Date: Saturday, 11 October 2025
Time: 14:00-17:00
Location: Varia (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

“Semi-True Interpretation of Fictionality” was a series of events at Varia in 2024 that discussed fictionality as an artistic method to tell alternative stories and critically reflect on what is considered truthful or fictional, and questioned the often oppositional positioning of fact vs fiction. Similarly, “B(r)oilerplates for Fictionality” will mostly focus on text and language as the media of concern.

In this session, we will talk about the human-centered specificities and differences between initiatives doing stuff with technology (gossip, folklore, craft, aesthetics, scenes).

For example:

• Activism on instagram and activism on the fediverse (both social networks) isn’t the same writing style.
• Artists doing research and Academics doing research (both research) don’t have the same value of what is a result.
• The tools that are made by the collective Open Source Publishing and a those made by a startup (both using open-source software) will not be used by the same people.
• Institutions doing web2print and Neocities people doing web zines (both printing from the web) don’t collaborate or share publishing methods.
• Two musical scenes like Detroit techno and hip hop use the same drum machine (both TR-808 drum machine) but gather different type of people around different aesthetics.
• “Hacker” male developers and feminist designers (both writing code) could be very mad at each other.
• Farmers repairing diesel trucks and permacomputing enthusiasts repairing smartphones (both fighting for right to repair) wouldn’t prioritize their environment in the same way.
• The GIMP logo, icons and interface doesn’t look as “professional” as the Adobe logo, icons and interface (both image editing softwares).

While those examples can often be compared from a technical point of view (the technology used, the methods used, the (infra)structure used), other differences and specificities are present and sometimes more difficult to talk about. In order to discuss them we propose a plastic-fictional etymology of 5 words (gossip, folklore, craft, aesthetics, scene) as a game to explore and map the multiple natures of “doing things with technology”.

This session is organised by Doriane Timmermans and Simon Browne, and falls under the Homebrewing research thread of Varia’s Seasonal Computing public programme.