This past summer, three Belgian intellectuals held a conversation for Open about the renewed attention to the 'makeability' of city and society. Moderated by sociologist Pascal Gielen, philosopher Lieven de Cauter, urban designer Michiel Dehaene and sociologist Rudi Laermans discuss such topics as the …

Most arguments in favor of command line versus graphical user interface (GUI) computing are flawed by system administrator Platonism. A command like "cp test.txt /mnt/disk" is, however, not a single bit closer to a hypothetic "truth" of the machine than dragging an icon of the file.txt with a mouse pointer …

On digital pornography.

Verhandeling over globaliseringsprocessen en cultuur- en gemeenschapscentra.

In het kunsten- en erfgoeddecreet werd een aparte categorie ‘Instellingen van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap’ opgenomen. Zij zouden een symboolfunctie en een sensibiliserende rol voor de artistieke gemeenschap en de gehele Vlaamse bevolking moeten vervullen. Bovendien moeten ze internationale topkwaliteit aanbieden. …

Uitnodiging boekpresentatie.

Twenty sixteen year old fourth-graders of the School for Young Talent (School voor Jong Talent) in The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Design, Music and Dance (Hogeschool van Beeldende Kunsten, Muziek en Dans) participated in a pilot project that combined music, dance and visual arts in a creative process. …

Indie porn represents a currently flourishing sub-genre of pornography, in which well known looks from subcultures such as Gothic or Punk are oftentimes staged as anti-commercial, feminist gestures of self-empowerment. In this regard the conflicts that shaped the debates around pornography's obscenity …

Executable code existed centuries before the invention of the computer in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition and experimental poetry. These practices are often neglected as a historical pretext of contemporary software culture and electronic arts. Above all, they link computations to a vast speculative …

This paper is based on the general (yet disputable) assumption that the theoretical debate of literature in digital networks has shifted, just as the poetic practices it is shaped after, from perceiving computer data as an extension and transgression of textuality (as manifest in such notions as ''hypertext'', …