January 30th

Finally a moment of meeting with you for 9000 km of drawings, tools, stories.
Interested in the libre? Curious about our practice? OSP studio welcomes you for a first public session at Variable.

18h30 – Welcoming
Presentation and discussions around recent and ongoing OSP studio works.

19h30
Exiled Cuisine (Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico City)
Lecture/performance + dinner.
Cookbook files are open when there’s a chance of working. The work is not technological in that nothing of this has not been done before. The literature that feeds into this has been contentionally written in the shall we say mmh street. The public space of technical forums is related in some way to network protocols. It could be good that these HTML files be exported into cookbooks. I don’t like it when these books are sold. A standard regime of the kitchen is easier for the exiled to understand.

Variable
rue Gallait straat 80
1030 Bruxelles

A conversation with Tom Lechner

We discovered the work of Tom Lechner at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. Tom has traveled from Portland, US to present Laidout, an amazing tool that he made to produce his own comic books and also to work on three dimensional mathematical objects. His software interests us for several reasons. We are excited about how it represents the gesture of folding, love his bold interface decisions plus are impressed by the fact that Tom has decided to write his own programming framework for it. A year later, we meet again in Montreal, Canada for the 2011 Libre Graphics Meeting where he presents a follow-up. With Ludivine Loiseau (amateur bookbinder and graphiste) and Pierre Marchand (artist/developer, contributing amongst others to podofoimpose and Scribus) we finally find time to sit down and talk.

Read the interview: http://blogs.lgru.net/ft/conversations/meaningful-transformations

Over at the Libre Graphics Research Unit we are preparing a second ‘Research Meeting’ that will take place in Brussels from 22 to 25 February 2012. Developers, designers and theoreticians from all over Europe will gather to imagine future Libre Graphics tools together. The theme for this particular edition is Co-position, and we’ll speculate about software for arranging texts and graphical elements. How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we bring together canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand in more interesting ways? What kind of messages do we propagate and how does this change the tools we need? These and many more questions will be addressed in four intense days of presentations, discussions, development sessions and prototyping.

If you are interested in contributing, please write us at donatella @ constantvzw.org. Participation is free but places are limited.