Publications

Hot Brine

Hot Brine is an ongoing speculative research into so-called sustainable technologies such as using geothermal-energy for producing both carbon neutral electricity and lithium hydroxide, or injecting carbonated water into underground basalt for permanent carbon sequestration. We are interested in the way that imaginaries for these technologies are visualised, materialised and circulated. During a summer residency in Atelier Mondial, hosted by the Critical Media Lab program at IXDM in Basel, we made two publications and a series of posters.

Two opposite pages from a zine, showing rubbings of name tags of companies

Für Kundeliste bitte Milchkasten öffnen (For client list, please open the milk cabinet) is a report from a daytrip to Zug, a small city that houses many major companies active in crypto currencies and blockchain. In a series of drawings and frottages, we traced the banal presence of nested letterbox companies in this self declared Crypto Valley capital.

Here’s a pdf to print separate pages
Here’s a pdf to print a 24 page A5 brochure.

Potential Removal collects a series of images and diagrams gleaned from scientific and commercial publications that visualize “mineral carbonization”. They were emptied from texts and values to reveal the bare graphic templates through which carbon removal schemes are made imaginable.
Here’s a pdf to print a 24 page A4 brochure.

A fragment of a poster, with altered pictures of rock and minerals, alternated by the words: zero, not, net, zero, is, not etcetera.

Rows of natural carbon look-alikes magically blow holes in sequestration formulas. The poster series Net Zero Not Zero reclaims visualisation of the mineral underground as a means to make the capitalist extractivist logics behind ‘Net Zero’ carbon neutral practices tremble.

2023, Peter Westenberg and Femke Snelting / The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI).

Atelier Mondial and the Critical Media Lab, Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) Basel Academy of Art and Design/University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW)

https://criticalmedialab.ch/hot-brine/

Study, Practice and Proximate Critique

The article Constant Study, Practice and Proximate Critique that Élodie Mugrefya and Peter Westenberg wrote for MARCH, journal of art & strategy briefly collects some thoughts to relate the work of Constant to publishing as an act of: tool thinking, generating publicness, being together, intervening in realities, bringing into existence and doing with protocols.

“For Constant, publishing as a practice holds the potential to generate opportunities for opening up and revealing hidden structures and, beyond that, to incite interaction and change. We see recursive publishing, which comes with the explicit invitation to rewrite and republish, as generative work.”

This article is the first of six that MARCH invited Constant to publish in the context of the journal’s first long term inquiry Publishing As Protocol.
Find all six articles here: https://march.international/feature/constant/

Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures

Download: https://calibre.constantvzw.org/read/185/pdf

This playful research report contains observations and fragments of interventions that were developed during the research project reclaiming Digital Infrastructures, which took place in KASK, School of Arts, Gent in 2021.

“What we learn and how we learn are closely related. Now that digital learning seems to have become a new norm, it is important to be able to read and understand the digital tools that we use and allow artistic knowledge to play a role in this.”

This collaboration between Constant and KASK, School of Arts in Ghent integrates a critical and creative attitude towards the tools used at KASK. This is crucial if we want to be able to respond to initiatives that are closer to the practice of design and art. Claiming the digital space for artistic-educational applications starts with an analysis of its (digital) materiality, daring to play and speculate with it in order to formulate artistic forward-looking proposals.

Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures takes KASKs digital infrastructure as a starting point for close-reading sessions. This infrastructure is both technical and ethical, legal and speculative, economic and political: it consists of cables and servers, social environments, laws and regulations, licenses and relations between human beings and other beings. The sessions make connections between the various infrastructural aspects.

Reclaiming Digital Infrastructures starts from an F/LOSS perspective. (Free Libre Open Source Software) Participants get acquainted with various F/LOSS software and/or methods.

With contributions by: Elodie Mugrefya, Wendy Van Wynsberghe, Jara Rocha, Martino Morandi, Manetta Berends, Femke Snelting, Seda Gürses

Graphic design: Manetta Berends + Cristina Cochior / VariaAutomatic word wrap
Editing: Femke Snelting + Peter Westenberg

Made possible by: KASK School of Arts, Gent

Iterations

This publication aims to create openings and inspire new concepts for work yet to be developed. As a vessel it is filled with hybrid content that can be unpacked and remixed. Inside this book, contributions of some participants from the past and Iterators from the future coincide in a joint effort to transport ideas to persons and contexts that are yet unknown to us. As such this publication could be read as an Iteration in itself.
The contributions are related to approaches, attitudes, positions that emerged from the Iterations project. Manetta Berends & Jara Rocha created a set of descriptions of common threads that were called ‘handles’, and invited each contributor to respond to one of them. During the ‘editorial sprint’ to process the material, scores were produced that allowed for a transversal reading of the contributions. This practice was named ‘x-dexing’.

Published by: Constant, Hangar, esc

Designing Openings

The article “Designing openings” is written in response to two projects that took place simultaneously in and around KASK. The “Open Design Course for refugees and asylum seekers” and the exhibition “Plus Ultra” by the artist Daniel Andújar. “Designing Openings” analyzes how they each critically engage with the institutional environment within which they operate in their own way.

Xavan + Jaluka

Friday 17 Frifek of the year Zek, a neutrondemolisher reduces the Grand Zone of Zendium to little more then a pudding shake, with dramatic consequences for lovers Xavan and Jaluka.

This comic by Pléoter Spilliaestenberg remixes the work of Belgian painter Léon Spilliaert.

Seventy years after the death of an author or artist, copyrights do no longer apply to his / her work. Public Domain Day celebrates yearly the fact that new works are entering the Public Domain. On this occasion Constant presents every year a public domain remix in the series Death of the authors.

Léon Spilliaert lived and worked in Oostende in the beginning of the 20th century. His symbolist work is lyrical, sombre and poetic. He passed away in 1946. His work is no longer protected by copyright and can be re-apropriated, modified and published.
If you look for Spilliaert in Wikimedia Commons, you will find most of the original images by Spilliaert the were used to make this comic.

The strip is a love story in a science-fiction set in the region of Zendium which is in a short but intense conflict with neighboring region Qualaria. Spilliaert wakes up in a fictive future.

Download PDF here (Dutch and French):
https://calibre.constantvzw.org/book/33

Cutting an odo

In: Grounds for possible Music, Exploring gender, voice, language and identity
Errant Bodies Press, Julia Eckhardt (ed), 2018

This article reports of the situated practice of Christine van Russel-Henar in which research and life practice are closely related. She is the founder of the Koto-Museum in Paramaribo, Suriname that pays tribute to the rich cultural heritage of the Koto, the traditional wear of Surinamese women. A well ‘cut’ Odo is a short, sharp saying, full of metaphor and local relevance. Odo are bound to the colorful prints of the dresses and headscarves and the way they are folded and worn.

Download article in Dutch: Een Odo snijden

Do You Speak My Neighbourhood? Language, Technology, and Proximity

Critical Arts, South-North Cultural and Media Studies
Volume 31, 2017 – Issue 2: No Strings Attached: Exploring the Relationship between Anthropology and Contemporary Arts

This article written by Peter Westenberg and Kris Rutten, analyses notions of participation, publicness, and proximity in the participatory artistic research projects Parlez-vous Saint-Gillois? and De Schaarbeekse Taal. It is explored how these projects deploy technology and language as means to create proximity, and what the issues are in creating art projects within a complex urban context. The notion of “co-presence” is introduced as a concept that moves beyond mere co-location in ethnographic research and participatory art practices. The argument is that the concept of co-presence opens new perspectives for artists and researchers to develop practices that examine space and locality, community and communication, proximity and interaction. At the same time, co-presence also raises issues about what can be considered as “public” or “public space” and what proximity entails, specifically in relation to media and technology. This article explores these issues by confronting theoretical perspectives with concrete examples from participatory artistic research projects.

Download here: Do you speak – Westenberg+Rutten

Cinelerra Manual

cinelerra

I contributed to the writing of this french manual for the open source video editing software Cinelerra. The manual is a good way to start to get to know the tool, it contains a section on features and examples.
Get your printed copy, or download a pdf from the website of FlossManuals FR:

Parlez-Vous Saint-Gillois ?

SGL

Do you speak Saint-Gilles? is an audio neighborhood project in around the street Rue de Bosnie, in the neighborhood Saint-Gilles in Brussels, commissioned by the Region of Brussels.
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Schaarbeekse Taal

deschaarbeeksetaal

Neighbourhood project and audio data-base, Schaarbeek, BE, 2009 – 2012

Go to project website of la Langue Schaerbeekoise

The project ‘Language of Schaerbeek’ collects words that are used by different groups of people living around the ‘Cage of the bears’ as Place Verboeckhoven is commonly known. Arab, Turkish, Dutch, Brussels, Swahili, Spanish, Polish are just a few of the languages that accompany the main language French. The dictionary is an open for change, flexible and organically growing collection of recordings of spoken words.
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Escuela 404 – Schaarbeekse Taal

http://seminarioeuraca.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/schrbk-2.jpg

9/4/2013 Escuela 404 – Intermediae – Matadoiro de Madriz

A presentation together with An Mertens about the urban language project Langue Schaerbeekoise / Schaarbeekse Taal on invitation of the Euraca seminar in Intermediae, Matadoro in Madrid.
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Interview Square

Loslaten als discipline

An interview by Pieter van Bogaert (Square) in conversation with Peter Westenberg and Wendy van Wynsberghe in the framework of the project ‘en suite’.

This text talks about several aspects of the projects that evolve around the organization Constant in which the interviewee recognizes a practice of ‘letting go’. We talked about methodologies of giving access to content, setting up participatory strategies, video, hacking, extra-curricular forms of education. (Dutch only)

Routes + Routines

r+r

Article for Trepeta, Artium museum, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2010

A short article that summarises some ideas behind Routes and Routines. I wrote it for the magazine Trepeta, published by the Basque museum for contemporary art Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz. Read / download the text from online publisher Constant Verlag.

Legal Performance

DIY performance manual, Text contribution to Platonique Lab, 2009

“These three short exercises investigate permitted behaviour in public space as specified in local laws.

Every time we act according to the law, we are contributing to its confirmation, we become ’legal bodies’; trained and instructed by a law we might or might not support. Through these exercises and the issues they touch upon, we propose to reinterpret definitions of public space, to test and stretch moral and public social boundaries.

Starting from a Free Software point of view, we feel that exchange should be built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute resources. Could these ’resources’ also include rules and regulations for public life?”
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Routes + Routines

R+R2

Routes and Routines, brochure, 54 pages, Hasselt, 2008

A joint publication by Constant vzw and Z33
Texts by: Peter Westenberg, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Wendy van Wynsberghe
Graphic design: OSP, Ludivine Loiseau and Yi Jiang

Download in PDF (34 mb)

This booklet documents five network walks as a part of the Routes and Routines roject Peter Westenberg developed for the exhibition Place@space in art center Z33. The walks were organised between March 13 and May 17 2008 and traversed the urban environment in all its complexity. Through streets, the public domain, the internet, radio waves, semi-public territories, legal space, fantasies, historical footprints and technological connections, the walkers explored the boundaries of the public nature of the city.

Affinity video

vortex

Peter Westenberg contributed an article Affinity video to the ’first research book about YouTube’ published by the Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur in Amsterdam.
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World Wide Westwijk

www

Booklet with cd rom, 2004

A booklet about the web streaming project World Wide Westwijk, which consisted of a television program webcasted on a weekly basis between december 2003 and june 2004, combining the traditional documentary character of local tv with artistic avant garde in-situ interventions.
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Madam I’m adam / The organisation of private life

madam

Book, 2003

“A publication about the organisation of private life, the nuclear family and the institutionalisation of love , realised in the framework of the thematic project The Organisation of Private Life, a co-production by the Piet Zwart Institute and the Kunstuniversit”t Linz.
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Stedelijke onregelmatigheden / Urban anomalies

cover titel

Booklet with textual and visual contributions, 2001

This publication was commissioned by dance company Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods, and accompanied their Rotterdam performance of Highway 101. Guest writers and artists reflected on normality, representation, human behavior and excess in a contemporary urban environment.

Read:
Introduction by Rudi Laermans and Myriam van Imschoot
The lifestyle of excess, the excess of lifestyle by Laurens ten Kate
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Metropolitan representations

Zapata

Article for Archis #5, 2001

A political contextualization of Chicano and Black murals in Los Angeles. This article about the political reality behind murals in Los Angeles was published in 2001 in the architectural magazine Archis. It presents excerpts from a report I wrote during a working period in Los Angeles.
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I have been charmed in the most unlikely places

charmed
Series of printed matter 1996 – 2001

A series of independently published small booklets, flyers and posters, dealing with the relation between cultural identity and geographical places. The bimonthly editions were mailed to subscribants and distributed via bookshops and hand out networks.

Visit the online archive.