Branch, Merge, Iterate – Co-designing Creative Version Control

Build a collaborative glossary for Creative Version Control with artist Lidewij Sloot, then personalize the outcome in your own zine!

About

For artist Lidewij Sloot a work is never finished. We look at it in moments along the path of its continued existence – when exhibited, when written about, when documented or simply when committing to a decision in our studio. For Lidewij, these moments where the work interacts with the world around it, pulling in anything from cultural meaning to the influence of consumerist systems, are often hidden in the habit of presenting artworks as static things rather than open-ended development.

Tracing this path, and the moments where the work acquires a different meaning, easily becomes a complex web of interactions with others, access to materials and institutional interventions. As artists, writers or researchers we might want to keep track of how our work interacts with the world, not just at its endpoint but all throughout its development. Staging these moments along its creative production allows us to point at the influences of the work, credit hidden contributors or come back to earlier moments in a process to see where different versions may take us.

Creative Version Control is a method of logging changes and managing versions of an artistic project. Version control systems are most prominent in (open-source) software development that, like artistic development, form an iterative process. Each dealing with similar questions: How to experiment without breaking what already works? How to document decisions in a complex process that both allow others and our future self to understand why we made them? Creative Version Control allows us to see ourselves not as singular authors, but us and the people we work with as ‘Art Developers’ [1].

The Process

The session will start with an introduction to the text ‘Conservators, Creativity, and Control’ by Jonathan Kemp (2024), which formed the starting point of Lidewij’s interest in Version Control for artistic practices.[1:1] After that, Lidewij will give an introduction to her practice and how she imagines Version Control could take a part in practices like hers, or potentially to writers, (digital) artists and researchers. Collaboratively we will collect all the knowledge we already have about Version Control into a glossary, structured with the aid of Claude.ai. From there, we imagine what aspects should be included into a glossary for Creative Version Control and add these to the glossary. This imaginative glossary we created together will be printed on the spot as zines. Each collaborator in the process is invited to edit and add visualisations to their own zine to imagine their own form of Version Control. After documenting the zines, you can take home your zine with the version control glossary we developed together.