Constant is a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology. They organise a workshop session every six months, which function as temporary research labs, collective working environments where different types of expertise come into contact with each other.

The worksession Collective Conditions experiments with the generative potential of codes of conduct, complaints procedures, bug reports and copyleft licenses. They understand these socio-technical protocols as artistic and activist media and are curious about the role they can play in the (different) imagination of complex collectivities.

The worksession is inspired by trans*feminist collective practices, anti-harassment and allyship-work, non-violent communication, score-making, decolonial and intersectional activism, but also by ways of doing developed within Free Culture and Free, Libre and Open Source software. Collective Conditions focuses on a-polarizing methods, affirmative habits that can stretch and reorient frameworks, that represent new vocabulary, gestures and forms of expression:

• Making room for support, sympathy, misunderstanding and difference in network protocols?
• Codes of conduct for servers, collectives, networks, rooms, authors, data, software ... that accommodate intra-collective alliances, or multi-species participants from different zones and eras?
• Considering material circumstances in the formulation of collectivity?
• Articulating togetherness but not avoiding problems and conflicts, or re-affirming existing boundaries and barriers?
• Interpreting techno-social protocols as changing infrastructures?
• Temporary, polyphonic, generative procedures?
• ... ?

This session is developed in collaboration with Ateliers Mommen, with contributions by amongst others Queering Damage and Loren Britton. Britton will be participating and setting the environmental conditions for the work.

For further information and full programme of the worksession see visit the website of Constant.