Libre Graphics Research Unit - Co-Position meeting.

Libre Graphics Research Unit - Co-Position meeting.

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http://www.furtherfield.org/features/reviews/libre-graphics-research-unit-co-position-meeting

Article by Antonio Roberts.

How can designers and programmers work more harmoniously? How can the tools being created better meet the needs of users? There is a need for designers to have a greater role in the production of the tools that they use, aside from just reporting bugs, requesting features or designing logos for open source projects. Antonio Roberts reports back from the Co-Position meeting of the Libre Graphics Research Unit and looks at how artists and developers are addressing these issues.

The first meeting, Networked Graphics, took place in Rotterdam from 7-10 December, 2011 and was Hosted by WORM. This second meeting, Co-Position, for which Antonio was present, took place at venues across Brussels from 22-25 February 2012. Co-Position is described by LGRU as:

"[…] an attempt to re-imagine lay-out from scratch. We will analyse the history of lay-out (from moveable type to compositing engines) in order to better understand how relations between workflow, material and media have been coded into our tools. We will look at emerging software for doing lay-out differently, but most importantly we want to sketch ideas for tools that combine elements of canvas editing, dynamic lay-out, networked lay-out, web-to-print and Print on Demand."

The meeting saw the coming together of many international artists, theorists and developers for four days of work around this subject.

Antonio Roberts is a British digital artist whose artwork focuses on the errors and glitches generated by digital technology. Many people would simply discard such artefacts but Antonio preserves these errors and displays them as art. With his roots in free culture he develops his techniques using open source and freely available software and shares his knowledge through the development of software. http://www.hellocatfood.com/profile/