“Merge conflicts”:

Git between Workspace Surveillance and Historical Record

2022-10-21 Friday 19:00 @ LAG lab

If media shapes space and time and thus human experience, then Git is a particularly interesting medium, because its aim and purpose is the writing of a decentralised history featuring parallel timelines, bifurcations and milestones. Merge conflicts arise when time is out of joint, and the programmer was born to set them right. While Git is the lofty format in which contemporary software heritage is passed on, it also serves a more mundane role as the time clock of software developers at the workplace. In this event, we take a theoretical and practical look at Git’s role in social conflicts around memory and forgetting, within geopolitical power struggles, between workers and management, and in our personal computer toolbox.

  • 19:00: Presentation, debate and dinner: “Merge Conflicts in Git”
  • 20:30: Hacking, learning and research with Git: “Never Rewrite History”

Lineup featuring…

Slides from the talk