ungual

crafting with language
bruxelles based

previously part of http://osp.kitchen (from 2021 to 2026)
now left art and design to embody digital frictions and radical pedagogy

☽︎☽︎☽︎☽︎☽︎☾☾☾☾☾(me and my 10 nails): https://ungual.digital
＊＊＊ (pedagogy and intimate digital autonomy): https://howspot.club
🝰 (research on web languages): https://declarations.style
⭮ (web sticker): https://practices.tools

Last Notes

2026-07-14 17:54:42 GMT

ok its time ill start using this network for something else than being smart funny & sexy
soooo who can house me in Amsterdam from the 21st to the 23th of july, i'm attending the end of the hackers and designers summer camp.
i give you in exchange: proprietary access to my very own gossips infrastructure

2026-07-08 08:26:03 GMT

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teaching kids how to torrent is like a mantra like i'm serious i've been circling back to that so much like !!! you know !!! to relearn in the ruins created by big tech empire what's a file, what's downloading, what does it means "to have a copy of it" instead of "using a service", what's a server, what's peer 2 peer, what's peer 2 peer with many peers, what's media archive, what's resilience and access and why it matter under a more and more fascist gov, what's being an amateur media librarian with intentionnality, what's piracy, what's commoning, how communities ask you to give and take and not only take, what's decentralisation, what's anarchism, etc etc suddenly your teen brain goes like wow internet is not big services it can be people and their devices and you keep this all your life with you

2026-03-11 14:09:40 GMT

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totally !! But it's also good to understand that's not per say a bug but also a behavior of decentralisation in the sense that when we're going to another instance we are visiting another website - that could even be running another software or version of mastoson, hence it's default is very raw bc it can't assume a bunch of things? That means implepenting cross-websites local storage and why not but idk there is something there that's also informative: unlike centralized social network when i go to another instance it's like going to another place where maybe they don't even know my instance. i have 2 accounts on different instances so it would pick the last one? But i see your point, why not just propose the 2 in autocomplete mode like email field? idk

2026-03-04 20:37:23 GMT

Something that's both funny and frustating these days is how anti-AI discourse is facing the same false-logic argumentation than what was veganism for me 10 year ago. I'm both vegan and anti-AI. But the collective discourse as always goes like...
individuals gestures VS structural changes. Where personnal boycott is portrayed as useless by people who claim to want structural change. However it becomes a reason to not boycott while also not doing any actions for structural change (using one's argumentation to do none of those). While those two things aren't mutually exclusive and in fact often goes together! you just look silly if you eat animal while criticising the hands that feed you, in the same sense if someone start actively fighting against AI lobby, infrastructure, culture, i really doubt they'll keep using AI as part of their daily life.
Also, blaming personnal use is useless, but welcoming everyone to change is key. We are all entangled in complex knots of precarity, accessibility, culture and education... Yes i don't eat meat but eat whatever you want, it's just my choice depending on my realities, it's ok.
I love to keep changing both myself and my knots (as feedback loops), you are welcome to do so how you can for yourself, with criticality. But don't let blame or false logic freeze you.

2026-02-26 12:10:19 GMT

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On a new episode of Xpub Gossips, this time with my lovely friend and perma-low-tech pop star @npub16pv…6wfa, for a session title Comp(h)osting (with) our phones. We had a lot of wonderful discussions about perma-low-tech (after watching the funky and radical video they made with @npub1wzd…vl3g "the mission is degrowth"), from idea of scales, the danger of romanticising low-tech aesthetics, social practices of collectivising as a radical alternative (compared to constantly developing new optimisations as a form of "leftist techno-solutionism"), and many other rad ideas.
We then went full termux mode with phones brought by the students! Marie joked about how "retired phones" could be the new raspberry pi, they are optimised for transport and battery, and we have an inherent intimate familiarity with them, i add that they understand other protocols like SMS (making them extra gossipy in many way because of the cross-protocol possibility)
There are much more links and images to explore (including the video by Marie and Dasha and her crazy nice guide on comp(h)osting) there: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Comp(h)osting_(with)_our_phones
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2026-02-17 10:13:14 GMT

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Some updates on my XPUB Special issue that explores Gossips. Some of you may have heard about it already but we've been visiting a datacenter, with wonderful duo of guest @npub1gfs…ajz2 (active in the north holland datacenter fight) and Anti from @npub1pp8…yzcn (active in marseille datacenter fight). The session was title Gossiping in and around a datacenter, in this case the Van Nelles one in Rotterdam.
Even with the kind tour guide arguing for european digital sovereignty quoting "so we don't depend on trump administration" we quickly answered him that there catchline is "a gateway to the world" and that we can see the logo of amazon web service, microsoft azure and google cloud on their website... showing clearly how even "smaller and more local" datacenter only make sense as part of a bigger extractive and destructive system. We got a looot of other gossips to tell you all including diesel energy consumption, unesco protected architecture, hot corridor of server rack that you open with your fingerprint, corporations that seemingly own each others in a cycle to remove tracability, a feminist sculpture and a prison, but a zine may be in the making. As it was forbidden to take pictures, we've been drawing and mapping a bunch of things!
Some documentation here:
https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Gossiping_in_and_around_a_Datacenter
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2026-01-28 13:23:37 GMT

crazy how artists (not restricted to digital art but like all art practices) are particularly stuck in mainstream social networks like instagram because "we need it to brand our work to pay rent, so this became where we build our career" while more and more people are actually just leaving those platforms. it feels silly to imagine a bunch of artists shouting in the hypercapitalist ruin-to-profit-loop mainstream social network "look what i just made its my new project". i say that without judgment, as i'm on insta myself (though i don't post about work only shitpost & impulsive thoughts and pics), but the idea that "artistic practices become an obstacle to social change, in the big schemes of thing" (?) in that sense is really silly

2026-01-23 10:53:02 GMT

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During this xpub Special Issue i am inviting a bunch of cool people from different scenes of alternative tech practices and resistances, because well we can't gossip in a closed group, stories translated from a situatedness to another. The first gossiping guest was @npub1wys…gh48, from @npub1asj…x5dx feminist server, for a session titled Serving Gossips.
We discussed using the terminal and communal servers. We explored collective terminal session with Tmux. It allows to have live shared remote login sessions as the same user. It is a very gossipy tool since every single input is shared between the people attached to a session, not differenciating legit input from mistakes, which can be used just to chat. It is a nice way to do inclusive pedagogy in the terminal since you can witness (and interact) with how something is done on a server. We said that if SSH is like astral projection, Tmux is like merging our souls to become a collective (slightly demonic) amalgation.
Kaa worked on a tool temporary titled tmux2web2print that generate HTML fanzines out of a Tmux session (and serves them). A way to have on-the-go mini subjective documentation of What is our server gossiping about? The fanzines read like a play and can be stylised in CSS then printed :)
Some documentation here: https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Serving_Gossips
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2026-01-20 11:22:44 GMT

For the next 3 months (january, february, march 2026) i am teaching at @npub159r…xrh2 a special issue titled "Gossiping at the intersection of Crafts and Resistances". With the students we are investigating how to do inclusive pedagogy on everyday technology, networks of alternative practices where we are the nodes and the edges are gossips, the importance of production of knowledge that is intimate and unofficial, in a moment where techno-fascism is rising. to quote Aurianne Preud'homme in Gossiping is not just bitching, "constantly rearticulated by our subjective desires" and that trigger a "fear of reversal of power, of hegemonic conception of what is true or not". As well as gossipy technology, often decentralized, or that allows anarchist mode of collaborations, such as self-hosting, communal server, fediverse, etherpads, fanzines, peer2peer, torrent, bootleg libraries, ... You can already get some gossips from this page of the xpub wiki https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/SI29_Gossips_%26_Pedagogy#Gossiping_at_the_Intersection_of_Crafts_and_Resistances
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2025-10-08 11:41:09 GMT

current mood
(yes i did a 5 years master in mathematics before design and art, yes it made me disociate, party a lot and hate academics)
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2025-07-10 17:17:00 GMT

Some of the technology green flags i learned to recognized:
* if it makes sounds when working
* if the best way to learn is to talk with specific people, going apprentice mode
* if there is small/local community around it
* if you need to fix it once in a while
* if it contains stories like fables through its evolution/making/upgrades
* if it can't deliver the expected production standard of the industry, forcing to slow down
* if you can create world inside, like live inside
* if it induces new ways to do stuff, and changes you, your habbits, by using it, into something that seem desirable
well the other day (at OSP yearly retreat) i was introduced to justine's water mill in grammont... 💫
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2025-02-09 12:55:05 GMT

on the 23rd of february 14h-17h i welcome some of you in my living room (bruxelles, saint-gilles) to explore our (mainstream) social media archives together with some tea and food, dm me to join there isn't much much space
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