(one's) tracks
Thank you for sending us your track proposal for Relearn 2017. We've received a series of great proposals (13 in total) from all sorts of fields. It's wonderful to see that with its arrival in Rotterdam, Relearn will accommodate a new sphere of subjects and concerns. Reading you all is exciting and encouraging.
Whether it offers a specific subject to work on during the week or a well-defined method of working, each proposal adds something valuable to Relearn, enriching the idea of 'co-autonomies'. This word helped us think through what we might want to do this year and we're glad to see how you understood this invention.
One of the experiments of previous years that we would like to further develop is the ability for the tracks to walk on their own legs and evolve autonomously. In the edition of Relearn in 2013, track organisers intentionally left 'their' tracks after the second day of the week. This meant that the track they initiated had to be taken over by the participants and further developed into new directions.
In line with this setup, and in order to challenge the distinction between <subjects><students> and <production><teachers>, we conceived a track experiment for this year. Since some of the topics addressed in the proposals seem to resonate with each other, we would like to open the conversation between the tracks and see whether bridges can be made. We identified five areas of affinity which we are proposing to collaboratively develop:
- Ransom Headlessnesss in the Design of Language
- Collective Care Transmission Forms
- Versioning the Networked Archive
- The Considerate Cake Track
- Not-So-Utopian Open-Source Pedagogies
This is an experiment with the forms of tracks matching/merging/soup/brew/fusion/. Let us know what you think about it. If in some way it does not work for you in this way, write back to us and we'll try to reshape the format together. No need to say that we are open to different matches and some coexistences of autonomies we didn't envision.
Whatever might be going on during Relearn, we tend to focus on processes over outcomes[^1]. However, research themes are important to provide entry points into collective research. Thematic tracks (usually simply called tracks) are subject proposals which are put forward during the week in different ways, some more technical, some more discursive, some more exploratory.
[^1]: The goal of Relearn is not to be collectively productive, instead it is left up to each participant to determine the rhythms and patterns in which they want to operate. The session attempts to construct a playful space where if something like work happens, it is for the sake of curiosity and does not require the participants to perform acts of closure, finitude or functionality. The motivation for this can be found in Relearn's history: one of the reasons for starting it in 2013 was a reaction to those *work sprints* that go under the name of *workshops*. Open Source Publishing (OSP – mentioned here as the initiators of Relearn 2013) was and is often invited to give workshops in various art and design schools, but one reoccurring condition of these *workshops* is the desire to produce objects, often in print form: publications, posters or collections. This partially comes from the need to be able to grade and score students' work, but it has become clear that working to these end goals hinders the focus on research questions. Later, this became an idea to address during Relearn. Clearly stating that making finalised things is not a requirement at Relearn lets participants spend their time exactly where they desire, not constrained by conditions imposed by production.
*Tracks* is a deliberately loose word used for a subject, an approach or a set of material allowing participants to influence and orient the direction of collective work. A track is the word that has been used to ensure that everyone involved realises that diversions are encouraged and that one can decide to take alternative routes. Tracks in that sense is meant to resonate with tracks or pathways in a forest. Some of those tracks are more close to being roads and even appear on the map, but others are more serendipitously created as people start to follow the same path more often, pushing the leaves and branches on the floor to the side. They start to leave a trace and create a track for others to follow. Others are less visible, but marked with signages that indicate direction. Some of these tracks carry histories with them, while others are yet to be discovered, thus defined. As such, the strive for this kind of learning can be interpreted as a walk we undertake together, that is short-lived, but whose discoveries are potentially continued in different places, traversing into the day-to-day lives of the walkers.
We start suggesting this metaphorical use of the term track while writing about the 2017 edition. The term has been used since the first edition, but has never been explicitly described. It became a transversal element of Relearn without a fixed understanding of what it could be.
Tracks are prepared in advance. Most Relearn iterations involved an open call for tracks. In some cases these tracks were proposed by people coordinating Relearn itself, but more often than not, track submissions came from people beginning research into a topic and wanting to bring the topic to a wider group of people to develop the subject further. Track organisers are typically asked to bring enough material to make their questions understood, but no more than that. By using the word track instead of workshop, we try to call for proposals of subjects, attitudes or techniques, that can be collectively explored. During Relearn some tracks (borrowing from versioning software vocabulary) have been forked, signifying a split, a deliberate change in direction, a disambiguation or a deeper exploration of a sub-topic.
This openness for input/take-overs from others directly relates to the wish of displacing roles of the teacher and learner (see notes expanding the *call for tracks* text). A secondary, yet key ongoing experiment, is the idea of track travelling: encouraging participants to take part in tracks and then visit other tracks. It emphasises not only the lack of focus on production, but other aspects too: active documentation, sharing of topics and giving participants a chance to benefit from all the subjects being researched at Relearn. An expression of this—and something that has been done deliberately—is when a track initiator leaves the track they originally started, to join a different one.
Various moments of sharing spring up throughout the length of Relearn. They assist in communicating to the rest of the groups what each track traveler is busy with and become an invitation for external questions. These moments help track travelers move to other focuses, or take ideas and processes from other groups. It is notable that these sharing moments are not scheduled and do not happen regularly. They also tend to happen organically, often the sharing of updates happens throughout meals and breaks.
Relearn 2017 hosted a new type of experiment related to tracks; to put track proposals in conversation with one another and see what type of situation it would yield. As a response to the open call, we received thirteen proposals, of which five were eventually unable to join the week. The remaining eight were at different points in their development. In an attempt not to exclude any tracks, we discussed each proposal at length and noticed some common interests or similitudes in approaches. We then reached out to initiators and asked for their permission—and interest—to being put into dialogue with other initiators.
The motivation to do this was manifold: to provide the space to all those who had submitted a research initiative to find collaborators and to follow curiosities alongside each other, intersecting or multiplying; to make the track preparation process less solitary; to open up some of the research strands in order for more people to be able to join; to already form connections between participants; or serendipitous research encounters. Indirectly, we were also influenced by the notion that we had put forward in the call: co-autonomies, but this was more of a reaction to the topics that were proposed, not a planned move to enact the term.
We aimed to create an open conversational space where the experiences of those involved could inform the directions of the week. To break open the teacher-student duality by learning about your track partner's practice. Instead of a merge, the idea of having research questions be shaped by each other was a means to open up the organisational work and destabilise norms of knowledge production. This involved some risk taking: different ideas on how to lead the tracks had to be negotiated and the combination could have possibly diluted the focus of the original proposals. Time was also an important constraint; to be able to devote a week to re-learning is already a significant luxury, but to find moments to plan and plot outside of this frame was not as easy for everyone. Collaboration requires togetherness and agendas mirroring each other, and it is rarely free of frictions. In this sense, combining tracks came with more work for everyone involved in the organisation of the week.
We went one step further in this attempt: once we had received approval from all parties in the new partnerships, we opened an etherpad document[^etherpad] for each collaboration. In each pad, we included the proposals from each party and proceeded to include our observations and explanations of why we felt it appropriate to join the topics. Our proposal was for the track initiators to use that space to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously on the cross-sections of their subjects.
[^etherpad]: Etherpad is web-based software that allows for multi-handed collaborative writing and editing of texts in real time. The software is heavly adopted by Relearn and many of its supporting organisations, Varia, Constant, OSP. The consistent use of etherpad stimulated two Relearn transversal projects: [Ethertoff](https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/osp/tools.ethertoff), developed for and used during Relearn 2013) to turn etherpad into a writing interface for a wiki-type website; and [Etherdump](https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/aa/etherdump) a converting and archiving tool of all pads in an etherpad installation.
Four tracks resulted:
- *Ransom Headlessnesss in the Design of Language* looked at the interplay between design and programming languages.
- *Versioning the Networked Archive* explored the link between networked communities and archives starting from practical examples such as the Poortgebouw archive, or the Github archive.
- *Not-So-Utopian Open-Source Pedagogies* combined a critical examination of utopian conceptions in open source software with constructive methods for the organisation of groups.
- *Collective Care Transmission Forms* dealt with healing in cyberspace from a critical feminist materialist perspective, communal care in digital environments and the transferral of aural thoughts and expression.
The outcomes were less ambivalent, we felt: bridging the tracks meant that the organizers had to gain an in-depth understanding of their intentions through the collaboration and to have an oversight on the connections as well as on the digressions of the two topics.
A later, further risk was taken from these resulting tracks (and their pads): the tracks pads, containing track proposals and new information from the established contacts, were made public and used to invite participants to contribute in the secondary call for participation. Those considering to respond to the open call for participation would be able to see the topics in their latest version, and even, if they so wished, to already propose corresponding questions or contribute material. The ideal scenario we were trying to create here was a collective research environment that could traverse the fixed time of collectivity by extending the discussion to before and after.
An observation from the specific track attempts from 2017 is that it was easier to create discussion points between individuals than among groups. Some track proposals were submitted by groups of people. In those instances, the collaborative work done by the initial group was more complex to bridge into a new, bigger group, no doubt due to the already complicated work done in multiple people proposing a single track. Frictions also arose when discussing their common grounds. It is also notable that we were not always able to consider these frictions as points of interest, opportunities to observe collaborative practices. These, as well as the extra quantity of work and coordination it implied, makes us wonder if these experiments worked. Looking back, we would procede with more caution and be more hesitant about pairing up individuals with / and / or groups of multiples without providing a dedicated space (beyond an online editor) for that. Dedicating a full week in the summer to Relearn is complicated enough as it is, investing extra time in preparing a track together can be too exhausting.
When Relearn 2017 ended, no time beyond the practical disassembly of the spaces we used was planned or budgeted. We, as a group of organisers debriefed lightly, took time to publish (problematically ! cfr. *a-little-too-active-documentation* notes) the etherdumps and information from the local server on shared text & code versioning platforms, but not much beyond that. Relearn 2017 happened on the first week of September, so the traditional September rush ensued.
The Rotterdam edition of Relearn also marked five consecutive years of the summer research project, after which there was a year of silence. Meanwhile, Varia—as an idea, as a group and later, as a space—, was in full development, and various previous Relearners were meeting in multiple different contexts, Barcelona, 35c3, Computer Grrrls, Constant worksessions, etc.
Relearn 2019 was re-initiated with experiences from previous years in mind. A desire not to continue the format, but to address the time and energy requirements to organise an iteration. Relearn 2019 was re-initiated as a curve of short two to three day sessions, spanning several cities, over a longer period of time.
<!--
Relearn 2019
Tracks
---
- What is a track, from our perspectives?
What is a track not?
Based on our own oral memories from 2013, 2014 and 2015 / operating within a historical understanding of the term / self-chosen habits with a past
* displacing roles of the teacher/learner
* openness for input/take-overs from others
+ connected to a practice, tracks tied to input/output
- Various approaches to tracks
- Track travelling
- Track conversation as an experiment
- Relearn 2019: edition as track
---
From the text about the Parallel School in Extra Curricular - horizontality in power relations between skills to express a position or opinion and those who are less good in that. Or between people who have knowledge about a subject already and those who have not. - exercise of loosing individuality, to seek the collective
model of curating model of openness breaking open the workshop format similarity with hackerspace organisation (everyone feels free to add their workshop)
---
Easy self-institutionalization A website is very convincing. It's easy to appear bigger then it is. How easy things are in sleep mode, or terminating. Where do these alternative learning situations live? Thinking of Evening Class falling apart these days ... The relation to infrastructure with longer term horizons (Constant, OSP, Varia) supports the continuation of Relearn.
---
---
From thefreedictionary.com, a list of idioms showing the metaphors through which tracks are understood in the English language:
a track record
along the beaten track
around the block
back on track
be off the beaten track
be on the right track
be on the right/wrong track
be on the wrong track
be on track
cover (one's) tracks (up)
cover one's tracks
cover tracks
cover your tracks
dead in (someone's or something's) tracks
dead in one's tracks
dead in or an animal's tracks
down the track
drop in (one's) tracks
drop in one's tracks
drop in tracks
fast track
fast-track
follow in (one's) tracks
follow in someone's footsteps
follow in tracks
from the wrong side of the tracks
from/on the wrong side of the tracks
get off track
get the inside track
give (one) the inside track
halt (someone or something) (dead) in its/(one's) tracks
have a one-track mind
have the inside track
hot on (one's) tracks
hot on (one's) trail
hot on somebody's/something's tracks/trail
hot on the track of (someone or something)
in (one's) tracks
in tracks
inside track
inside track, the
jump the track
jump the track(s)
keep on track
keep tab
keep track
keep track of something/someone
keep/lose track
lose track
lose track of (someone or something)
lose track of something/someone
make tracks
off (the) track
off the beaten track
off the track
on the beaten track
on the fast track
on the right tack
on the right track
on the track of
on the trail
on the wallaby (track)
on the wallaby track
on the wrong side of the tracks
on the wrong tack
on the wrong track
on track
one-track mind
other side of the tracks
put (one) off the track
put off the track
railroad tracks
right side of the tracks
side of the tracks
stop (dead) in (one's) tracks
stop (someone or something) (dead) in its/(one's) tracks
Thank you for sending us your track proposal for Relearn 2017. We've received a series of great proposals (13 in total) from all sorts of fields. It's wonderful to see that with its arrival in Rotterdam, Relearn will accommodate a new sphere of subjects and concerns. Reading you all is exciting and encouraging.
Whether it offers a specific subject to work on during the week or a well-defined method of working, each proposal adds something valuable to Relearn, enriching the idea of 'co-autonomies'. This word helped us think through what we might want to do this year and we're glad to see how you understood this invention.
One of the experiments of previous years that we would like to further develop is the ability for the tracks to walk on their own legs and evolve autonomously. In the edition of Relearn in 2013, track organisers intentionally left 'their' tracks after the second day of the week. This meant that the track they initiated had to be taken over by the participants and further developed into new directions.
In line with this setup, and in order to challenge the distinction between <subjects><students> and <production><teachers>, we conceived a track experiment for this year. Since some of the topics addressed in the proposals seem to resonate with each other, we would like to open the conversation between the tracks and see whether bridges can be made. We identified five areas of affinity which we are proposing to collaboratively develop:
- Ransom Headlessnesss in the Design of Language
- Collective Care Transmission Forms
- Versioning the Networked Archive
- The Considerate Cake Track
- Not-So-Utopian Open-Source Pedagogies
This is an experiment with the forms of tracks matching/merging/soup/brew/fusion/. Let us know what you think about it. If in some way it does not work for you in this way, write back to us and we'll try to reshape the format together. No need to say that we are open to different matches and some coexistences of autonomies we didn't envision.
-->
nooo.relearn.call.for.tracks v _____ v _____ _ _ v _____ v ____ ____ _ ____ \| ___"|/ |_ " _| |'| |'| \| ___"|/v | _"\ v v| _"\ vv /"\ v | _"\ | _|" V | | /| |_| |\ | _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | | | |___ /| |\ v| A |v | |___ | _ < I | __/ / ___ \ v| |_| |\ |_____| v |_|v |_| |_| |_____| |_| \_\ |_| A/_/ \_\ |____/ v << >> _// \\_ // \\ << >> // \\_ ||>>_ \\ >> |||_ (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__) (_P_)(_A_)_D_) (__) (__)
Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: VISIBILITY: - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it. PRIVACY: - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. RETENTION: - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely. - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests. ACCESSIBILITY: - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups. - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies. If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. <!--
__RELEARN__
[successful attempt to create a reading order of the footnotes]
introduction (ex-postscriptum) we varia summer-school relearn experiment(s) participant-as-teacher F/LOSS software-as-critique tracks programme thinking-autonomy agency collective-practices local-networks hosting-network finances poortgebouw end-product
[missing mini-chapter] tools (xmpp bots, long ethernet cables, local network, etherpad, etherdump)
[sort of weird stuff/actual footnotes more than mini-chapters] digital-entity displacement continuity vortex investigate
[footnotes-in-footnotes] re participants -->
# Call for Tracks[^introduction] [introduction](#introduction){.footnote}
**Relearn**[^relearn] [relearn](#relearn){.footnote} is a collective learning **experiment**[^experiment] [experiment](#experiment){.footnote} with as many teachers as it has **participants**[^participantasteacher] [participant-as-teacher](#participantasteacher){.footnote}. It is motivated by the possibility to displace parameters of/for research, studying and learning. During the week of Relearn, **we**[^we] [we](#we){.footnote} work with a set of case-studies, observations, questions or stacks of study material that we call "**tracks**"[^tracks] [tracks](#tracks){.footnote}. Relearn outlines the idea of resetting thinking modes, for a diverse set of approaches that we can reconsider, that come out of the development of our cultures towards and through digital entities.
While Relearn is an experiment in collective learning, it grows from an interest in **Free / Libre Open Source Software culture and practices**[^FLOSS] [F/LOSS](#FLOSS){.footnote} as a way to address and acknowledge the production processes and frameworks[^softwareascritique] [software-as-critique](#softwareascritique){.footnote} involving technology and culture.
For the upcoming Relearn, *we* are looking for people that are willing to research together by initiating a track around a specific subject, methodology or issue they/you are currently working on or would like to investigate during this week. A key element for this experiment is that **tracks need not be fully determined**[^programme] [programme](#programme){.footnote}, and a concrete end-product is not required at all.
This year's Relearn is loosely connected to the **possibilities to reconsider forms of organisation**[^varia] [varia](#varia){.footnote} and to create **co-autonomies**[^thinkingautonomy] [thinking-autonomy](#thinkingautonomy){.footnote} in regard to both **machinic systems**[^localnetworks] [local-networks](#localnetworks){.footnote} and social formations. We hope to make use of the proposed tracks as a looking glass to reconstruct notions of **agency**[^agency] [agency](#agency){.footnote} and consider forms of maintaining them. Particularly within the current political and economic vortex, we would like to discover **ways in which co-autonomies can be re-explored, re-shared and re-created** from many different angles[^collectivepractices] [collective-practices](#collectivepractices){.footnote}.
We're allowing ourselves to prefix this word, co-autonomies, because the idea of autonomy alone doesn't emphasise the cross-seeding aspects we hope to stimulate. We mean co-autonomy as the conscious collective need for multiple autonomous systems and practices, that may also be alternative, simultaneous, off grid, self-standing or self-defining, but not operating inside a vacuum closed off to social, political and economical relations.
Feel free to get in touch with us to discuss ideas or possible forms of contribution to Relearn this year. We are looking forward to create a collective study moment in the summer of 2017 in Rotterdam!
<u>Practical info</u><br> Relearn will take place between **Tuesday the 29th of August and will end on Saturday the 2nd of September**[^summerschool] [summer-school](#summerschool){.footnote}. We are currently working with the community at **Poortgebouw**[^poortgebouw] [poortgebouw](#poortgebouw){.footnote} to see if this could be our Relearn location of this year. Following a tradition from previous years, we will try to arrange a **hosting network**[^hostingnetwork] [hosting-network](#hostingnetwork){.footnote} in the city and find a place to stay for each participant. Depending on our subsidy requests, we aim for the lowest participation fee possible for the week, with a strong preference for **none**[^finances] [finances](#finances){.footnote}.
<u>How to submit a track</u><br> The reader is invited to submit a proposal around a subject they have been investigating or would like to pursue in a collective setting. In order to propose a track, please send an email to registration@relearn.be with a short text where you informally describe the subject you would like to investigate during Relearn. Please send your proposals before the 15th of June, *we* will reply at the 25th of June the latest.
<u>Resources & contact</u><br> → email: registration@relearn.be<br> → subscribe to the Relearn mailinglist<br> → Relearn's gitlab repository<br> → IRC channel: #relearn on Freenode<br> → Photographs of previous Relearn editions can be found in Constant's gallery
[^introduction]: [**introduction**]{#introduction} This text is the *Call for Tracks* of Relearn 2017. The text sometimes includes some 'stiff', convoluted terminology, which perhaps does not very well represent the informal setting of Relearn, nor does it properly reflect the conviviality and enjoyment of writing this text as a group. Rereading it after a couple of years, we ask ourselves "why did we write it like this?". We recognize a tendency not to define, not to close-off, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Is vagueness just the result of collective writing or a strategic means to welcome different strands of thoughts? Maybe an open call text acquires its full meaning only in hindsight. Because of time constraints, the discussions we had were taking place while writing the text, and not before. More than the expression of a fully formed concept, the open call functioned as a window into an unraveling process. Furthermore, it was also always complicated to write a text that proposed an experiment to an undefined group of actors, all the while channeling the voice of a network with a history. Looking back at the text after two years allows us to rethink its mode of address, and the way it guided the developments of the event itself. <iframe src="./relearn-2017.sources/relearn.be/call-for-tracks.html"></iframe> <figcaption>A preview of the Call for Tracks how it appeared on the [http://relearn.be](./relearn-2017.sources/relearn.be/call-for-tracks.html) website.</figcaption>  website.](publication.assets/call-for-tracks.png){.printimg}
[^we]: [**we**]{#we} "We" is intended here both as the whole Relearn 2017 group, and as a smaller group that organised Relearn 2017. Finally, there is the "we" that is writing this documentation. "We" is also used as a collective noun, meant to be all inclusive and inviting to attendants old and new. While that current "we" wrote the call and invitation, that group was in no way static. We mean to invite people in by calling ourselves with a pronoun that includes the reader, however it is never meant to be understood as a monolithic voice speaking for the entirety of the Relearn network.
[^relearn]: [**relearn**]{#relearn} Relearn is an experiment in self-organised education that started as a summer school in 2013, originally organised by the Open Source Publishing group in Brussels, thereafter taking care of by Constant again in Brussels and later in 2016 organised in Calafou. Relearn takes place each time someone finds the resources and collaborators to make it happen. Since 2013 and up to 2017, there have been week-long editions each year, each time organised by someone different. The work we, the annotators here present, did was to facilitate the organisation of Relearn Rotterdam in 2017. To start the process, to make sure the mailing list was informed of the newest developments, that no email was left unanswered, to get in contact with catering groups, to find a space and make sure it was equipped to welcome Relearners. Further than that, the organisation was shared with participants and track initiators alike in regards to the content and caring for the space. This is also why we may refer to Relearn as an action by using the verb relearn, each edition is another opportunity to relearn what Relearn is. We've also been referring to it by saying: Relearn editions, Relearn issues, Relearn iterations, Relearn years, Relearn instances, Relearn sessions; often a mix of nouns and rarely a standalone. <iframe src="./relearn-2017.sources/photographs/index.html"></iframe> <figcaption>A gallery page of the photographs taken during Relearn, generated with Distribusi.</figcaption> {.printimg}
[^summerschool]: [**summer-school**]{#summerschool} The 'summer school' attribute of Relearn has been under discussion in multiple editions. As a result, the 2019 iteration of Relearn started from breaking up the week of activities into concise moments of 2-3 days that could be distributed throughout a longer period of time and across different geographies. The goal was to make Relearn accessible for participants who cannot afford to take a whole week off, but this was also partly an attempt to move away from the summer school format, which has been coopted as another form of commodifying education and device for professional positioning. As Francisco Laranjo puts it, *"design summer schools are overpriced tourism gatherings with good weather and a nice view […] Working on a laptop on Indesign overlooking a lake is not a spiritual retreat to charge creative batteries, it's just privileged illusion"* (from *A Brief History of the Design Summer School*). Most of the people who make up the Relearn network are based in Western Europe, where summer schools are often inaccessible because of their high fees and in the worst cases become extensions of institutionalised pedagogy lacking self reflection. Relearn emphasises the leisurely, the conviviality and the slow-paced tempo that is generally associated with summer. It puts forward the critical engagement with the social, political and technical structures that make it possible (sometimes to a narcissistic extreme), as an attempt to reimagine what education could mean at a small scale. In 2017, we referred to it as a 'collective learning experiment' in order to open up to new formats.
[^varia]: [**varia**]{#varia} Parallel to the conversations about organising and hosting an edition of Relearn in Rotterdam, some of us were actively involved in finding a space in the city for Varia, soon to become a *center for collective approaches to everyday technology*, which was founded in Charlois a few months later (October 2017). Varia focuses on the combination of self-organizing in the digital and non-digital <!--(extra-digital/post-digital?)-->. Currently, [Varia](https://varia.zone) is exploring how self-organized spaces can gain agency [agency](#agency){.footnote} over their digital infastructure (amongst other things). At the time of Relearn, this was something that we wanted to discuss and also to put into practice.
[^experiment]: [**experiment**]{#experiment} There are several horizontal educational experiments out there, various critical summer schools or self-organised festivals. Relearn 2017 is influenced by several of these experiments, such as the Anti-University festival in England, Scuola Open Source in Italy or the traveling Parallel School, but it tries to apply what it knows to the local conditions in which it operates. Relearn is considered an experiment because it understands education as an experimental process. It is perhaps not a coincidence that many of the attendants have a background in teaching. Some aspects of the ethos which have guided the relearning experiments until now are: <br><br> - a decision to move away from the teacher - student model and replace those terms with participant and, in some editions, track initiators[participant-as-teacher](#participantasteacher){.footnote} <br> - an attitude towards organisational tasks, where we share the day-to-day roles and care/use of the spaces<br> - an emphasis on process over outcome. This may not be as important in the later iterations of Relearn but in the earlier years, it was important to make clear that Relearn did not have to produce any tactile objects. We originally felt that using the words 'workshop' or 'summer school' [summer-school](#summerschool){.footnote} meant (text/book/object) production sprint (the hackathon model). This perspective was questioned because it does not allow time for researching and probing (production) processes, which for us became the focus.<br><br> Questions that drive Relearn as an experiment: <br> - How does the group steer this learning situation collectively ?<br> - What does re-learning depend on in terms of group dynamics ?
[^participantasteacher]: [**participant-as-teacher**]{#participantasteacher} One of the foundational aims of Relearn is to erase the duality of learners and teachers and create a space where pedagogy is exercised as a group, where hierarchies are frequently restructured.
[^FLOSS]: [**F/LOSS**]{#FLOSS} From the beginning of the Relearn editions, F/LOSS (*Free/Libre Open Source Software*) has been an underlying principle of the sessions. Inspired by the F/LOSS community, we rely on free software to carry out our experiments and to set up the infrastructure that makes self-organisation possible. In the same spirit, we release and make public the findings, discussions and code that emerged during the week and try to encourage multiplication through the distribution of materials.
[^softwareascritique]: [**software-as-critique**]{#softwareascritique} Relearners see software not only as a tool or a medium, but as a large web of organisations, protocols, people and machinic agents. In this sense, software is more an environment than a thing. From this perspective, using and inhabiting software means taking a stance, often critical, sometimes radical, towards default decisions.
[^tracks]: [**tracks**]{#tracks} Whatever might be going on during Relearn, we tend to focus on processes over outcomes. However, research thematics are important to provide entry points into collective research. Thematic tracks (usually simply called tracks) are subject proposals which are put forwards during the week in different ways, some more technical, some more discursive, some more exploratory. → [Read further](#nooo.relearn.call.for.proposals-proposal-footnote) <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/tracks.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>An etherpad page that was made to link to the different pads for each track.</figcaption> {.printimg}
[^programme]: [**programme**]{#programme} Relearn started with the recurring *Install Yourself Into Relearn* session, where introductory tables to *XMPP*, *Etherpad*, *Local Network* and *Collective Practices* were set up. Participants could join a different table each round to find out about the ways in which we were using these practices. This was followed by another table carousel, where the four tracks were introduced: *Ransom Headlessnesss in the Design of Language* was looking at the interplay between design and (programming) languages; *Versioning the Networked Archive* was exploring the link between networked communities and archives starting from practical examples; *Not-So-Utopian Open-Source Pedagogies* was combining a critical examination of utopian conceptions in open source software with constructive methods for the organisation of groups; *Collective Care Transmission Forms* worked with forms of networked collectivity that emerge around certain health situations. The tracks are usually a starting point for the week to unfold. During the time we spend together, other paths are taken. For example, alongside these groups, other types of gatherings took place as well, from impromptu skill-sharing sessions during which chargers were fixed, to one-day satellite workshops, evenings of short presentations of the participants' work, to eetcafe dinners organised by the Poortgebouw. Everyone is encouraged to use their time at Relearn as they see fit. <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/program.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>An etherpad page that was made to link to the different pads for each track.</figcaption>
[^thinkingautonomy]: [**thinking-autonomy**]{#thinkingautonomy} The term 'co-autonomy' emerged from the unease we felt to talk about autonomy-as-independence and autonomy-as-full-agency <!--[not sure about this - pls expand/rewrite as you see fit]--> when our own conditions were entangled with those of others, exemplified by the fact that we were guests of Poortgebouw, we had to apply for a small local fund to partly cover costs of catering and the electronics needed to have a functioning local infrastructure, etc. All of these elements made us shift focus towards relational agencies: observing and acknowledging the ties that create the fabric of our self-determined associations. The word autonomy, especially in relationship to the digital, hasn't left our minds, since it brings with itself a baggage of emancipatory traditions. Under the umbrella of Varia or Constant, some of us are still working on it and collecting other terms and expressions that can help capture the entanglement of being related to something, while preserving one's own position. <!--The terms are: … -->
[^agency]: [**agency**]{#agency} When discussing this text in 2019, we realised that "agency" does not have a direct translation in many of our native languages. Perhaps the closest to the meaning to the English version is "zelfzeggenschap", "agentschap", "autogestione" or "autodeterminare". Furthermore, depending on the field, agency can mean "the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment" (philosophy), or "the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices" (sociology). Whereas the emphasis is on the capacity to act, doing so independently might be the very limit to it.
[^collectivepractices]: [**collective-practices**]{#collectivepractices} Digital processes allow us to intervene into a practice in many ways and at different moments. A case in point is this very text: it is being written collectively, in real time. Collective writing reflects Relearn's urge to preserve a multiplicity of voices. Live (online) and collaborative text editors are often a tool of choice as they let us think, read and write together, and keep trace of oral conversations. This collective practice is not easy, it requires some daring, some testing and the vulnerability to show others how one's writing is produced. Collaborative working methods are a point of interest for Relearn because they let us rethink digital practices that are made for 'the user'. Practicing together brings context to the foreground. <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/not-so-indexed.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>A collective initiative was taken to start writing a "not-so-index" page that could guide outsiders through the multiple pads that were made.</figcaption>
[^localnetworks]: [**local-networks**]{#localnetworks} Relearn is also a moment to experiment with the communication tools that we use. In 2013, git, a software for tracking changes in code during development, was a focus, whereas in 2014, the group of Relearners used the IRC protocol to communicate with one another. In 2015, a local network was set up. In 2016, unfortunately none of the members of this text's writing group was able to go to Calafou. The following year, we continued using Etherpad software for collaborative note taking, next to which we set up XMPP multi-user chatrooms and used XMPP bots to send messages to the whole group or to print content that would be displayed on a physical wall in Poortgebouw. Each edition an attempt is made to rethink the infrastructure on which we rely on, not to fall into defaults, or if we do, to fall consciously. <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/local_network_carousel.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>*Local network carousel* introductions on the first day.</figcaption> {.printimg}
[^hostingnetwork]: [**hosting-network**]{#hostingnetwork} The hosting network is one of the tactics that re-appeared in all ofthe editions: volunteer local participants are matched with visiting participants in order to ensure a place for them to stay during the week. On the one hand,this is a practical solution that helps us keep costs down and on the other, it is a more welcoming introduction to the city and to the group.
[^finances]: [**finances**]{#finances} The process of organising Relearn in 2017 started out as a voluntary task. We applied for a local fund to cover the catering expenses during the week (breakfasts, lunches and two dinners) and some equipment needed for the local network and the caretaking of the Poortgebouw. Being dependent on a grant proposal meant that we didn't know until very late if we would receive the funding - when we did, all of it was spent on lunches. We also asked for a €50 participation fee to cover the most basic needs of the space. After the week was over, the sum that was left was split among three of five continuous organizers, who received a fee of €300 each. The remaining two waived the payment for having a stable income.
[^poortgebouw]: [**poortgebouw**]{#poortgebouw} The Poortgebouw is a Dutch monument built in 1879. After being in a limbo of non-use, it was squatted by a group in 1980 as a protest against an increasing housing shortage. Despite the relatively short duration of this period (only two years), the group managed to organise legally as an association in 1984, and since then has been hosting cultural activities and a co-living community of around 30 people. The space self-organises food-on-donation eetcafes, clothesswap days, alternative music nights, info evenings by activist organisations, among many different do-it-yourself projects and events. The building particularly resonated with the topic of co-autonomy, as can be seen in the [archival project](https://giuliadegiovanelli.com/The-Autonomous-Archive) that Giulia de Giovanelli & Max Franklin, 2017 co-organisers, coordinated together with others in and around Poortgebouw; it was taken as a case-study for the *Versioning the Networked Archive* track.
<!--
--------
sort of weird stuff/actual footnotes more than mini-chapters
[^digitalentity]: [**digitalentity**]{#digitalentity} An entity is defined as "a thing with distinct and independent existence". Maybe we used this word to emphasize the idea that computers are more than just tools. Reading this after two years, we would stress the dependency and interdependent quality of being digital and digital objects more.
[^displacement]: [**displacement**]{#displacement} Displace might mean to move something from its proper and usual position but also to take over the position of something or someone. In this latter meaning there might be some aggression involved. What does it mean to displace parameters of research? To include more than what is generally considered as useful information to conduct research? To reconsider the position and therefore the object of research?
[^continuity]: [**continuity**]{#continuity} We felt that it was important to not only bring up the construction/creation of agency. How to maintain agency over a longer period of time ? [My first thoughts in reacting to this question are around open licencing, collective authorship and resposibilities ? yes pls add!]
[^vortex]: [**vortex**]{#vortex} On December 2016, Trump was elected. Soon after UK citizens voted in favour of Brexit. The Grenfell Tower in London was eaten by fire. The metoo movement reached mainstream coverage. Political crisis in Catalunya. What was the political and economix vortex in 2017? What did we refer to? It's hard to recall what we refer to here. It was after Trump got elected and the alt right reaching mainstream.
[^investigate]: [**investigate**]{#investigate} How much did we steer the type of work/research/learning when we phrase it as investigating a subject?
----
additions from the footnotes, these notions do not exist in the actual original call for tracks
[^re]: [**re**]{#re} re- as a loop, going back to something and then continue from there ... (would be nice to do some small mapping exercises of re-ing/looping) iteration, Thinking about Relearn as a combination of the word "re" and "learning" made us think of of an article by Annette Kraus on the phenomenon of Lifelong Learning. In the text, she describes "[l]ifelong learning [...] as an example of a progress-oriented accumulative model of learning that pervades institutions and subjectivities today." She describes how the pressure of learning "skills" to be able to "adapt" to an always-changing market, while being required to "self-manage" your carreer places the responsibility of a system on the shoulders of the individual. At the same time, she refers to the critical pedagogy movements in the 60s and 70s in the US(?) that urged for alternative learning situations to re-think the hierarchal systems of universities and include feminist and post-colonial voices. Instead of the word "relearning" she uses the word "unlearning". It creates a framework of thinking about "re"-learning something as acquiring skills and critically relate to current hegemonic educational systems. Not only "un"-learning habits and processes, but through togetherness also "re"-constructing new ones.
[^participants]: [**participants**]{#participants} The word "participants" can be used interchangeably with "us".
list of other stuff to include: - methods of activation - what relearn is - lonely (or sleeping?) pads - etherdump standalone (almost there, in the sync folder) - (etherdump.grep.sh tool, cross-readings around one keyword) - collection of images + annotations - post scriptum on tools created for the act of archiving (turbo-exif, etc) - (other (un)learning experiences like Casco one and Extra Curricular) - reroam (?) - programme of the week - organisation of relearn
---
from previous convos, maybe to include
going around it, not capturing the essence of relearn, cuz there is no essence guide users through manifestations of what happened in a specific time, with specific people, in a specific place nobody owns relearn: shared awareness relearn is not somebody's why it can't be everything? what makes it what it is? shared feeling of protecting it? feeling of malleability of structure, but avoiding the tyranny structureleness what does this mean for new relearners? what are the risks? first relearn is not necessarily the most comfortable experience? no competition: normally summerschools, hackatons or (art)schools while they are supposeldy cooperative they always inject some moments of competition/showing off and this happens thorugh the notion of result/ and presenting those results. So relearn tries to detach from this logic at the risk of some frustration, staying too long in conversation mode, have the feeling falling in pattern? taking the comfortable role? how to escape that? making sure that we also keep relearning those. Some of the Relearn tools or ingredients are becoming norms, how do we stay aware of that? (relearn: light moderation; worksession: strict moderation) (relearn: little programme, worksession: strict timing, more programme elements) Worksession / Relearn. How can these two learning situations be differentiated, and intensified at the places that make them different from each other? go in and out: immerse and re-emerge
-->
nooo.relearn.call.for.tracks
<!--
__RELEARN__
[successful attempt to create a reading order of the footnotes]
introduction (ex-postscriptum) we varia summer-school relearn experiment(s) participant-as-teacher F/LOSS software-as-critique tracks programme thinking-autonomy agency collective-practices local-networks hosting-network finances poortgebouw end-product
[missing mini-chapter] tools (xmpp bots, long ethernet cables, local network, etherpad, etherdump)
[sort of weird stuff/actual footnotes more than mini-chapters] digital-entity displacement continuity vortex investigate
[footnotes-in-footnotes] re participants -->
# Call for Tracks[^introduction] [introduction](#introduction){.footnote}
**Relearn**[^relearn] [relearn](#relearn){.footnote} is a collective learning **experiment**[^experiment] [experiment](#experiment){.footnote} with as many teachers as it has **participants**[^participantasteacher] [participant-as-teacher](#participantasteacher){.footnote}. It is motivated by the possibility to displace parameters of/for research, studying and learning. During the week of Relearn, **we**[^we] [we](#we){.footnote} work with a set of case-studies, observations, questions or stacks of study material that we call "**tracks**"[^tracks] [tracks](#tracks){.footnote}. Relearn outlines the idea of resetting thinking modes, for a diverse set of approaches that we can reconsider, that come out of the development of our cultures towards and through digital entities.
While Relearn is an experiment in collective learning, it grows from an interest in **Free / Libre Open Source Software culture and practices**[^FLOSS] [F/LOSS](#FLOSS){.footnote} as a way to address and acknowledge the production processes and frameworks[^softwareascritique] [software-as-critique](#softwareascritique){.footnote} involving technology and culture.
For the upcoming Relearn, *we* are looking for people that are willing to research together by initiating a track around a specific subject, methodology or issue they/you are currently working on or would like to investigate during this week. A key element for this experiment is that **tracks need not be fully determined**[^programme] [programme](#programme){.footnote}, and a concrete end-product is not required at all.
This year's Relearn is loosely connected to the **possibilities to reconsider forms of organisation**[^varia] [varia](#varia){.footnote} and to create **co-autonomies**[^thinkingautonomy] [thinking-autonomy](#thinkingautonomy){.footnote} in regard to both **machinic systems**[^localnetworks] [local-networks](#localnetworks){.footnote} and social formations. We hope to make use of the proposed tracks as a looking glass to reconstruct notions of **agency**[^agency] [agency](#agency){.footnote} and consider forms of maintaining them. Particularly within the current political and economic vortex, we would like to discover **ways in which co-autonomies can be re-explored, re-shared and re-created** from many different angles[^collectivepractices] [collective-practices](#collectivepractices){.footnote}.
We're allowing ourselves to prefix this word, co-autonomies, because the idea of autonomy alone doesn't emphasise the cross-seeding aspects we hope to stimulate. We mean co-autonomy as the conscious collective need for multiple autonomous systems and practices, that may also be alternative, simultaneous, off grid, self-standing or self-defining, but not operating inside a vacuum closed off to social, political and economical relations.
Feel free to get in touch with us to discuss ideas or possible forms of contribution to Relearn this year. We are looking forward to create a collective study moment in the summer of 2017 in Rotterdam!
<u>Practical info</u><br> Relearn will take place between **Tuesday the 29th of August and will end on Saturday the 2nd of September**[^summerschool] [summer-school](#summerschool){.footnote}. We are currently working with the community at **Poortgebouw**[^poortgebouw] [poortgebouw](#poortgebouw){.footnote} to see if this could be our Relearn location of this year. Following a tradition from previous years, we will try to arrange a **hosting network**[^hostingnetwork] [hosting-network](#hostingnetwork){.footnote} in the city and find a place to stay for each participant. Depending on our subsidy requests, we aim for the lowest participation fee possible for the week, with a strong preference for **none**[^finances] [finances](#finances){.footnote}.
<u>How to submit a track</u><br> The reader is invited to submit a proposal around a subject they have been investigating or would like to pursue in a collective setting. In order to propose a track, please send an email to registration@relearn.be with a short text where you informally describe the subject you would like to investigate during Relearn. Please send your proposals before the 15th of June, *we* will reply at the 25th of June the latest.
<u>Resources & contact</u><br> → email: registration@relearn.be<br> → subscribe to the Relearn mailinglist<br> → Relearn's gitlab repository<br> → IRC channel: #relearn on Freenode<br> → Photographs of previous Relearn editions can be found in Constant's gallery
[^introduction]: [**introduction**]{#introduction} This text is the *Call for Tracks* of Relearn 2017. The text sometimes includes some 'stiff', convoluted terminology, which perhaps does not very well represent the informal setting of Relearn, nor does it properly reflect the conviviality and enjoyment of writing this text as a group. Rereading it after a couple of years, we ask ourselves "why did we write it like this?". We recognize a tendency not to define, not to close-off, sometimes at the expense of clarity. Is vagueness just the result of collective writing or a strategic means to welcome different strands of thoughts? Maybe an open call text acquires its full meaning only in hindsight. Because of time constraints, the discussions we had were taking place while writing the text, and not before. More than the expression of a fully formed concept, the open call functioned as a window into an unraveling process. Furthermore, it was also always complicated to write a text that proposed an experiment to an undefined group of actors, all the while channeling the voice of a network with a history. Looking back at the text after two years allows us to rethink its mode of address, and the way it guided the developments of the event itself. <iframe src="./relearn-2017.sources/relearn.be/call-for-tracks.html"></iframe> <figcaption>A preview of the Call for Tracks how it appeared on the [http://relearn.be](./relearn-2017.sources/relearn.be/call-for-tracks.html) website.</figcaption>  website.](publication.assets/call-for-tracks.png){.printimg}
[^we]: [**we**]{#we} "We" is intended here both as the whole Relearn 2017 group, and as a smaller group that organised Relearn 2017. Finally, there is the "we" that is writing this documentation. "We" is also used as a collective noun, meant to be all inclusive and inviting to attendants old and new. While that current "we" wrote the call and invitation, that group was in no way static. We mean to invite people in by calling ourselves with a pronoun that includes the reader, however it is never meant to be understood as a monolithic voice speaking for the entirety of the Relearn network.
[^relearn]: [**relearn**]{#relearn} Relearn is an experiment in self-organised education that started as a summer school in 2013, originally organised by the Open Source Publishing group in Brussels, thereafter taking care of by Constant again in Brussels and later in 2016 organised in Calafou. Relearn takes place each time someone finds the resources and collaborators to make it happen. Since 2013 and up to 2017, there have been week-long editions each year, each time organised by someone different. The work we, the annotators here present, did was to facilitate the organisation of Relearn Rotterdam in 2017. To start the process, to make sure the mailing list was informed of the newest developments, that no email was left unanswered, to get in contact with catering groups, to find a space and make sure it was equipped to welcome Relearners. Further than that, the organisation was shared with participants and track initiators alike in regards to the content and caring for the space. This is also why we may refer to Relearn as an action by using the verb relearn, each edition is another opportunity to relearn what Relearn is. We've also been referring to it by saying: Relearn editions, Relearn issues, Relearn iterations, Relearn years, Relearn instances, Relearn sessions; often a mix of nouns and rarely a standalone. <iframe src="./relearn-2017.sources/photographs/index.html"></iframe> <figcaption>A gallery page of the photographs taken during Relearn, generated with Distribusi.</figcaption> {.printimg}
[^summerschool]: [**summer-school**]{#summerschool} The 'summer school' attribute of Relearn has been under discussion in multiple editions. As a result, the 2019 iteration of Relearn started from breaking up the week of activities into concise moments of 2-3 days that could be distributed throughout a longer period of time and across different geographies. The goal was to make Relearn accessible for participants who cannot afford to take a whole week off, but this was also partly an attempt to move away from the summer school format, which has been coopted as another form of commodifying education and device for professional positioning. As Francisco Laranjo puts it, *"design summer schools are overpriced tourism gatherings with good weather and a nice view […] Working on a laptop on Indesign overlooking a lake is not a spiritual retreat to charge creative batteries, it's just privileged illusion"* (from *A Brief History of the Design Summer School*). Most of the people who make up the Relearn network are based in Western Europe, where summer schools are often inaccessible because of their high fees and in the worst cases become extensions of institutionalised pedagogy lacking self reflection. Relearn emphasises the leisurely, the conviviality and the slow-paced tempo that is generally associated with summer. It puts forward the critical engagement with the social, political and technical structures that make it possible (sometimes to a narcissistic extreme), as an attempt to reimagine what education could mean at a small scale. In 2017, we referred to it as a 'collective learning experiment' in order to open up to new formats.
[^varia]: [**varia**]{#varia} Parallel to the conversations about organising and hosting an edition of Relearn in Rotterdam, some of us were actively involved in finding a space in the city for Varia, soon to become a *center for collective approaches to everyday technology*, which was founded in Charlois a few months later (October 2017). Varia focuses on the combination of self-organizing in the digital and non-digital <!--(extra-digital/post-digital?)-->. Currently, [Varia](https://varia.zone) is exploring how self-organized spaces can gain agency [agency](#agency){.footnote} over their digital infastructure (amongst other things). At the time of Relearn, this was something that we wanted to discuss and also to put into practice.
[^experiment]: [**experiment**]{#experiment} There are several horizontal educational experiments out there, various critical summer schools or self-organised festivals. Relearn 2017 is influenced by several of these experiments, such as the Anti-University festival in England, Scuola Open Source in Italy or the traveling Parallel School, but it tries to apply what it knows to the local conditions in which it operates. Relearn is considered an experiment because it understands education as an experimental process. It is perhaps not a coincidence that many of the attendants have a background in teaching. Some aspects of the ethos which have guided the relearning experiments until now are: <br><br> - a decision to move away from the teacher - student model and replace those terms with participant and, in some editions, track initiators [participant-as-teacher](#participantasteacher){.footnote} <br> - an attitude towards organisational tasks, where we share the day-to-day roles and care/use of the spaces<br> - an emphasis on process over outcome. This may not be as important in the later iterations of Relearn but in the earlier years, it was important to make clear that Relearn did not have to produce any tactile objects. We originally felt that using the words 'workshop' or 'summer school' [summer-school](#summerschool){.footnote} meant (text/book/object) production sprint (the hackathon model). This perspective was questioned because it does not allow time for researching and probing (production) processes, which for us became the focus.<br><br> Questions that drive Relearn as an experiment: <br> - How does the group steer this learning situation collectively ?<br> - What does re-learning depend on in terms of group dynamics ?
[^participantasteacher]: [**participant-as-teacher**]{#participantasteacher} One of the foundational aims of Relearn is to erase the duality of learners and teachers and create a space where pedagogy is exercised as a group, where hierarchies are frequently restructured.
[^FLOSS]: [**F/LOSS**]{#FLOSS} From the beginning of the Relearn editions, F/LOSS (*Free/Libre Open Source Software*) has been an underlying principle of the sessions. Inspired by the F/LOSS community, we rely on free software to carry out our experiments and to set up the infrastructure that makes self-organisation possible. In the same spirit, we release and make public the findings, discussions and code that emerged during the week and try to encourage multiplication through the distribution of materials.
[^softwareascritique]: [**software-as-critique**]{#softwareascritique} Relearners see software not only as a tool or a medium, but as a large web of organisations, protocols, people and machinic agents. In this sense, software is more an environment than a thing. From this perspective, using and inhabiting software means taking a stance, often critical, sometimes radical, towards default decisions.
[^tracks]: [**tracks**]{#tracks} Whatever might be going on during Relearn, we tend to focus on processes over outcomes. However, research thematics are important to provide entry points into collective research. Thematic tracks (usually simply called tracks) are subject proposals which are put forwards during the week in different ways, some more technical, some more discursive, some more exploratory. → [Read further](#nooo.relearn.call.for.proposals-proposal-footnote) <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/tracks.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>An etherpad page that was made to link to the different pads for each track.</figcaption> {.printimg}
[^programme]: [**programme**]{#programme} Relearn started with the recurring *Install Yourself Into Relearn* session, where introductory tables to *XMPP*, *Etherpad*, *Local Network* and *Collective Practices* were set up. Participants could join a different table each round to find out about the ways in which we were using these practices. This was followed by another table carousel, where the four tracks were introduced: *Ransom Headlessnesss in the Design of Language* was looking at the interplay between design and (programming) languages; *Versioning the Networked Archive* was exploring the link between networked communities and archives starting from practical examples; *Not-So-Utopian Open-Source Pedagogies* was combining a critical examination of utopian conceptions in open source software with constructive methods for the organisation of groups; *Collective Care Transmission Forms* worked with forms of networked collectivity that emerge around certain health situations. The tracks are usually a starting point for the week to unfold. During the time we spend together, other paths are taken. For example, alongside these groups, other types of gatherings took place as well, from impromptu skill-sharing sessions during which chargers were fixed, to one-day satellite workshops, evenings of short presentations of the participants' work, to eetcafe dinners organised by the Poortgebouw. Everyone is encouraged to use their time at Relearn as they see fit. <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/program.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>An etherpad page that was made to link to the different pads for each track.</figcaption>
[^thinkingautonomy]: [**thinking-autonomy**]{#thinkingautonomy} The term 'co-autonomy' emerged from the unease we felt to talk about autonomy-as-independence and autonomy-as-full-agency <!--[not sure about this - pls expand/rewrite as you see fit]--> when our own conditions were entangled with those of others, exemplified by the fact that we were guests of Poortgebouw, we had to apply for a small local fund to partly cover costs of catering and the electronics needed to have a functioning local infrastructure, etc. All of these elements made us shift focus towards relational agencies: observing and acknowledging the ties that create the fabric of our self-determined associations. The word autonomy, especially in relationship to the digital, hasn't left our minds, since it brings with itself a baggage of emancipatory traditions. Under the umbrella of Varia or Constant, some of us are still working on it and collecting other terms and expressions that can help capture the entanglement of being related to something, while preserving one's own position. <!--The terms are: … -->
[^agency]: [**agency**]{#agency} When discussing this text in 2019, we realised that "agency" does not have a direct translation in many of our native languages. Perhaps the closest to the meaning to the English version is "zelfzeggenschap", "agentschap", "autogestione" or "autodeterminare". Furthermore, depending on the field, agency can mean "the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment" (philosophy), or "the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices" (sociology). Whereas the emphasis is on the capacity to act, doing so independently might be the very limit to it.
[^collectivepractices]: [**collective-practices**]{#collectivepractices} Digital processes allow us to intervene into a practice in many ways and at different moments. A case in point is this very text: it is being written collectively, in real time. Collective writing reflects Relearn's urge to preserve a multiplicity of voices. Live (online) and collaborative text editors are often a tool of choice as they let us think, read and write together, and keep trace of oral conversations. This collective practice is not easy, it requires some daring, some testing and the vulnerability to show others how one's writing is produced. Collaborative working methods are a point of interest for Relearn because they let us rethink digital practices that are made for 'the user'. Practicing together brings context to the foreground. <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/not-so-indexed.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>A collective initiative was taken to start writing a "not-so-index" page that could guide outsiders through the multiple pads that were made.</figcaption>
[^localnetworks]: [**local-networks**]{#localnetworks} Relearn is also a moment to experiment with the communication tools that we use. In 2013, git, a software for tracking changes in code during development, was a focus, whereas in 2014, the group of Relearners used the IRC protocol to communicate with one another. In 2015, a local network was set up. In 2016, unfortunately none of the members of this text's writing group was able to go to Calafou. The following year, we continued using Etherpad software for collaborative note taking, next to which we set up XMPP multi-user chatrooms and used XMPP bots to send messages to the whole group or to print content that would be displayed on a physical wall in Poortgebouw. Each edition an attempt is made to rethink the infrastructure on which we rely on, not to fall into defaults, or if we do, to fall consciously. <iframe src="relearn-2017.sources/etherdump/local_network_carousel.diff.html"></iframe> <figcaption>*Local network carousel* introductions on the first day.</figcaption> {.printimg}
[^hostingnetwork]: [**hosting-network**]{#hostingnetwork} The hosting network is one of the tactics that re-appeared in all of the editions: volunteer local participants are matched with visiting participants in order to ensure a place for them to stay during the week. On the one hand, this is a practical solution that helps us keep costs down and on the other, it is a more welcoming introduction to the city and to the group.
[^finances]: [**finances**]{#finances} The process of organising Relearn in 2017 started out as a voluntary task. We applied for a local fund to cover the catering expenses during the week (breakfasts, lunches and two dinners) and some equipment needed for the local network and the care taking of the Poortgebouw. Being dependent on a grant proposal meant that we didn't know until very late if we would receive the funding - when we did, all of it was spent on lunches. We also asked for a €50 participation fee to cover the most basic needs of the space. After the week was over, the sum that was left was split among three of five continuous organizers, who received a fee of €300 each. The remaining two waived the payment for having a stable income.
[^poortgebouw]: [**poortgebouw**]{#poortgebouw} The Poortgebouw is a Dutch monument built in 1879. After being in a limbo of non-use, it was squatted by a group in 1980 as a protest against an increasing housing shortage. Despite the relatively short duration of this period (only two years), the group managed to organise legally as an association in 1984, and since then has been hosting cultural activities and a co-living community of around 30 people. The space self-organises food-on-donation eetcafes, clothesswap days, alternative music nights, info evenings by activist organisations, among many different do-it-yourself projects and events. The building particularly resonated with the topic of co-autonomy, as can be seen in the [archival project](https://giuliadegiovanelli.com/The-Autonomous-Archive) that Giulia de Giovanelli & Max Franklin, 2017 co-organisers, coordinated together with others in and around Poortgebouw; it was taken as a case-study for the *Versioning the Networked Archive* track.
<!--
--------
sort of weird stuff/actual footnotes more than mini-chapters
[^digitalentity]: [**digitalentity**]{#digitalentity} An entity is defined as "a thing with distinct and independent existence". Maybe we used this word to emphasize the idea that computers are more than just tools. Reading this after two years, we would stress the dependency and interdependent quality of being digital and digital objects more.
[^displacement]: [**displacement**]{#displacement} Displace might mean to move something from its proper and usual position but also to take over the position of something or someone. In this latter meaning there might be some aggression involved. What does it mean to displace parameters of research? To include more than what is generally considered as useful information to conduct research? To reconsider the position and therefore the object of research?
[^continuity]: [**continuity**]{#continuity} We felt that it was important to not only bring up the construction/creation of agency. How to maintain agency over a longer period of time ? [My first thoughts in reacting to this question are around open licencing, collective authorship and resposibilities ? yes pls add!]
[^vortex]: [**vortex**]{#vortex} On December 2016, Trump was elected. Soon after UK citizens voted in favour of Brexit. The Grenfell Tower in London was eaten by fire. The metoo movement reached mainstream coverage. Political crisis in Catalunya. What was the political and economix vortex in 2017? What did we refer to? It's hard to recall what we refer to here. It was after Trump got elected and the alt right reaching mainstream.
[^investigate]: [**investigate**]{#investigate} How much did we steer the type of work/research/learning when we phrase it as investigating a subject?
----
additions from the footnotes, these notions do not exist in the actual original call for tracks
[^re]: [**re**]{#re} re- as a loop, going back to something and then continue from there ... (would be nice to do some small mapping exercises of re-ing/looping) iteration, Thinking about Relearn as a combination of the word "re" and "learning" made us think of of an article by Annette Kraus on the phenomenon of Lifelong Learning. In the text, she describes "[l]ifelong learning [...] as an example of a progress-oriented accumulative model of learning that pervades institutions and subjectivities today." She describes how the pressure of learning "skills" to be able to "adapt" to an always-changing market, while being required to "self-manage" your carreer places the responsibility of a system on the shoulders of the individual. At the same time, she refers to the critical pedagogy movements in the 60s and 70s in the US(?) that urged for alternative learning situations to re-think the hierarchal systems of universities and include feminist and post-colonial voices. Instead of the word "relearning" she uses the word "unlearning". It creates a framework of thinking about "re"-learning something as acquiring skills and critically relate to current hegemonic educational systems. Not only "un"-learning habits and processes, but through togetherness also "re"-constructing new ones.
[^participants]: [**participants**]{#participants} The word "participants" can be used interchangeably with "us".
list of other stuff to include: - methods of activation - what relearn is - lonely (or sleeping?) pads - etherdump standalone (almost there, in the sync folder) - (etherdump.grep.sh tool, cross-readings around one keyword) - collection of images + annotations - post scriptum on tools created for the act of archiving (turbo-exif, etc) - (other (un)learning experiences like Casco one and Extra Curricular) - reroam (?) - programme of the week - organisation of relearn
---
from previous convos, maybe to include
going around it, not capturing the essence of relearn, cuz there is no essence guide users through manifestations of what happened in a specific time, with specific people, in a specific place nobody owns relearn: shared awareness relearn is not somebody's why it can't be everything? what makes it what it is? shared feeling of protecting it? feeling of malleability of structure, but avoiding the tyranny structureleness what does this mean for new relearners? what are the risks? first relearn is not necessarily the most comfortable experience? no competition: normally summerschools, hackatons or (art)schools while they are supposeldy cooperative they always inject some moments of competition/showing off and this happens thorugh the notion of result/ and presenting those results. So relearn tries to detach from this logic at the risk of some frustration, staying too long in conversation mode, have the feeling falling in pattern? taking the comfortable role? how to escape that? making sure that we also keep relearning those. Some of the Relearn tools or ingredients are becoming norms, how do we stay aware of that? (relearn: light moderation; worksession: strict moderation) (relearn: little programme, worksession: strict timing, more programme elements) Worksession / Relearn. How can these two learning situations be differentiated, and intensified at the places that make them different from each other? go in and out: immerse and re-emerge
-->
nooo.relearn.colophon v _____ v _____ _ _ v _____ v ____ ____ _ ____ \| ___"|/ |_ " _| |'| |'| \| ___"|/v | _"\ v v| _"\ vv /"\ v | _"\ | _|" V | | /| |_| |\ | _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | | | |___ /| |\ v| A |v | |___ | _ < I | __/ / ___ \ v| |_| |\ |_____| v |_|v |_| |_| |_____| |_| \_\ |_| A/_/ \_\ |____/ v << >> _// \\_ // \\ << >> // \\_ ||>>_ \\ >> |||_ (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__) (_P_)(_A_)_D_) (__) (__)
Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: VISIBILITY: - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it. PRIVACY: - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. RETENTION: - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely. - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests. ACCESSIBILITY: - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups. - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies. If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. <!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Colophon
Written and designed by Colm O'Neill, Silvio Lorusso, Cristina Cochior and Manetta Berends — June, July, September 2019 — Rotterdam (NL), Carlow (IE).
Relearn 2017 participants included Roel Roscam Abbing, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Amelie Dumont, Annet Dekker, Julie Boschat Thorez, Ruben van de Ven, Gijs de Heij, Thomas Buxó, Quentin Jumelin, Quentin Astié, Hans Lammerant, Cristina Cochior, Manetta Berends, Silvio Lorusso, Colm O'Neill, Marcel Goethals, Miglena Minkova, Kym Ward, Karisa Senavitis (remote), Amy Pickles, Vasiliki Zioga, Desiree Kerklaan, Anita Burato, Dick Reckard, Émile Greis, Adelina Tsagkari, Anne Laforet, Javier Lloret, Dušan Barok, Joca van der Horst, Claudia Roeck, Jim Wraith, Léna Robin, Natacha Roussel, Máté Pacsika, Jeremy Olson.
# Tools
<!-- there is also a README in the publication.tools folder with a short intro.... -->
To aid this publication, one tool was created and two existing tools got extended: Etherdump and Distribusi.
* Distribusi is used to integrate the photographs of Relearn 2017 into the publication. A command line photograph EXIF comment inserter was built to annotate photo files inside the files themselves. The tool also comes with a reader to go through the annotations in the terminal.<https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/EXIF-image-commenter>
* An EXIF extension has been added to Distribusi that extracts the EXIF'Comment' metadata before building web indexes based on the contents of a directory. This function is activated by the flag '-c' or '-captions'. The flag can be used in combination with '-nf' or '--no-filenames' which tells Distribusi not to include image filenames. <https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/distribusi>
* New pad-to-publication features were added to theEtherdump software (on the publish-vs-nopublish branch) and were used to make this publication. They allow for *Etherdumping*a selection of pads that include the `__RELEARN__`magic word inside them. We used this occassion to fork etherdump into *Etherpump*, with the idea to stimulate further experimentation with pad-publishing within. You can find the fork and read more about it here: <https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/etherpump>.
nooo.relearn.colophon
<!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Colophon
Written and designed by Colm O'Neill, Silvio Lorusso, Cristina Cochior and Manetta Berends — June, July, September 2019 — Rotterdam (NL), Carlow (IE).
Relearn 2017 participants included Roel Roscam Abbing, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Amelie Dumont, Annet Dekker, Julie Boschat Thorez, Ruben van de Ven, Gijs de Heij, Thomas Buxó, Quentin Jumelin, Quentin Astié, Hans Lammerant, Cristina Cochior, Manetta Berends, Silvio Lorusso, Colm O'Neill, Marcel Goethals, Miglena Minkova, Kym Ward, Karisa Senavitis (remote), Amy Pickles, Vasiliki Zioga, Desiree Kerklaan, Anita Burato, Dick Reckard, Émile Greis, Adelina Tsagkari, Anne Laforet, Javier Lloret, Dušan Barok, Joca van der Horst, Claudia Roeck, Jim Wraith, Léna Robin, Natacha Roussel, Máté Pacsika, Jeremy Olson.
# Tools
<!-- there is also a README in the publication.tools folder with a short intro.... -->
To aid this publication, one tool was created and two existing tools got extended: Etherdump and Distribusi.
* Distribusi is used to integrate the photographs of Relearn 2017 into the publication. A command line photograph EXIF comment inserter was built to annotate photo files inside the files themselves. The tool also comes with a reader to go through the annotations in the terminal. <https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/EXIF-image-commenter>
* An EXIF extension has been added to Distribusi that extracts the EXIF 'Comment' metadata before building web indexes based on the contents of a directory. This function is activated by the flag '-c' or '-captions'. The flag can be used in combination with '-nf' or '--no-filenames' which tells Distribusi not to include image filenames. <https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/distribusi>
* New pad-to-publication features were added to the Etherdump software (on the publish-vs-nopublish branch) and were used to make this publication. They allow for *Etherdumping* a selection of pads that include the `__RELEARN__` magic word inside them. We used this occassion to fork etherdump into *Etherpump*, with the idea to stimulate further experimentation with pad-publishing within. You can find the fork and read more about it here: <https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/etherpump>.
nooo.relearn.methods-of-active-documentation v _____ v _____ _ _ v _____ v ____ ____ _ ____ \| ___"|/ |_ " _| |'| |'| \| ___"|/v | _"\ v v| _"\ vv /"\ v | _"\ | _|" V | | /| |_| |\ | _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | | | |___ /| |\ v| A |v | |___ | _ < I | __/ / ___ \ v| |_| |\ |_____| v |_|v |_| |_| |_____| |_| \_\ |_| A/_/ \_\ |____/ v << >> _// \\_ // \\ << >> // \\_ ||>>_ \\ >> |||_ (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__) (_P_)(_A_)_D_) (__) (__)
Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: VISIBILITY: - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it. PRIVACY: - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. RETENTION: - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely. - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests. ACCESSIBILITY: - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups. - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies. If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. <!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Methods of active documentation
What's the active part of documenting Relearn? What does it mean to re-activate a collection of files? Does it mean to execute them again? To read them again? To simply look at them again? Does the material change while we observe it? Do we change while observing the material?
Relearn is intentionally self-reflective. Almost every year there have been attempts to re-examine and revise it. 2017 was no exception. In the Networked Archive track of that year, the word *rumination* came up a lot. The track participants had the image of a cow's stomach in their minds, with the four different chambers that it consists of: Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum, Abomasum. The first two chambers are the major site of microbial activity that break down the material. After the cud is regurgitated, then swallowed again, until completely mixed (or activated) with saliva, it is then sent to the omasum, where it's broken down into the smallest elements possible to be pushed into the abomasum, the 'real' stomach of the cow. Further digestion takes place here. If Relearn were a ruminant, what would these chambers look like? Would the material ever reach the 'real' stomach? Is there any 'real', 'final' stomach? Do we ever finish digesting what happens during Relearn or are we stuck in a kind of gastric purgatory?
The files and traces that are left after every Relearn could be seen as extensions of a collective memory: notes that were taken in passing are now the only marks left of the thoughts that passed through, snippets of code that lay dormant in the repository, pictures of unidentified gestures which now seem alien, or group photos reminding of who was there. They sit in different hard drives: the hard drive of the server hosting the Gitlab repository and the hard drives of the participants' day-to-day computers. They are in that sense not passive at all. But you could say that they're not active either, as nobody is paying attention to them or remembers that they exist.
How to approach the Relearn 2017 *dump* of images, scripts, etherpad traces and more? We are in a kind of chicken-and-egg situation: how to introduce Relearn while taking into account what Relearn is, or better yet, how Relearn works, in the very way of doing this? Our intuition is that a lack of 'essence' might be a defining feature of Relearn. As the diversity among the various editions demonstrates, Relearn can be seen as a process more than as a 'thing'. A radical anti-essentialist approach to Relearn can be formulated as a question: what's the process of describing a process?
With this question in mind, we started looking at the traces left in various hard drives, servers, and online pages… We took an investigative, forensic approach. We started tagging, looking at metadata and producing more of it, conscious that while the material is unable to speak for itself, it is also a trigger for us to recall memories stored somewhere in our wetware hard drives.
One of the consequences of activating a previous event is that we spend time together again. Reading the *call for tracks* is a way for us to pick up conversations where we left them off in 2017, thus reframing the question of learning/relearning in a collective setting. It turns it into a reroam-over-time (where *reroam* has been a recurring name for moments of meta-reflection on Relearn, during Relearn). What were the motivations, curiosities or urgencies that led us to organising and initiating Relearn in 2017? Are they still the same? How different are they now?
<!-- [to ingest and to regurgitate] -->
Activation can also be an act of mediation. An important element of Relearn is its temporality: short bursts of togetherness anticipated by longer periods of organisational work. There is no stable institution or structure behind Relearn to mediate between people or over time. When there is no one to organise, the spam emails grow in numbers, like wild weeds in an unkept garden. We hope that activating and mediating Relearn through this document format enables thinking about it in a perspective of years instead of one of weeks. By writing about a previous edition of Relearn we hope to continue the conversation around collective practices, of which rumination is one.
There are three kinds of addressees for this document. First, diving into the files lets us take into account what permeated Relearn before 2017 and what was passed on afterwards. We hope this will reignite the subjects within our own networks, including the Relearn network.
Second, we revisited the Relearn 2017 conversations and inscribed them into a document that could speak to people with similar affinities, who may decide to organise their own experiment.
Last but not least, one of the constants of many editions is the difference in the way participants experience this time together. As it happens when someone joins a new group, for first-time relearners it can be a bit intimidating, a bit awkward, to decipher the habits of Relearn and to share their process with someone else. We hope that this document might feel like having a conversation with a previous relearner, while being outside in the sun, feet in the weeds.
<!--
[Something that is not touched upon is the role of learning in our practices? Or the relation between learning and our practices.]
---- text writing notes that need to be ported in or left aside ↓
During Relean, finished outputs are not required. This is very clear in the materials we analyzed, that can be seen as threads, which extend out of relearn. Were we trying to connect the threads more than following them to see where they lead to.
where is the data stored? What does collective memory mean? various hard drives, but also physical traces, "souvenirs", mental images, oral anecdotes, etc. that reactivate each other. Active archiving means incentivizing such "activation". ware, hardware, software and wetware.
what does activating mean? (A spectrum of activating) [i would keep this] 1. activating convo between relearners 2. making the archive legible to non-relearners or wanna be relearners 3. providing access and foster distribution 4. ????
How does the activation happen? conversation between things and people, inter-activation, inter-enactment
passive data, info > activated by looking at it "“situated knowledges”. The idea, developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of particular people make truth, Haraway argued. The scientists in a laboratory don’t simply observe or conduct experiments on a cell, for instance, but co-create what a cell is by seeing, measuring, naming and manipulating it." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth
files are constantly active? technically speaking?
multiple levels of activation (interrelated) [i would keep this] 0. material that sits somewhere, but nobody knows were, nobody looks at it 1. looking at the material 2a. annotating the material
- injecting annotations (images [in the files], call for tracks [in the text])
- organising, adding order, making sense (etherpads)
2b. making it legible (introducing, design, playfulness in the way we do this to reflect relearn?) 3. producing new material (oral histories etc.) 4. picking up conversation / producing situation that is new and old at the same time 5. give it to others 6. connecting to other experience that are out there (articulate position)
A little too active documentation: mistakenly adding the hidden bashrc files when too rapidly commiting files to the git before taking offline the complex.local server at the end of Relearn 2017.
What's the active part of documenting Relearn? What does it mean to re-activate a collection of files? Does it mean to execute them again? To read them again? To simply look at them again? Does the material change while we observe it? Do we change while observing the material?
Relearn is intentionally self-reflective. Almost every year there have been attempts to re-examine and revise it. 2017 was no exception. In the Networked Archive track of that year, the word *rumination* came up a lot. The track participants had the image of a cow's stomach in their minds, with the four different chambers that it consists of: Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum, Abomasum. The first two chambers are the major site of microbial activity that break down the material. After the cud is regurgitated, then swallowed again, until completely mixed (or activated) with saliva, it is then sent to the omasum, where it's broken down into the smallest elements possible to be pushed into the abomasum, the 'real' stomach of the cow. Further digestion takes place here. If Relearn were a ruminant, what would these chambers look like? Would the material ever reach the 'real' stomach? Is there any 'real', 'final' stomach? Do we ever finish digesting what happens during Relearn or are we stuck in a kind of gastric purgatory?
The files and traces that are left after every Relearn could be seen as extensions of a collective memory: notes that were taken in passing are now the only marks left of the thoughts that passed through, snippets of code that lay dormant in the repository, pictures of unidentified gestures which now seem alien, or group photos reminding of who was there. They sit in different hard drives: the hard drive of the server hosting the Gitlab repository and the hard drives of the participants' day-to-day computers. They are in that sense not passive at all. But you could say that they're not active either, as nobody is paying attention to them or remembers that they exist.
How to approach the Relearn 2017 *dump* of images, scripts, etherpad traces and more? We are in a kind of chicken-and-egg situation: how to introduce Relearn while taking into account what Relearn is, or better yet, how Relearn works, in the very way of doing this? Our intuition is that a lack of 'essence' might be a defining feature of Relearn. As the diversity among the various editions demonstrates, Relearn can be seen as a process more than as a 'thing'. A radical anti-essentialist approach to Relearn can be formulated as a question: what's the process of describing a process?
With this question in mind, we started looking at the traces left in various hard drives, servers, and online pages… We took an investigative, forensic approach. We started tagging, looking at metadata and producing more of it, conscious that while the material is unable to speak for itself, it is also a trigger for us to recall memories stored somewhere in our wetware hard drives.
One of the consequences of activating a previous event is that we spend time together again. Reading the *call for tracks* is a way for us to pick up conversations where we left them off in 2017, thus reframing the question of learning/relearning in a collective setting. It turns it into a reroam-over-time (where *reroam* has been a recurring name for moments of meta-reflection on Relearn, during Relearn). What were the motivations, curiosities or urgencies that led us to organising and initiating Relearn in 2017? Are they still the same? How different are they now?
<!-- [to ingest and to regurgitate] -->
Activation can also be an act of mediation. An important element of Relearn is its temporality: short bursts of togetherness anticipated by longer periods of organisational work. There is no stable institution or structure behind Relearn to mediate between people or over time. When there is no one to organise, the spam emails grow in numbers, like wild weeds in an unkept garden. We hope that activating and mediating Relearn through this document format enables thinking about it in a perspective of years instead of one of weeks. By writing about a previous edition of Relearn we hope to continue the conversation around collective practices, of which rumination is one.
There are three kinds of addressees for this document. First, diving into the files lets us take into account what permeated Relearn before 2017 and what was passed on afterwards. We hope this will reignite the subjects within our own networks, including the Relearn network.
Second, we revisited the Relearn 2017 conversations and inscribed them into a document that could speak to people with similar affinities, who may decide to organise their own experiment.
Last but not least, one of the constants of many editions is the difference in the way participants experience this time together. As it happens when someone joins a new group, for first-time relearners it can be a bit intimidating, a bit awkward, to decipher the habits of Relearn and to share their process with someone else. We hope that this document might feel like having a conversation with a previous relearner, while being outside in the sun, feet in the weeds.
<!--
[Something that is not touched upon is the role of learning in our practices? Or the relation between learning and our practices.]
---- text writing notes that need to be ported in or left aside ↓
During Relean, finished outputs are not required. This is very clear in the materials we analyzed, that can be seen as threads, which extend out of relearn. Were we trying to connect the threads more than following them to see where they lead to.
where is the data stored? What does collective memory mean? various hard drives, but also physical traces, "souvenirs", mental images, oral anecdotes, etc. that reactivate each other. Active archiving means incentivizing such "activation". ware, hardware, software and wetware.
what does activating mean? (A spectrum of activating) [i would keep this] 1. activating convo between relearners 2. making the archive legible to non-relearners or wanna be relearners 3. providing access and foster distribution 4. ????
How does the activation happen? conversation between things and people, inter-activation, inter-enactment
passive data, info > activated by looking at it "“situated knowledges”. The idea, developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of particular people make truth, Haraway argued. The scientists in a laboratory don’t simply observe or conduct experiments on a cell, for instance, but co-create what a cell is by seeing, measuring, naming and manipulating it." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth
files are constantly active? technically speaking?
multiple levels of activation (interrelated) [i would keep this] 0. material that sits somewhere, but nobody knows were, nobody looks at it 1. looking at the material 2a. annotating the material
- injecting annotations (images [in the files], call for tracks [in the text])
- organising, adding order, making sense (etherpads)
2b. making it legible (introducing, design, playfulness in the way we do this to reflect relearn?) 3. producing new material (oral histories etc.) 4. picking up conversation / producing situation that is new and old at the same time 5. give it to others 6. connecting to other experience that are out there (articulate position)
A little too active documentation: mistakenly adding the hidden bashrc files when too rapidly commiting files to the git before taking offline the complex.local server at the end of Relearn 2017.
-->
nooo.relearn.preamble v _____ v _____ _ _ v _____ v ____ ____ _ ____ \| ___"|/ |_ " _| |'| |'| \| ___"|/v | _"\ v v| _"\ vv /"\ v | _"\ | _|" V | | /| |_| |\ | _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | | | |___ /| |\ v| A |v | |___ | _ < I | __/ / ___ \ v| |_| |\ |_____| v |_|v |_| |_| |_____| |_| \_\ |_| A/_/ \_\ |____/ v << >> _// \\_ // \\ << >> // \\_ ||>>_ \\ >> |||_ (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__) (_P_)(_A_)_D_) (__) (__)
Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: VISIBILITY: - The pads are not indexed by search engines, but anyone that knows its URL is welcome to read and edit it. PRIVACY: - The contents of the pads are not encrypted, meaning that they are not private. - Anyone with access to the server has the possibility to see the content of your pads. RETENTION: - We make our own backups, meaning the the contents of all pads sit on our harddrives potentially indefinitely. - Because the identity of a pad author cannot be confirmed, we don't respond to pad retrieval requests. ACCESSIBILITY: - If you rely on the content of these pads, please remember to make your own backups. - The availability of the pads is subject to cosmic events, spilled drinks and personal energies. If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad. <!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Preamble
This text appears out of order. Not only because of how we've organised it, but because we are writing abouta collective learning experiment called Relearn, almost two years after it took place. The documentation of Relearn 2017 is of interest on its own, but it is also ressurected as part of the *Network of One's Own: Three Takes on Taking Care*publicationmade at Varia.
As part of the collection of *Networks of One's Own* editions, we want to document a network of people shaped by multiple editions of Relearn, a week-long collective learning experiment that has been taking place since 2013 mainly during the summer; a recurring moment for us to meet new or known free softwarecurious peers.
The following text'schoral voice comes from the reactivated core of people who initiated and organised Relearn back in 2017. We are Manetta Berends, Cristina Cochior, Silvio Lorusso and Colm O'Neill, but instrumental to organising Relearn 2017 were a lot more people, including Giulia de Giovanelli, Max Franklin, Roel Roscam Abbing, and the members of the Poortgebouw residency in Rotterdam. And let us not forget of the remaining 30 participants. This text, however, is written from our point of view and as a consequence does not reflect all of the opinions and outcomes of the session itself.We don't want to see this as a shortcoming. Instead, we deliberately decided to embrace the act of documenting an event in fragments, which might be the only way toreveal what Relearn 2017 as a whole was.
In the early months of 2017, the idea to bring Relearn to the city welive(d) in sparked up. Why organise it at all? Looking back, we never once stopped to ask this question. It seemed self-evident that there was a collective desire, if not a need, for previous encounters to continue happening. We became excited at the ideaof organising an edition as a way to give something back to the Relearn community, but also to bring it to Rotterdam for the first time, to connect it to people around us, and to contribute to the shape Relearn could take.
This process of documentation is less about reporting and sharing files—although we've selected a representative collection of images and files—than it is about reflecting about what was sucessful and what wasn't, particularly in regard to the new format that Relearn has adopted in 2019.
We began this documentation with one of the first texts that was collectively written: the call for tracks. It became our first point of interest as it actually introduces a lot of Relearn notions. We began annotating this call and realised how the comments alone produced a different understanding of the text. This vernacular Relearn glossary has come to be populated with history, context and opinions, so it is our point of departure.
We spent some time reflecting on what it means to actively document Relearn 2017, thinking of ourselves as ruminants.Next, we detailed how we responded to the proposals that were sent following the call for tracks.In the publication itself, we're interlacing elements of the documents produced at Relearn such ascontextual images. We've chosen to manipulate this documentation with a few tools that we've created, modified or extended (more about this in the colophon) to serve the purpose of re-entering a relearn way of thinking.
We end this text by pointing to the current experiments that are taking place in 2019 while Relearn is travelling on its curve between Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris and wherever else there's enthusiastic relearners.
Our aim with this publication is not to focus on tools and methods, as Relearn usually would, but instead to emphasise the experiments we tried in 2017in relation to Relearn's overarching patterns and the contextual influences that arose from organising this week in Rotterdam.
nooo.relearn.preamble
<!-- __RELEARN__ -->
# Preamble
This text appears out of order. Not only because of how we've organised it, but because we are writing about a collective learning experiment called Relearn, almost two years after it took place. The documentation of Relearn 2017 is of interest on its own, but it is also ressurected as part of the *Network of One's Own: Three Takes on Taking Care* publication made at Varia.
As part of the collection of *Networks of One's Own* editions, we want to document a network of people shaped by multiple editions of Relearn, a week-long collective learning experiment that has been taking place since 2013 mainly during the summer; a recurring moment for us to meet new or known free software curious peers.
The following text's choral voice comes from the reactivated core of people who initiated and organised Relearn back in 2017. We are Manetta Berends, Cristina Cochior, Silvio Lorusso and Colm O'Neill, but instrumental to organising Relearn 2017 were a lot more people, including Giulia de Giovanelli, Max Franklin, Roel Roscam Abbing, and the members of the Poortgebouw residency in Rotterdam. And let us not forget of the remaining 30 participants. This text, however, is written from our point of view and as a consequence does not reflect all of the opinions and outcomes of the session itself. We don't want to see this as a shortcoming. Instead, we deliberately decided to embrace the act of documenting an event in fragments, which might be the only way to reveal what Relearn 2017 as a whole was.
In the early months of 2017, the idea to bring Relearn to the city we live(d) in sparked up. Why organise it at all? Looking back, we never once stopped to ask this question. It seemed self-evident that there was a collective desire, if not a need, for previous encounters to continue happening. We became excited at the idea of organising an edition as a way to give something back to the Relearn community, but also to bring it to Rotterdam for the first time, to connect it to people around us, and to contribute to the shape Relearn could take.
This process of documentation is less about reporting and sharing files—although we've selected a representative collection of images and files—than it is about reflecting about what was sucessful and what wasn't, particularly in regard to the new format that Relearn has adopted in 2019.
We began this documentation with one of the first texts that was collectively written: the call for tracks. It became our first point of interest as it actually introduces a lot of Relearn notions. We began annotating this call and realised how the comments alone produced a different understanding of the text. This vernacular Relearn glossary has come to be populated with history, context and opinions, so it is our point of departure.
We spent some time reflecting on what it means to actively document Relearn 2017, thinking of ourselves as ruminants. Next, we detailed how we responded to the proposals that were sent following the call for tracks. In the publication itself, we're interlacing elements of the documents produced at Relearn such as contextual images. We've chosen to manipulate this documentation with a few tools that we've created, modified or extended (more about this in the colophon) to serve the purpose of re-entering a relearn way of thinking.
We end this text by pointing to the current experiments that are taking place in 2019 while Relearn is travelling on its curve between Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris and wherever else there's enthusiastic relearners.
Our aim with this publication is not to focus on tools and methods, as Relearn usually would, but instead to emphasise the experiments we tried in 2017 in relation to Relearn's overarching patterns and the contextual influences that arose from organising this week in Rotterdam.