For this Reading Room session, Seda Gürses and Femke Snelting from The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest join us to read and discuss the introduction to ”There is no Software, there are just Services” by Irina Kaldrack and Martina Leeker.

Please RSVP to participate in this reading session by sending an email to info@page-not-found.nl with subject ‘Reading Room’. You will receive the introduction to ”There is no Software, there are just Services”, which should be read in preparation.

As a rare critical account of radical changes in software production with huge implications, this text written in 2015 lucidly details a transformation long in the making. As became increasingly clear during lockdowns, public institutions such as hospitals, schools, local libraries and cultural institutions have by now almost without exception outsourced their digital infrastructures to a small handful of Big Tech companies. By allowing them to provide the administration, facilitation and optimisation regimes to keep business running “as usual”, they ceded control both over their operations and the possibility for offering localised services. As Kaldrack and Leeker write, this “corresponds to a process in which any kind of aid or help, personal service or favour– our normal, everyday practices– can be subjected to the law of the economical”.  Interjected by readings from pamphlets, manifestos and zines from critical tech-collectives proposing solidary, queer, non-coercive computational practices, this Reading Room Session will be stretching readers’ technical and social imaginaries.

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. Together we convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. We develop tools from feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism and artistic practice to generate currently inexistant vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies. TITiPI functions as an infrastructure to intensify these practices and to establish new ways in which policy making around technology is organized in the public interest.

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, the Reading Room and Page Not Found are committed to provide a safe environment for all participants, while questioning the control regime that the QR code check implies. This commitment brought us to a new format: the session will be a procession, in which our guests Femke and Seda guide the participants, between the rooms of Page Not Found and the street outside. We will be physically circulating, circulating ideas and text, as well as hopefully airing out our aerosols and data traces. This way, our event is a “transfer” or “circulation activity” (doorstroom activiteit) for which a Covidpas is not required.  At the beginning of the session, we will invite the participants to define collectively how to feel safe together (using distancing, masks, etc). Please stay home if you feel unwell.

The session runs from 19:00 to 21:30 with a break in the middle. 

We welcome you to a talk by Marc Fischer as part of the cycle ‘Solitary Solidarity’.

The Chicago-based artist and zine-maker will present his recent projects such as the publication Quaranzine, a one-page zine published as a daily response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the artist-in-residence program The Courtroom Artist Residency. The evening will also include a conversation between Fischer and Hamja Ahsan.

The cycle Solitary Solidarity, curated by activist, artist and writer Hamja Ahsan, centers on strategies of surviving isolation through publishing practices. Hamja Ahsan explores the use of the Shy Radicals book and movement as a curatorial thread. This program in three acts centers on a consideration of solitary confinement through the prison system, psychiatric care and quarantine, and inquires how we can learn from each other while placed under different restraints.

Marc Fischer is the administrator of Public Collectors, an initiative he formed in 2007. Public Collectors aims to encourage greater access and scholarship for marginal cultural materials, particularly those that museums ignore. Public Collectors’ work includes Quaranzine, which produced 100 single page publications with over 75 collaborators at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public Collectors also initiated the Courtroom Artist Residency. For this project Fischer brought artists to observe the Criminal Court in Chicago followed by a discussion over a meal at Taqueria El Milagro in Chicago’s Little Village neighbourhood. The conversations were turned into a publication series: The Courtroom Artist Residency Report. Recently Fischer published the book Public Collectors Police Scanner, which is the result of 75 days of note-taking while listening to live police radio in Chicago. In addition to Public Collectors, Fischer is also a member of the group Temporary Services (founded in 1998) and a partner in its publishing imprint Half Letter Press (ongoing since 2008).

Hamja Ahsan is an artist, writer, activist, and curator based in London, UK. He is the author of the book Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, now adapted into a film currently touring film festivals. He was awarded the Grand Prize at Ljubljana Biennial 2019. He is co-curator of the DIY Cultures festival of creative activism, zines, and independent publishing since 2013. He was shortlisted for the Liberty human rights award for Free Talha Ahsan campaign on extradition under the War on Terror. He is on the editorial board of the Radical Mental Health magazine Asylum. He has presented art projects at PS1 MOMA at New York Art book week, Tate Modern, Gwangju Biennale, Shaanakht festival Pakistan and and CCA Warsaw Poland and forthcoming at Documenta 15. His practice encompasses all media: conceptual writing, building archives, performance, video, sound and making zines.

This event will take place in our project space, where a number of issues of Quaranzine will be physically displayed. Marc Fischer and Hamja Ahsan will both join the evening via video call.

If you would like to attend the event, but cannot make it to our space, you can request a link to the livestream by sending an email to info@page-not-found.nl with the subject ‘Livestream Solitary Solidarity’.

Starts at 18:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

Please note: for events we kindly ask you to show a valid proof of vaccination, recovery or negative test result at the entrance, as Page Not Found follows the COVID-19 regulations of the Dutch government. For further information, please visit this website.

Page Not Found and the Reading Room are happy to invite you to a session with writer Ethel Baraona Pohl. 

Lending your books or reading out loud to friends are forms of intimate care and political comradeship. Instead of discussing one text as a whole, this time we will delve into “A book for all readers”: a folder full of fragments and media, which centers the pleasure of reading. Embracing alternative modes of discourse and expression, we’ll share personal insights that are found in the interstices. You are not required to read all of the fragments, but invited to navigate them as you please, perhaps focusing on those bits that catch your attention. 

In this session we will inhabit books as collaborative spaces of encounter. Heterogeneous ways of publishing and reading between fiction, poetry and critical theory, allow for the configuration of new kinds of spaces, where empathy and alterity are stronger than ideology. We ask you to listen to each other, to intermingle and to explore unconventional relations to text. 

Ethel likes to smell books. They don’t like vanilla ice cream… but those grassy notes with a hint of vanilla and mustiness are irresistible to them. Since a youngster they have been smelling printed pages. Sniffing one page after the other, while researching artistic and urban practices, they have learnt about the political and social impact of books; how can reading be a tool for taking action?

Ethel Baraona Pohl is a critic, writer and curator. They are a co-founder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory and the social milieu.

Starts at 18:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

Page Not Found kicks off the new cycle ‘Reverberations’ with and evening joined by musicians and publishers Jonas Delaborde and Hendrik Hegray.

Reverberations explores the vivid intersection between visual and sonic arts and presents artists and musicians whose practice equally embraces music, publishing and contemporary art. Such rich cross-disciplinary practices often echo from self-organized initiatives like music labels or press houses, which allow spontaneity, experimentation and independency from corporate structures. 

Jonas Delaborde and Hendrik Hegray (FR) have been self-publishing “NK”, a cult sequence of annual magazines, since 2006. This publishing practice converges in the work of the artists, alongside research in music and performance as the sonic interpretation of their visual experiments. Both active in different fields and scenes, mostly in the margins of contemporary creation, they collaborate organically on this collective publication, at times strident, wilfully unpleasing, fun or cryptic. Their presentation at Page Not Found is an opportunity to display the history of “NK”, its different formats, its recurring contributors and the connections developed over fifteen years with the individual practices of its founders. Questions of tone, taste, shapelessness and fragmentation will be addressed and short films by both artists will be screened.

Jonas Delaborde and Hendrik Hegray have released a myriad of small books and fan-zines, self-published, and published by FLTMSTPC, Orbe, Nieves, Editions du 57, and Shoboshobo. Their most recent presentation at Palais de Tokyo within the “Future, Former Fugitive” exhibition (2020) incorporated their cross-disciplinary practice into a layered and complex swamp-like installation which involved audio and visual work as well as printed matter.

Starts at 19:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

It is with great excitement that we invite you to the book launch of Electric Brine, presented by Jennifer Teets.

Flowing, seeping, leaking, cascading, shaping. Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World In Which We Occur and its associated online study group Matter in Flux. Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative’s long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry. A vision of material politics is situated through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. Electric Brine is published by Archive Books, Berlin. The book features contributions by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker and Lisa Robertson.

Jennifer Teets (editor of Electric Brine) is an American curator and writer based in Paris working at the intersection of science studies, literature, and performance. She is interested in the “backstory” of matter, and its conditioning as both ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. Within her work she addresses the roles of consumption and contamination as an embodiment of thought which then performs, spores and proliferates. She has curated numerous exhibitions and talks since the early 2000s with artists and thinkers worldwide and is the director/convener of The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing), a research-based entity that explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. 

Starts at 17:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

“… she clicked and rose from her desk. Muscles frozen by screen time unfurled and concentration fell off her like cold river water. She broke surface into the evening sun at the back window.

The street below was quiet. The only movement was on the horizon, where towers of cumulus built along the coast and up, into the cobalt, pink and blood orange. She thought about her mother and watched a small nearby cloud skid north across the roofs – a pale sailing ship trailed by wispy outliers that a wind curled into sharp birds beating home.

Cobalt became ink and she turned to her kitchen and the wine bottle by the toaster. She came back as the ship became a lunatic head, on its back, cackling at the sky. Tannin soaked into her tongue and her pupils dilated as rose darkened. It had been sixteen months. The mouth of the crazy head was wide open. A smoke coloured bird lifted up and out, spectral wings pointed down on each side as it ascended.”

Page Not Found proudly presents the fourth chapter of Open Letters. The project invites The Hague artists to occupy our large storefront window with messages of urgency and vulnerability. 

Janice McNab is a Scottish artist and academic who now lives in the Netherlands. She was born in Aberfeldy, studied at Glasgow School of Art, and in 2000, moved to Amsterdam on a Scottish Arts Council residency programme. Her PhD is from the University of Amsterdam, and she is Head of the MA Artistic Research at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. From 2020-2022 she is also a post-doctoral scholar with The University of the Arts, The Hague / Leiden University.

This open letter will be unveiled on 8 October 2021 and will be up for view until 8 November 2021.

Open Letters are freely accessible from the street at any time.