chapter
08 Geoff Cox
3 July 2024, 12:00 PM
Introductions
02:45 My position is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University. As the name suggests, it’s in London. It’s a very particular kind of university. It would describe itself as a technical university. So it takes particular kinds of students. It’s ex-polytechnic, so it’s quite vocationally oriented. Its student population is largely non-white, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. So it’s not LSE, or Oxford, or Cambridge, it has a very particular character. I’m co-director of a small research center called Centre for the Study of the Networked Image. It’s concerned with what constitutes a contemporary image; not singular, networked, distributed. I’d even say a kind of social technical assemblage.
I’m also an adjunct at Aarhus University, where I collaborate on an ongoing workshop and series of publications which I’ll talk more about later. I’m also a co-director of a MA programme called Curating Art and Public Programmes, which is a collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery. In terms of my research interests, I’m interested in image politics, but, more broadly, I’m operating in a field you would describe as software studies. Together this leaks into discussions around AI, and I suppose my concern is more specifically image-based AI literacy. I’m interested in publishing, too –the practice of publishing, publishing even as an artistic medium, as a cultural practice.
Why: Politics of Publishing
05:14 Building on that, if you could pinpoint to a theory or syllabus, missions or references, ideals that guide your interest or are connected to your work in university.
05:35 Obviously, the job of an academic is to publish and there are metrics for this, so you’re locked into these kinds of systems. So I’ve written a couple of books, but they tend to be highly collaborative. I’m interested in collaborative writing. A couple of these books were published by MIT Press, so in this sense, they’re very conventional. Even if MIT has attempted more recently to make its books open access, it’s the conventional end of academic publishing. I write a little bit for journals, although I try to avoid it. It’s one of the things I suppose, in terms of my practice, I’m trying to operate outside of these typical academic circuits and networks to some extent.
06:28 How come, if I can ask?
06:30 traditional publishing practicesBecause the processes are so painful, slow, and inefficient. They often have very small readership. If they make mistakes, they have very weird procedures of how to correct them, like adding addenda and things like this, rather than just actually going onto an online portal and making a change. All these rather outdated, outmoded 19th century practices, which they have inherited from print publications. I just don’t think they’re very good at what they do. They often operate with paywalls as well, they rely on academic institutions subsidizing, as this is ostensibly a commercial practice. So I would oppose that as well. So what I’ve tried to do is operate within a realm of self-publishing, such as currently working on two book series, which, again, are collaborations. One, which is called The Contemporary Condition, is a book series with Sternberg Press, and another is called Data Browser, with Open Humanities Press. So there’s a sense of more independence in the infrastructures through which they operate, Open Humanities Press being the best example of that. That particular book series was previously with Autonomedia. Another example of relative autonomy over a publishing process. I’m interested in those kinds of publishing houses, either Open Humanities Press, which is run by academics, or something like Autonomedia, which is an anarchist press.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
08:30 Yeah, actually, that touches upon the next theme, which is the infrastructures of publishing. If you could tell us a bit about your experience in exiting academia and focusing more on these other forms of publishing, what’s the workflow? What models, tools are you using? How do you operate within that framework?
09:03 I wouldn’t say I’m exiting, but more operating on the edges, sort of trying to dip in and out of academic conventions where and when possible. A good example of that is the ongoing collaboration with Transmediale and Aarhus University. As I said, I have this adjunct position, and we’ve been running a research workshop for the last 12 years, which is derived from an open call. alternative publishing practicesWe select a group of researchers, often PhD students, but not necessarily, and they produce texts online and comment upon each other’s texts. Then we meet up in physical space, and we work on a sprint publication, which is expressed as a newspaper, but it’s not necessarily the kind of conventional form of a newspaper. We produce it very quickly. We write together in a collective space, and increasingly we’ve used experimental publishing techniques for this, such as web2print. A couple of times we did this with Gijs, from Open Source Publishing, but more recently with people from Varia collective, specifically Manetta Berends and Simon Browne. So we are increasingly trying to bring the process of publishing and writing much closer together, in dialogue, even in the same space.
I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. Two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like. In the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that the entire infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
13:41 I was wondering how this faster system of production and distribution works. What’s the sort of response that you’ve gotten? Because it seems very direct. Do you perceive that functioning well? Is it a mechanism that works?
14:06 It functions differently. It allows you to reflect more upon the dynamics, the interaction of the production of writing, but within a social context, within a social milieu, if you understand publishing as an organizational form, as something that sets up particular kinds of social relations. In that respect, it resonates politically as well. The Open Book Futures project, which comes out of Coventry University, is a collaboration with the publisher Minor Compositions. If you have come across that as an imprint of Autonomedia, it’s run by Stevphen Shukaitis. We’re interested in his writing about organizational forms, and also his publishing practice, because for him, publishing is not so much about the use of particular tools, or even distributing books, it’s about setting up certain kinds of social dynamics.
Who: Community of Publishing
15:24 There’s this idea that the role of the editor is not to publish books, but to create a community. I think we’ve discussed this idea of a community with other guests, and said that we also don’t fully understand what we mean when we say community. Because in the end, it is often still the work of the individual, but of course, it’s an individual within a network. So it’s interesting to see publishing as an organizational form. Maybe if you have specific workflows or models for this organizational form, I mean, you’ve already mentioned some, but are there some ways that you ground this?
15:29 Well I could talk about some referencesreferences for this. For example, Stevphen Shukaitis is one. There’s a really excellent essay written in collaboration with Joanna Fiegel. It’s called Publishing to Find Comrades. I think it’s really excellent. They draw upon the relationship between publishing, politics and labor. They reference people like Ned Rossiter and logistical media. This notion of logistics is quite important. Through Stevphen, it’s hard not to make the connection to The Undercommons, by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, to think about that. So I suppose there’s that intersection of ideas, I think, that we’ve tried to draw upon to, the management of pedagogy and the management of research, which is, in academic circles at least, tied to particular companies and to big tech, to Google and other institutions of that kind. So that would be a further concern in answering the political question about what’s happening to higher education currently as it becomes more and more attuned to neoliberal structures and the market. This is particularly apparent with a lot of restructuring going on at the moment in the UK. I think something similar is happening in the Netherlands, actually, and probably everywhere else, too.
18:26 I come from a background of media studies and, theoretically, you’re very critical of big tech, but in practice, oftentimes the graduates end up working there. So the idea of being critical of publishing, while oftentimes you end up participating again in that space, is interesting.
19:00 sustainability of workflowsIt’s hard not to, of course, because to be a successful academic, you have to publish and you’re encouraged to publish with particular publishers. So it’s difficult to break out of that chain. I’m a bit older and I’ve got a reasonable position in the university so I can afford to be a bit more experimental. But I recognize that if you’re a younger academic, you can’t do this very easily. So that’s part of the motivation for the Transmediale workshop really, it’s a kind of forum for younger researchers so that they can, on the one hand, publish a little bit more experimentally with the newspaper, but then we invite them to submit a longer article, much more conventional to an online journal that we run, which is in the open journal system, and facilitated by the Royal Danish Library. It follows the more typical conventions of double-blind review and academic reviewers with the right kind of credentials. So it allows you to operate both within, and sort of outside, some of those structures.
20:20 How would you say this community looks like right now? Do you see that maybe there’s a movement in academia towards these things? Are your collaborators also operating on the margin or do you have to go outside of academia to find that? Who is your network?
20:47 Yes. Well, the network is both inside and outside. The current project is called ServPub. This is a collective of people both in universities. including myself, Winnie Soon, who I collaborate a lot with, who’s based at UCL, University College London, Christian Ulrich Anderson at Aarhus University, who I collaborate with on the Transmediale workshops as well, and then a group called In-grid, an art tech collective based in London, but some of them work in universities, many of them on part-time contracts but they also operate as a collective in their own right. Also Systerserver, as I mentioned, who are outside of academia, and then Simon and Manetta, who also are outside academia, though Manetta teaches into the Experimental Publishing course in Rotterdam. It’s an eclectic mix of people with different connections to formal academic work.
22:12 What about your readers or your audience? Do you see your work resonating mainly within the university field? Do you think you’ve reached out? Or how do you think about your audience?
22:27 There are different kinds of audiences for the different kinds of projects, but the Transmediale workshop might be a good example of publishing in a way where, with the newspapers in particular, the distribution and the readers are the festival itself. That’s a mix of artists, hackers, activists, academics, students, the kind of people that attend the festival. So, in a way, it’s quite self-contained. The work with Open Humanities Press is much more like a typical academic audience: students and teachers and researchers who probably mainly download the PDFs – the free PDFs – rather than buy the book. The Sternberg Press books, that’s more of an art crowd, and has a very particular distribution through galleries and art bookshops. So, different kinds of audiences for different kinds of works.
23:56 Maybe actually just thinking about the free PDFs, if you could tell us a bit about open access and open tools and how you think, what can they offer that proprietary tools can’t, but also what can’t they offer? What are their challenges and limitations?
24:19 That’s a big question, isn’t it? I mean, a lot of these projects are based on the legacy of free open source software production and distribution, but also mixed with feminist pedagogy, perhaps. You can see that from the collectives that we’ve tried to work with. Open access and free and open source software is fraught with problems in terms of remuneration and sustainability, but I still think the ethics and the principles remain crucially important. There we have followed the discussions around federated approaches, the work of people, again, around the xpub community in Rotterdam without trying to be evangelical about it at the same time.
Discussion
25:46 How would you define publishing? I know it’s a very broad question. I have a book in my mind: the Content Machine from Michael Busker. My understanding here is that he defined publishing somehow as an amplification machine, something that takes a message and amplifies it. I’m wondering what are the mutations of publishing in an era where everybody can potentially amplify a certain machine, a certain message? So what is the role of publishers? What is the role of the audience? And how is this both an opportunity and a challenge for established players?
26:36 I don’t know that particular reference. But I like this way of describing publishing as making something public, putting something in the public realm, but also in the sense in which it can produce a public, the discussion of what constitutes publicness. So I suppose that’s more the way I would see it. I mentioned the reference to Stevphen Shukaitis’s work, this idea of drawing attention to this connection of publishing to labor and politics, and that you’re producing social relations in the act of publishing, which is between readers and writers, but also between all the sorts of other kind of collectives that are involved in the process. I mean, that’s a bit of a vague answer, but I think it’s a hard question, how do you think of publishing? I think it’s important to see it in that expanded sense, to use the phrase that you’re operating with.
27:55 Let me make it a bit harder and insist a bit on my question. We are in a sort of moment where we experience a certain, “horizontal deployment of amplification”. To refer to my favorite article, No One Buys Books, about the catastrophic sales of two of the biggest publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. While defending themselves on the trial, they said that they will sign influencers, because influencers already have an audience. So what is the role of the publisher when they depend on influencers to fund the rest of the catalogue? Because what we learned through that article is that 90% of the books they publish don’t make money. A significant percentage don’t sell more than 1,000 copies. And 5% of the books sell less than 12 copies. These are the biggest publishers in the world. This is a multi-billion merger between the two biggest publishers. So I’m wondering, if publishers need to count on influencers, I mean, major publishers, what is the future for smaller publishers? If it’s so grim for big publishers, how can smaller publishers like Nero or Topovoros or INC survive in such a competitive environment without structural subsidies or public funding? Survival not only in terms of finance, but also in terms of moral and ethics. How can you wake up and find motivation in running a small business like that?
30:02 I don’t feel particularly concerned about those big publishing houses to be honest. Why would I be concerned about the profit margins of these big companies that often produce books that aren’t worth publishing in the first place. I am concerned about the circulation of ideas and culture connected to the smaller presses that you’re describing. Also, the future of books: I love books, of course, the physicality of a book, I like reading from paper rather than from screens. I suppose small companies need to develop very particular business models that respond to the conditions within which they’re operating. Sternberg Press would be a good example of that. business modelsFor books we do with them, we are funding the production relatively cheaply. They’re small pamphlets, they only cost about 1,600 euros to produce. They’re printed in Lithuania, and quite cheaply. That's the Sternberg model. We pay for it using research grants. So we try to build a contingency in the research we’re doing to distribute the ideas that emerge from that research, but also to make sure they are distributed. It does get out there, it does reach a public. Then Sternberg makes money from those sales, and we’re perfectly happy for the money that comes from those sales to go back to them to be able to operate. That’s a very particular business model, it’s quite straightforward in a way. That’s what a lot of places do, Open Humanities Press do something similar. Their books are produced very cheaply because they’re print-on-demand, but as an academic, you have the ability to be able to subsidize the operation and then rely on them for the distribution. Then the money that comes back from that goes back into the project.
32:39 You mentioned several cases in which the contents are produced through different mediums, and they’re also distributed through different tools or even environments, online and offline. You talk about the limited advantages of open source contents and publishing, and I’m curious about your opinion on this kind of hybridization of publishing. Why do we somehow return to a traditional medium, like a printed book or paper book?
33:47 I think it’s just a very different reading experience. You receive information in very different ways when you receive it through a particular medium. You read on screen in very particular ways, knowledge is constructed in different ways depending on the way in which you experience it. So books – paper – allows you to digest that material in very different ways, even the materiality of the medium has an effect on the way that your understanding of that material is processed. When you talk about temporality, you read a book in a very different way; you might have it lying next to your bed, maybe reading a couple of pages before you go to sleep. All these things affect the way that you understand the material, even the ways in which you enjoy in the material.
35:02 This is a big question for us, but I think somehow, we return to traditional publishing for economical sustainability. So in that case, you have a structured system in which you can have different revenues, and this is also the reason why there is a sort of resilience of the medium itself. A big publisher would also try to avoid fully digital for this reason, as you also mentioned briefly. So I think it’s a question of reading, but in that case, it’s more like habits — we can turn to reading digitally, if we have that device available. But I think one of the reasons is that we are forced to stay in that model is because we don’t have any alternative, economically speaking.
36:37 I can understand these are concerns as you’re running a publishing project. I’m not, I’m just involved in publishing in ad hoc ways, so financial stability is less of a concern. If we’re doing a book, like in this data browser series, we might need to find 500 euros or something for someone to lay it out. If I don’t do it, someone else will. I would just try and find some money somewhere in the university to pay for it, make an argument for it. It’s relatively easy if you have a university position to find little pots of money. You just operate very tactically and strategically in terms of the way you describe what’s taking place. I also run a research center, so I have a budget for that. I can always find some small amounts of money. So I don’t really have that same economic anxiety, although I’m always looking for money and there’s never enough, but things are possible.
37:51 We also discussed this constant negotiations with institutions that are part of our business model. For Nero, our publications are expensive books with colors, big formats, and so on. Of course, we are forced to negotiate with institutions that can support us, or apply for public funds. So it’s also interesting to understand this frame – of financial limitations and having to negotiate with big institutions – and ask what the future for independent publishing is within it? How is it possible to be independent from institutions while publishing autonomously?
38:45 digital objectsMy interest in that is more conceptual. ServPub is an attempt to think through what autonomous publishing might look like. Our speculation following a book that Winnie and I did together called Aesthetic Programming, which was published by Open Humanities Press. alternative publishing practicesWe released all the materials, all the writing on GitLab with the invitation that you could do anything you wanted with the contents of this book. You could add a chapter, you could rewrite it, you could fork it essentially. Some people took up that invitation. We’re really interested in that as a model of academic publishing, where you just produce an iteration of a book and someone could then make their own.
digital objectsThe further extension of that was to think not only about releasing the contents on Git and trying to think of a book as a computational object, as a sort of iterative form that can offer itself to different versions, but also to think about the technical infrastructure for that. To actually run everything on our own server, to learn how to become a systems administrator as a way of exerting more autonomy over the technical processes through which publishing takes place. So not relying on outsourcing to other technologies, but to develop a server, run it, use it as a portable device that you can take into workshops, but also to think about the whole mechanics of publishing as a system within which you can exert more control over, as opposed to publishing with Springer or something like this, where control is almost completely removed from you. So that was the conceit, but it’s more like a conceptual experiment than thinking of it as a model for a particular publisher. But then the small amount of money we’ve got from Coventry University with this Open Book Futures project is to work with Minor Compositions. It is a publisher in print, even though practically it’s run by one person.
The intention is to speculate with them on future forms of their workflow, to think of how they might use Media Wiki, or they might have their own server, or to speculate with them about the organizational form that they might develop that would reflect more the nature of the political project they’re engaged in. I don’t know if that was very clear, but I think that’s the worry of Minor Compositions, a project that broadly comes out of an anarchist and autonomous Marxist tradition, how they might think about their working practices and organizational structures that better reflect their sense of project.
42:19 Do you have any examples of federalizing structures of publishers? Minor composition is a great example. Many publishers in different countries publish in English, for better or for worse. We are wondering why we don’t have one single process of production. And then multiple distribution schemes, such as models combined together. This is something that was also developed by Geert at INC, but more as an idea than practice. This might be a really great solution for some books: the model is to use the publishers as distributors, as institutions that have access to specific audiences, using them as a sort of super-organism that will manage all the production processes and distribution of the books. alternative publishing practicesThis concerns comics too. Just to give an illustration here, I’m based in Brussels, comics are a very important cultural product, there are lots of fans. When we do books, we know that we are very limited in distribution, so we take the money from Belgium, and we try to find other publishers in different European countries. We see a book as sort of a shareholding thing, so they pre-buy 100, 200, 300 copies with a marginal cost that will never allow them to have a book like that in the catalog. It’s like a Robin Hood model, maybe slightly unrelated to the forms of publishing we're discussing here, but it would nonetheless be interesting to see more of this in non-fiction and academic writing.
44:27 I’m really interested in this as well, I don’t think I have examples, but this was the promise of print-on-demand, wasn’t it? That you would be able to print locally to your distribution, from a distribution center.
44:43 Just to add something here, print-on-demand is one option, but what happens, when we do the printings, is that we do offset, we only change the cover, and then send the books to different countries with a marginal cost again. I mean, it’s logistics, and shipping. So, offset is a technology that scales, right? So the more you print, the less it costs. So, the more partners you can find, the better the product can survive in their local markets.
45:21 Maybe this is an example of some of the problems, at least. With the Aesthetic Programming book, we wanted to translate it into Chinese and we ended up working with a collective based in Taiwan. But working in a context like Taiwan which also has lots of indigenous languages, a particular colonial relationship to mainland China, and which therefore has lots of debates about the use of classical Chinese immediately made it somewhat complicated. We wanted to consider the translation process to be something like forking: how do you fork into another language, and how does that resonate with local politics? We suggested that we would do this print-on-demand to make it cheap, to make some physical copies. Yet their print-on-demand hasn’t really developed, so they wanted to print offset. Then you’re immediately in a different set of economic difficulties of where to raise money and how to raise money. So this kind of cross-cultural translation, I think, is really interesting at the level of the content, but also at the level of the form that might take.
47:02 I think it’s interesting that you use the word forking. If we start thinking about books as a GitHub repository, obviously forking and branching are very interesting. There are some tools that allows us to think about a book with a new metaphor, because the way we have been conceptualizing mostly, to say it broadly, still comes from an antiquated model: uniquely talented singular artists, writers, that have inspiration and they have the conviction to speak with a publisher. When we start thinking about forking and branching, and local varieties, as you said, about China, which are different from publishing in the UK, we can shift the metaphors of book and start thinking of models that allow us to work together, despite the different linguistic barriers or market leverages we still have.
48:16 printed objectsThis is exactly what we tried to do with the Aesthetic Programming book, to think of the book as a computational object and to think of the printed form is one iteration of many possible versions that could be produced by multiple people. alternative publishing practicesAlso the reason I tend to work collaboratively and write collaboratively is because I want to remove myself as much as possible from these 19th century models and reputational economies that are so prevalent in publishing. You know, try and develop collective names, for instance, for these kinds of things. That’s the idea of the ServPub collective as well.
49:01 I don’t know if it’s a question or a reflection, but it’s more putting something on the table to continue the conversation. I want to bring back what Ilan was saying about the idea of federating. I think we are reflecting a lot on this from many different perspectives. You were referring more to the distribution. toolsYou’re also collaborating with Varia, with open source publishing, with different initiatives that create tools. Sometimes they’re very similar, because maybe they’re based on, Pages.js and they’re like forks of that tool in many different iterations. I feel that this is the whole idea of the politics of open source, that’s where we come from, but on the other side, sometimes it feels like reinventing the wheel every time. That’s maybe where I want to go about the sustainability of it in the long-term. I was talking with Lorenzo from Nero yesterday and he mentioned how it would be very nice to have a web-to-print tool that can print the zine that they are producing digitally in order to print them at home. For example, I thought about INC DevOps, like a tool that was exactly that four years ago. Then because of costs and issues, the project went down, the code is still there, but it’s not online anymore. Then I was like, there’s Pages.js, you should hire a developer and produce it yourself, but this can become very tiring after a while, especially for programmers.
But the question is, how can we federate this site? Is it even possible? Does it go against the idea of open source? I think that collaboration is still there, and this is to just stop there. But I think it also refers to the idea of a book as a computational object, right? At INC, we have been putting all our books on GitHub for the last 10 years, but if INC is going to close in a few years, who’s going to sustain all those books, who’s going to pay for the GitHub Pro account? Who is going to upkeep an autonomous server?
52:25 I mean, these are some of the problems we’ve had, even when working with collaborators, like Manetta and Simon. We’ve employed them to work with us on the Transmediale collaboration, for instance, and it’s proved to be quite expensive. The amount of labor involved in producing something for a particular event far outweighs what it would cost to quickly lay it out using InDesign. But then that’s not the point, of course. It’s the process of doing that, which we want to expose and be able to engage with, but the sustainability of that becomes really difficult. We’re working on the latest issue of the online journal, which again, will be produced using the same set of tools. We’re paying Simon to run some workshops with myself and Christian, so that we can actually take on some of the work. There are all sorts of economic challenges, but then at the same time, there are other issues. Despite people working with the ethics of free open source development, people are quite protective about the particular work that they’ve done on the development of a particular tool, so they need to protect their own income streams as well. They want to be accredited properly. We’ve run into quite a lot of difficulties over the way that people feel about ownership of tools, despite it being somewhat of a contradiction.
I’m rambling a bit, but the potential of some kind of federated model where tools can be accessed and further developed by communities of people in different locations would be wonderful. I don’t know how to do that either. I suppose that’s what we’ve tried to, that’s why we’ve tried to operate with a collective of people based in London to try to replicate some of the work that OSP or Varia have been developing in a local context so that we can have a much more hands-on workshop-based approach to the work that we’ve been trying to develop.
55:17 This is probably more of a provocation, but should we then maybe rethink the protocols or the whole idea of open source? I don’t mean some kind of political idea, I think that’s very solid, but I mean in terms of protocols. This is more of a theoretical question. How can we put together this idea of showing the labor behind all of this?
56:09 These are the kinds of questions that Aymeric Mansoux has also been trying to think through. From his experience of students coming out of the xpub course and setting up collectives like Varia and working with these sort of ethical principles, but then getting burnt out, getting kind of lost in the process, realizing that their future trajectory looks quite bleak in terms of being able to sustain themselves, sustain energy levels and income streams. Some of them have moved to OSP on this basis as well, which sets itself up with a slightly different model. I’m not sure what a good model would look like, but certainly people are trying to rethink this and are struggling with structures that can sustain themselves.
57:16 I’m really not an expert in technology, but I’m curious about your experience with technology and codes: are there some technical tools that can help in sharing the incomes, the revenue, the credits in a common collective production, if we imagine for a moment, that technical utopia where this kind of share would be possible? I’m curious to know if you can give us some good practice or examples of this.
58:26 No, I mean, I turn to other people for this discussion as well. I mean, this is the interest in working with some of the groups that we’re operating with, like OSP, Varia, developing their own licenses, of course, for the distribution of work. So absolutely. I’m a bit more skeptical about other kinds of models, like blockchain and DAOs, but I would also turn to other people for this discussion. I don’t think I would have anything to add that you don’t know already.
What: Future of Publishing
59:04 I think we’ve been touching upon the final question a lot, which is: what’s the future of publishing? This is hard to answer, but I think we’ve been able to pinpoint some interesting potential directions in which it could develop. More as a final comment on this aspect of the future of publishing, what do you see as possible directions you would like to see publishing going, and maybe some things that you think we should not focus on anymore that we can leave in the past?
59:54 Well, definitely the question of the sharing of the development of these tools that was just mentioned. I mean, that’s a major challenge, and it would be really sensible to try to network those practices and groups developing tools together in a more comprehensive way. My concern is more about working in a university and the inner mechanics and politics of academic publishing, as well as the way there’s still this bizarre reliance on these companies that have a very particular profit model. I want to encourage academics and students to intervene in these processes, to realize that publishing isn’t something that’s just given; something as simple as producing work and just handing it over to someone to publish. But that the choices that you make at this point are part of the work, that they need to be folded into a reflection upon the way that the content is developed and the way the content is made public. So to be more concrete: to use publishers like Open Humanities Press, or set up a means of publishing as collectives for research groups to take responsibility for this as a very particular decision that they’re making about how works come into the world, how they reach people, and to see that as our responsibility to engage with these questions, especially in universities where you can draw upon funding. You can build this into research projects, you can think about the distribution of the work, the way the findings are made public for any research project, and make ethical decisions based on that.
I’m interested in your project in relation to other projects, like the work at Coventry. I mentioned this in the online meeting that I attended some months ago, your relationship to these other projects, like xpub as well. We have this model in the research center, of collaborative PhDs with cultural institutions. We find that many of the students that we are employing for these projects come out of xpub, I think we’ve had two or three now. They’re the kind of graduates that seem to be doing the kind of work in the way that we think is appropriate. It’s a really interesting dynamic collection of people and ideas, it seems to me. So where is your project, how does it connect with these other communities?
1:03:54 Just to specify, I think the meeting you were referring to, is an in-between project, the project that you were in contact with me for earlier this year still has to start, if it’s ever going to start, because we are waiting for the funding grant answer in August. So this is a European project that started last September, so from the previous year. But the topic is the same, and I think the whole idea behind is to really think about this network or network of knowledge. And I’m very glad we are mentioning the word federating, because at least this is personally, and hopefully also in general, a very good direction, also because it’s still not very defined.
1:04:56 I’m also interested in this term. We’re a small research group in a university that doesn’t have an established reputation for research. So we see our strength in reaching out to other collaborators in the cultural sector, as I was describing, but also to other similar small research centers in other universities, for instance, a small group in Amsterdam through Annet Dekker that we collaborate with quite heavily, and Aarhus, of course, and a small group at the University of Southampton that are interested in image politics. So we also see these research structures as open to a federated model in a way. We’re not quite sure what that means, but we think it’s interesting to think about, at least.
1:05:52 Yeah, I think we are federated in a way, we are getting money from different institutions. I think it’s important to actually share between all these groups, because we are really aligning in many topics and terms. I’ve also been thinking about the idea of the book and paper publishing as a starting point, trying to expand it in different forms as an algorithmic object, but also into a different medium. I think we are reflecting on audio as publishing, video as publishing, event as publishing. And then Aymeric gave a lecture about permacomputing, which is an interesting concept. And my first question was: how do I combine the video publishing with permacomputing, or livestream publishing with permacomputing? He answered: you can’t, there’s no way you can do it. But actually, that was challenging. We were like, no, actually, maybe you can. But then that takes a lot of imagination, to rethink everything in terms of minor tech, and that’s what you were referring to your issue. So trying to implement this idea could be interesting to take it in a different direction, and not to replicate big, but we should maybe go in the direction of small. This might be very abstract.
1:07:41 I’ve also been following this discussion, of course, and one of our PhD students is Marloes de Valk who has been writing extensively about this, and about scaling in particular, and referring to the work of Anna Tsing, of course, and non-scalability theory, and I think it’s a really interesting discussion. Following the development of this term, permacomputing, and the other alternative terms. I think this discussion is probably in the glossary. I’ve forgotten what it’s called now, the thing that refers to Stewart Brand, the online glossary. What’s it called again? Whole Earth Catalogue. But this has all those sorts of references, doesn’t it? And you can, and in Marloes’s PhD, you can follow the discussion of some of those alternative terms like small tech, and low tech, and, you know, and so on.
1:09:01 One of the ideas out of this discussion is to compile a repository of all these terms and tools. So it’s interesting how many of these there actually are, you can see this very well with Silvio’s PHD project “Post-Digital Publishing Archive” , a repository of all the experiments in publishing.
1:09:51 It’s a really rich area, isn’t it? I think, obviously expanded publishing, you know, the reference that most people think about is expanded cinema. And, I can’t help think of how that’s used in the Hito Steyerl’s essay In defense of the Poor Image. As well, poor images, you know, and think about what poor publishing would look like.
1:10:00 That’s also interesting, because when we were talking with Irene, she had this provocation of ‘stop publishing’, or ‘don’t publish’, which we were having some trouble with, but maybe poor publishing and this more immediate, low frequency publishing is quite interesting.
1:11:03 Thank you. I should update you on the book that we’re working on, the Open Book Futures project, because that’s developed a bit. It’s going to be a kind of theoretical reflection, so a description of the process of producing the book in a very particular way. It’s a highly reflexive approach. So we talk through how to use the tools, but also the people developing those tools reflect upon the way that they think they operate in terms of setting up new social relations and opening up a particular sort of politics, etcetera. That’s the idea. Although we’re only at the early stages of that.