Residency : Algoliterary publications

by An Mertens, Gijs de Heij on November 2021

Anaïs Berck invited seven makers for a paid residency during two weekends in September and October 2022, taking place in the ground floor of Meyboom Artist-Run Spaces in pachecolaan. With Ahnjili ZhuParris, Ipek Burçak, Gülce Padem, Livia Diniz, Isabelle Alvers, Mara Karagianni, Brendan Howell, Doriane Timmermans, Gijs de Heij, An Mertens.

Thanks to the support of FRArt Anaïs Berck explores this year the idea of ‘An Algoliterary Publishing House‘ in which the authors are algorithms, presented with their contexts and codes; and in which the content of the books seeds with trees and nature. This research in company of more-than-human presences brings Anaïs Berck to highly charged territories in the colonial legacies at the intersection of botany, computationalism and publishing. There, the implications of Western ideology, the centrifugal force of archivism and extractivism are brought into focus.

During the residency participants develop algoliterary publications. These are publishing experiments with algorithms and literary, scientific and activist datasets about trees and nature. We ask ourselves: who and what is excluded, made invisible or exploited in the existent representations, discourses, tools and practices? How can we restore their presences in histories and storytelling? How can we heal and transform ourselves, our tools, our practices, our relationships to the world, our legacies? How can we help to destabilize the centrifugal force in botany, computation and publishing? How can we make books, databases, algorithms visible as objects of doubts and how to go beyond their established forms?

To explore the resulting experiments of the residency