• Part of the PhD-Workshop «Imagination as a Site of Struggle»
En-crip-ing time is a performance lecture of a durational software piece. The software performs cron jobs (the background jobs of server infrastructures) as chronic jobs (practices of indefinite maintenance and care). It does this by running cron jobs, usually determinate maintenance programs, at indeterminate and disruptive times. The code that is run programmatically encrypts a line of the poem each time it runs with SSL encryption, rendering the poem gradually unreadable. This slow and indeterminable process means to perform computation through a criping of time and is experienced only by people willing to spend time alongside this crip infrastructure. It is meant to question what rhythms we have with technologies and how through a crip understanding of relations and temporalities can we slow down and care for our chronic*computational infrastructures (C*CI).
'En-crip-ing time' means to enable computational practices to accept down time! Live with chronic pain/illness/failure! Disobey the normative protocols to perform the care we need!
The lecture will be a short intro to the work, followed by a reading of the poem. As a durational piece of software, it can't be fully performed during the lecture, as it has its own rhythms and frequencies - and can't be accelerated to fit the confines of the presentation. Instead, we will read the section that is visible at that time, and then follow by a collective imagining of how C*CI might take forms and feel to be with.
Chair: Helen V. Pritchard, Shaka McGlotten, Ines Kleesattel, and Lucie Kolb.
Biography
This is the first collaboration between Mariana Marangoni and George Simms. This working together comes from many bumpings into, chatting to and making space for each others crip troubles. In making these spaces we are making wiggle room for each other (and maybe others) to imagine how our chronic pains can fracture their silence and enable computational practices that aren't rooted in optimization and instead embody the practices of indefinite care only we know how to give.
Mariana Marangoni is a Brazilian artist and researcher based in London, currently a PhD student at UAL CCI and a Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts. Her work focuses on critically examining digital materiality and its socio-ecological implications through a wide range of media such as installations, web-based experiments and visual poetry.
George Simms is a British researcher, dev*hacker, queer instigator and crip trouble. They create and develop digital tools, infrastructures and protocols that reimagine the capacities of computational infrastructures.
They are finishing off a PhD in queer and crip collective methods towards automated sociotechnical infrastructure. They teach and mentor experimental media, speculative computing and coding skills at I-Dat, UoP. They are also a founding member of In-grid, a London base trans*feminist collective that develops and produces technical infrastructures, skills shares and events*parties.