chapter
Clusterduck
2 July 2024, 10:30A
Introductions
00:00 This is the first of a series of expert meetings on expanded publishing. I’m Marta, this is Carolina, and we’re the moderators for this event. And over here, you can see a range of people you might already know, our panel of partners. We’re going to start with just a quick introduction. Then we have three main questions, a moment for discussion, and then coming back with a final question. And Carolina will be handling that, and I will do more timekeeping. If you could start with just a brief introduction? Chloë is also connected for more notes.
00:56 Hello, we are Clusterduck. Actually, it’s just three of us, while usually the co-founder members are five. I’m Silvia. Then there is Aria. Francesca and Tommaso, unfortunately, couldn’t be here with us. Clusterduck is a collective that was founded in 2016 to unravel the mess of the social web and the internet. The aim was to do that together. What we did in the past year has been to connect our knowledge in terms of design, transmedia, new media studies and all the research that we do in the many bubbles of the social web to create installations, curating exhibitions or creating participative operations. So in a sense, we are experimenting with many mediums in the attempt to create something which is participative and which can help the discourse go on and maybe clarify something more about the cluster fuck which we are in.
03:02 I don’t have much to add to the description. We mainly focus on URL processes, and on the gap that characterizes the different communities online and offline. We also have this kind of cross-media research and practice in which we research on topics by doing our participative experiments. But other than that, I don’t have much more to add. I don’t know if Noel wants to continue.
Why: Politics of Publishing
04:17 Thank you very much, all of you. To start, we wanted to first go into what we call the Politics of Publishing, or the missions and goals that drive you to have started Clusterduck and still do it today. Could you elaborate a little bit on why do you operate in the way you operate? How is your collective shaped? Do you have a core mission, and goals that guide you through all your different work across all the mediums that you just explained?
05:08 One topic we have been working a lot on, as you might know, is that of memes and memetics in general. I think this also points to the red thread that goes through our work in other topics that we have been investigating, how narratives impact our reality. When we started getting into memes, around 2016, we realized that sometimes these complex narratives that develop on the internet and on digital media that might seem quite innocent at first sight, or even frivolous or superficial, actually have a very deep impact on our reality on a political level and in the way people perceive reality, the way they interact with reality — our work aims to somehow raise awareness about this.
06:23 Back when we started in 2016, at that moment, the priority was to show that memes mattered and were something important. It was not just something frivolous that you would share with your co-workers that wouldn’t have any consequences. I think nowadays in 2024, it’s not necessary to explain that as much as it was eight years ago. I think the awareness about this has risen significantly. But what still maybe lacks is, I think, the awareness that all the problems we are facing as a society can be solved on a practical level. So why are we not able to solve them? And that’s basically because the over-arching stories that somehow shape our societies are much more difficult to adapt than laws or politics. And that’s somehow what gives the whole situation in which we are this inertia. That’s why it’s so difficult to steer away from the catastrophe that we’re seeing in front of us. Because when it comes to these collective narratives that give meaning to our lives, most people are probably not even aware that they can be changed. They are seen as facts.
07:48 They are seen as things that cannot be changed. They are just there, like laws of nature. I don’t know if I steered away from the original questions, but I think that’s for sure one very important part of our work. And one part that drives us to try to interact with different mediums. Whether it’s real-life situations, on-the-street demonstrations or traditional media, like printed media or digital media, they all have a role in defining these narratives. So that’s why we try not to concentrate just on one strategy because we think that’s not enough. I think it needs, what is needed is a very broad approach.
08:40 I think everything that you described from raising awareness to, as you said, putting things out there in the public space, I think they can all be understood as publishing practices or gestures of making public. What are some of the main references, people or things that inspire you throughout your work?
09:14 I think there are too many, probably! The thing that brought us together in the first place was that we all come from very different backgrounds and communities on the internet. During the late 90s, and early 2000s, we were all doing different things in different platforms and navigating different communities. So the answers to that question would probably be shared but very peculiar for all of us.
09:56 I definitely feel a very strong bond with the referencesNetArt community, so all the work that was in the scene of the early 2000s in Italy where we’re based. That’s probably something that came up earlier, but Clusterduck is a transnational collective, the five co-founders are based in Germany and Italy, but of course, we collaborate with a much broader community of creators all around Europe and in some cases also outside of Europe.
10:40 I would say my main reference before starting working with Clusterduck were of course referencesSalvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico and Les Liens Invisibles, all the kinds of cross-mailing list, cross-platform communities in Italy at the time, but through Clusterduck we collaborated with referencesFranco Neva Mattes, a lot of other artists that were part of a common network when we started, but I’m sure any one of us had different kinds of connection and bonds to different scenes of the Internet. One of the things that brought us together was indeed to research and look at these different clusters of the web how they connected and overlapped sometimes and in which spaces were taking place. The matter of publishing or going public and the connection that this creates was a big part of our references at the beginning. I don’t know if Noel or Silvia want to add to that.
12:06 I think an important reference is certain communities and bubbles that we were part of when we started as a collective. So that would be, for example, in the early 2010s what came to be called the references"Weird Facebook" community. What we found interesting about it was that those people (and us too) were using those platforms in a way that was completely the opposite of what Zuckerberg and their founders were hoping you to do with them. For example, anonymity, posting content that would go against the guidelines, and repeatedly opening up new profiles all the time. Trying to somehow go around this very stark surveillance and rules that were put in place on those platforms. And somehow these communities were able to create something very meaningful and precious to us and to many people that lived through it at the time. And I think if one traces this back to the topic of publishing, maybe one could even go as far as to say that this goes back to certain communitarian practices, like self-published zines in the referencespunk communities or political communities. This DIY ethos of just doing your thing and not caring about what the rules and consequences are.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
14:01 I think you also touched on something that perhaps can go into our next theme, Infrastructures of Publishing, and I think you were already tapping into those DIY, self-organized infrastructures. Do you have a specific workflow or structure within your collective? You’re already talking about multiplicity, you are individuals, and you work across different geographies… I imagine that you also have your way of working together.
14:53 When we started it was similar to the situation in which we live now. It’s a situation where we are exposed to a lot of communication and a lot of content, a lot of images, a lot of text. When we started, publications, posting, and shit posting, were the things that we wanted to analyse. We somehow felt that we were receiving a lot and we were publishing nothing. The first thing that we wanted to do was a documentary that never saw the light of day. So, what I’m trying to say is that trying to absorb, curate or just understand all the information that we are exposed to is a very hard thing to do.
15:55 toolsDiscussing together about what was going on, especially for the three years after we started, was the main thing that we were doing. And we are realising it just now. We were starting to do things, such as curating the Roma Biennale and so we were publishing something. We were doing an exhibition at PANKE and creating a digital gallery that somehow told us about our topics. But what we were really doing, and I’m seeing it just now, was trying to understand what was going on. And this is something very interesting about how we started. We had the impression that all that we were going to post online was to nourish a future neural network that we were calling AAN, DRAN, whatever. And so, we had this feeling that even posting on Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform we were using had a responsibility attached to it.
17:30 It was kind of a dream to have a saviour, a very intelligent being that somehow would come and save us from this mess and kind of organise this mess. But now we are realising that this happened already with Stable Diffusion and it is a lot messier… the results that Stable Diffusion brings back to us mean scraping and stealing our data. It’s like a six-year parabola because now we understand that maybe all the published things that we have already, and that we want to analyse, are not going to stop. sustainability of workflowsWe have to find a way to absorb it without being destroyed by the amount of things. We need to think about the methods to save ourselves from this mess.
19:03 One of the main tools we have been using over the past years is toolsTelegram and Telegram chats, for example. That’s a tool that we have been using a lot for sure. And then all the usual tools, also many tools that we use in our corporate jobs, we try to bring them back into our creative practice if it seems meaningful to do so. One thing that we started noticing very early on when we started to work together as a collective and we were attending, for example, events like Transmediale here in Berlin, was this difference between the older generation of net artists and activists that also Aria was referencing and what our generation was doing at the time. The older, activist generation didn’t trust what we were doing.
20:20 They were trying to warn us, quote"You have to own the platform, you have to own the tools that you use because otherwise, they are going to own you somehow." Sometimes we would feel judged because we were using a lot of Instagram and Facebook and all those tools and maybe not worrying enough about the consequences. And of course, we were aware that those were proprietary platforms with very strong surveillance.
20:52 But as I was saying before, with this Weird Facebook thing, we thought that we could somehow find our way around it and trick those platforms into something else. And I think nowadays probably we would see what those older activists were warning us about and they had good reasons to do so. At a certain time, there was this big debate about leaving Facebook. I mean, this has come up time and time again over the past years. Now it’s been quiet for a while, but there were some attempts to migrate to other platforms, Mastodon and whatnot. And also the promises of Web 3.0 and how everything will be decentralized and democratized and so on. We have seen that these promises have not been fulfilled. Because of the way that platforms work, I still think that exiting those platforms is not the solution because you lose a huge audience and you miss out on the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with this audience. However controlled and censored this might be, I still think that it is a loss, if you look at it as a whole.
22:21 - We could spend a whole day untangling these threads together! You were just talking about how you combine your other work with the collective work and how you also bring your individual experiences into Clusterduck as a collective. When preparing this, I also saw in another interview that you gave that you sort of define yourself as business modelsemployed in the creative gig economy by day and meeting online at night. I’m curious if you can expand on that with how you ensure or work towards some kind of sustainability of your collective and how you operate in this way.
23:26 I can start by saying that, yes, we are all employed in the creative industry. We mainly work for digital communication agencies. So the theme of sustainability and, to use a term that I don’t like a lot, “work-life balance”, has been present in our discussions, both in recent and less recent times. What we try to do, as Noel was saying, is to extract information from our corporate experience and bring that into the collective to maximise the efficiency of the process and try to not burn out.
24:19 We all have different roles. And, of course, sustainability of workflowswe try to combine our professional life and professional needs with the collective's, trying to apply for residencies, for example, to share as much time as possible, or visiting venues around Europe to connect and be physically together to avoid an excess of online communication. It does not always work because managing these kinds of balances can be quite tricky and difficult. But we try to focus on our well-being and the pleasantness of our experience. We try to not lose focus and to send our presence online through that, and we also have learned with time to keep some free spaces and some out-of-office time where we don’t respond or take in more work, as it can be quite challenging to have a whole round through the year of continuous work, both in our corporate employments and in our collective activity. That’s mainly it: trying to focus and keep track of your well-being and being present when possible.
26:09 Let’s say that when we wrote that interview, something changed, COVID happened, and after that, sustainability of workflowswe realized that working 17 hours per day is not healthy. When you start and you love what you do, you don't realize that working so much can be bad for your health, and so now we changed throughout this process a lot, we understood what was best and fortunately, the work that we did brought us on.
27:00 For example, we didn’t talk about one of our main works, which is the one that Noel has behind him. Our research brings us to build huge walls of memes, called the detective walls, which is a spin-off of another project of ours called Meme Manifesto, and this says a lot about the tools that we use and also about publishing. We published the internet on a 20-meter wall, and we did that by using the tools that we are using already, for example, Noel mentioned Telegram, we use it to gather memes. Some of us, especially Francesca, have a passion for toolsarchiving and so we were toolsscraping Reddit and 4chan and a lot of different social media. In the end, we were publishing something, even in a very weird way, and the work was transmedia because we had many media in which we wanted to post it.
28:39 We published the little book with Aksioma, as a catalogue to explain the work, and there is a website supporting it. This is somehow something that we learned, as Aria was saying, from our daily jobs, the corporate jobs, because usually, web campaigns must have a landing page. These are the basic “rules” of marketing. But later on, as marketing was evolving, we also understood that the transmedia landscape was changing. The Meme Manifesto work can be an example of an experiment we wanted to make in publishing, but while doing Meme Manifesto we were in COVID lockdown. toolsWe had many workshops where we were trying to talk with people about what was going on in their personal and very alone lives on the web. We understood that even talking about that was useful for people, talking out loud about what is happening online to you and just you is something very useful. We started this process which was a therapeutical healing process. And we need that because, you know, the internet is very addicting. And work is also very addicting. And we were addicted to it.
30:54 It’s about finding a method to survive all this content, survive all this rhythm that somehow we are imposing onto us. The people thoat work in culture are doing it a lot. You are self-exploiting the enthusiasm that you and your peers have, while we should find a way to protect ourselves from these so that we don’t exhaust all the energies that we have. Our last work, which is called references"Deep Fried Feels” (https://clusterduck.space/deepfriedfeels) and that we haven’t presented, is also about that, about our feelings and how the media and communications together are kind of destructive.
32:43 I wanted to say something more about what Silvia was saying, about self-exploitation in the cultural industry, because I think it’s a very important topic. That’s one thing I wanted to address, this relationship between the corporate jobs that we have — which have a lot of limitations and issues and problems that I think I don’t need to address that are quite self-evident… But on the other side, the deal is very clear, and sometimes it’s more honest than what you have in the cultural industry because business modelsthe cultural industry thrives on those grey zones of informal work that Silvia was addressing. It's much more apt at colonizing your free time and your passions, while at the same time criticizing exactly those kinds of things, and that's what makes it feel very weird, to say the least, sometimes.
33:50 Another thing I wanted to address is, since we are a transnational collective, something that we also noticed is the differences in what it means to have a sustainable work-life balance, for example, in Northern Europe, and in Southern Europe, which is very different. And it creates very strong imbalances in our collective and is something that is not addressed enough in the creative industries. Somehow this all goes under the label of “we are all Europeans”, we all have freedom of movement. We are all the same. This is not true, because someone who lives in Greece, Italy or Bulgaria will have other possibilities than someone who lives in Denmark or Germany. And I think this is quite obvious, so I don’t need to dig deeper into that. Regarding the work that Sylvia was introducing, as she already started explaining, it has a lot to do with empathy and emotions and how those things travel in digital media. So if we want to bring it back to the topic of publishing, when you publish something, when you publish content, you are expressing ideas, a story, but often we are also trying to convey emotions. And digital media has a very specific way of doing so. For example, the way that we are talking now gives us somehow the illusion that we are in a conversation that is comparable to an interaction in real life. But after six years of working online — we started realizing this very strongly during the pandemic — something very fundamental was missing. And this was creating problems between us. That was the starting point for this work: reflecting on emotions and how emotions are conveyed on digital media.
Who: Community of Publishing
36:02 Thank you very much for going deep into this topic, which is also very dear to me. And it’s really important to put it in these conversations because we’re also archiving this and reporting on it and hopefully continuing something sustainable for everyone. Reflecting on what “Europe” means is also very relevant to this project. And I specifically like the mention of the meme as a healing agent. In the beginning, you also highlighted how you’re very much a part of an online community and are doing things not only with your collective but then using Telegram channels or using these online communities as your medium, I would say. How do you create your community around your work? Who is your audience, if we can say it in these terms? And how do you see your role within that bigger online community as a publisher of that community itself, like you described?
[[00:37:34] The easiest way to understand who our audience is wherever we give talks. It’s very beautiful because there you see, “OK, so they were listening to us”. This is very important. And that is what we missed during Covid. In situations like festivals or gatherings — for example, there was one very nice symposium called “Organized by None”, communityor when we go to Aksioma or the Institute of Network Cultures — we have this feeling that we are part of a greater community that is discussing the same topics as we are.But also all of us developed a community on the web. As everybody’s doing what you like, you become part of a discussion. Just like when Noel was talking about Weird Facebook, it was when we were a lot into Facebook groups and we were discussing a lot about virtual reality, technology, post-Internet, and memes. I remember that Zuckerberg had to make the Facebook group functional because of the filter bubble problem, he wanted Facebook to be more local, so we exploited that feature in the platform.
39:55 The community is very diverse. Every time that we go places, we invite people as a follow-up to join our Telegram chats. communityAnd then there is a network of people who we collaborate with in our jobs. And so during the years, every time that we wanted to do something, and we wanted to collaborate, for example, with a developer or with a designer, people were adding up to the cluster family. For example, the collaboration with referencesJules Duran, who is a very good designer and type designer, was very precious in the work on Meme Manifesto. There are some others, like developers, referencesPietro Arial Parisi, Super Internet, and Gregorio Macini, that are helping us with the development of the many websites that we did, but also intervening in other ways, because all of our collaborators are very interested in a lot of things.
41:28 Speaking of tools, it’s not easy at all to understand how to share our work in a very correct way. In the beginning, we were discussing everything on chats and for example, Aria who comes from a background in activism, was very good at teaching us how you can make horizontal decisions. governance and ownershipNow we understand that even if we have many tools, decisions have to be made in a video call. Via emails is impossible to have a smooth dialogue and understand each other. We have a lot of suggestions now, if you want to start a collective, write to us at hello@clusterduck.space because we are starting to be really good at it!
43:17 That’s great. You could have a manual on how to collectivise.
43:25 I think now would be a nice time to open the discussion for the rest of our room, which we will see in a second. I’m going to pass on this microphone…
43:40 Can I add just one thing on the community topic that we were addressing before, just one small thing? I think the Institute for Network Cultures published a book which addresses the topic quite well, which is a dark forest anthology. (Marta: Actually, that’s my book!) We love it, it’s a very great concept to describe what online communities can be like in a positive sense. You know very well how much work it is to manage a community. communityAnd to be honest, we sometimes feel that we have to put so much work into making things work between us as a collective that we would love to put more work into community management, growing communities and addressing communities. You know very well how much work that is. So we don’t always have enough time to do that as we would like. But we have a lot of love and respect for anyone who does so, and there are some great people out there who are great at doing this.
Discussion
44:53 Absolutely. Thank you so much for your final thoughts on that. I’ll pass on this microphone throughout the room. We’ve got one question.
45:27 Ciao! We talk about tools and you somehow experimented with a decentralized network with the super internet. I’m curious to know more about your experience with blockchains and this kind of technique or technology to understand if you find something interesting in terms of tools, in terms of technological dynamics that we can adopt in the future, even in publishing or in the art sphere.
46:24 The Super Internet Space is a multiplayer room in which everybody can draw, this was the start of it. Clusterduck organized things in this space in 2018 as part of “Meme Propaganda”, which was maybe our first participative operation. And it was the operation that Noel was talking about when we started to understand what memes can be, that memes can be used for propaganda. But later on, the Super Internet Space developed into something which is a kind of satellite of Clusterduck with other collaborators.
47:30 The position of Clusterduck in terms of cryptocurrencies is very attentive and critical, because financial streamswe saw what happened during COVID with the NFT craze in relationship to our network of digital artists, and it was very ambiguous. So we were watching it happening, and it was destroying the vision that people have about digital art because, for us, digital art is much more than a JPEG sold on a digital Metaverse or whatever platform/museum. The Super Internet World Experience has something in common with Clusterduck and also with a very nice work from Silvio Lorusso, “A Slice of the Pie”. It was a project that we really liked, they were using a cake and everybody could try to join in the building just by posting their art on this cake. And what was happening is that if you managed to post on the cake, you could write on your CV that you exhibited at Kunsthalle, we love that. Super Internet Space does something in that direction in the sense that crypto as a technology makes it easier to assign a room to the artist that joins the project. And so to answer your question, Lorenzo, maybe it is useful to make the process easier. About the CV, we particularly loved that thing and we use that in the Meme Manifesto project as well. alternative publishing practicesThis year we were exhibiting at KW Institute in Berlin, and we asked the curator to write a very huge colophon of 300 names so that all the people who somehow (that we know) joined the project could write on their CV that they were exhibiting at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, which is, I think, the "higher" place in we got in. So we wanted to give back.To sum it up, if we can use any tool, script or whatever, we try to give back something to the community that we are interacting with.
51:32 If I can add just a little something to what Silvia was saying… which I completely agree with. I would say that another part of our reflection towards both blockchain and AI, the two major technological themes in the last years is the environmental impact of mining and the database production that involves both of these technologies. We always try to be as careful as possible regarding this theme because we all do feel a deep attachment to it. In 2019/2020, we developed a branch of Meme Propaganda, that involves memes, the climate crisis and the protests of Fridays for Future, the use of memes during the protests. toolsWe tend to have an approach that is as practical as possible to this kind of technologies. We're glad to use them for what they represent and how they can help to build online communities and share the visibility and the rewards that come from collaborative practices, but we also try not to idolize technologies and see them in the wholeness of the picture, considering their environmental impact. I don’t know if Noel wants to add something.
53:29 No, I fully agree with you. Just one thing, building on what Aria and Silvia said… I think one has to be very careful about technological determinism. This utopian idea, that we all inherited from the 90s, is that somehow the internet is inherently free and uncontrollable. That maybe some new magical technology will come across which will emancipate us, be it blockchain or whatever. What we have seen over the past year is that the big promises that were made a few years ago about Web 3.0, that it would somehow solve the problems of Web 2.0, these promises still need to materialize. And I think this was to be expected.
55:12 But we are also trying to use these tools as we are using social media: we are not just critical, but we understand the grassroot dream. We are using tools, because we also want to try them, we are very weak, unfortunately. So we are also trying to find other solutions.
55:53 I want to ask you about the limits of criticality, because this is also an automatic thing in our small milieu, that everybody is critical about the technologies and the tools. But we also see that criticality has diminishing returns. We can be as critical as we want, but criticality does not change reality. And I’m wondering if we can imagine a post-critical way to address technology.
56:24 Yes, that is important. One month ago, I was at CERN in Geneva. I was there because of a movie festival that we’re making. I noticed how beautiful it is to have technology by your side when you want to use it. People stay there on a very beautiful campus and they just think all day about what they want to do. And of course, it would be a dream to have the same for artists, you know, a very beautiful space where you go there, you have your very nice breakfast and you talk all day about memes and art. I feel that sometimes we are critical because we are excluded by the power of using technology in the way we would like to use it. But no, we need to be critical because no one is doing that. We are doing this in Europe a lot. For example, in the U.S. it’s very difficult to even find artists that are critical about technology, it’s kind of a taboo.
58:02 It would be beautiful to foster collaboration between engineers and people. co-publishingI think that art, humanities and culture should happen before designing that technology. But this is not happening. And we see it, you see at Google all the people that were fired. They tried to integrate academies with the construction of neural networks, but they had to fire them in the end because they were not optimal for the market. It’s a very complex situation and we need to map it to understand what we can do, and maybe we are critical because it’s the only thing that we can do. I would like to be an artist who collaborates with a physicist, and with a lot of funding to understand, for example, memes through big data. But that’s not happening. I don’t know, maybe I would not be critical of technology if I had a place like CERN for artists.
1:00:04 Thank you so much for everything you just said. I have a question, maybe it can be a link to the final question. At the moment, we are a group that is discussing a lot about publishing and new forms of publishing. What are the main constraints that you have found in publishing? Because you have a very multidisciplinary but also multimedia approach. You are in this interesting position of being both an author and a publisher, as you said before. And I know that you have collaborated with some of the people around this table. And this is from my experience: sometimes we are talking about AI, we are talking about blockchain, but then here we are also talking a lot about books, paper books. What do you think are the constraints of this medium? What are the things that it can add to the Internet? And maybe to even make it broader, if it’s something that you ever had as an issue: have you ever felt constrained by this medium?
1:01:49 Traditional publishing has been, overall, a very nice experience for us. It’s not the medium we’re most familiar with, but I think this is another aspect that makes it interesting to work with transmedia projects and different kinds of outputs, one big recurring theme through all the different publishing platforms is diffusion. We worked on a video documentary which was published because of distribution issues and it needs to be distributed to meet the public. This is not something that we experienced in our editorial projects. It’s not our main medium, so we work with publishers that share common goals and ideas with us when working on printed books, such as “The Detective World Guide” that was mentioned, or the most recent publications that we’re working with Nero Editions. So I would say that it’s a very particular way of publishing. Another recurring theme in all our publications is accessibility, so another thing that we try to keep in mind when working on printed books is how accessible they can be, and which is the target they refer to, to make it as accessible and understandable as possible.
1:04:23 traditional publishing practicesWe try to go for more recent technologies rather than books, to evaluate which are the benefits and which are the possibilities of each medium we cross. For sure, books do have the possibility of reaching a very broad audience and a more unlimited target, in comparison with our web projects.For example, people who don’t understand how web projects can work can benefit from the existence of a book like “The Detective Wall Guide” to understand Meme Manifesto as a project.
1:05:23 I just wanted to say something very fast about constraints as a way to push the boundaries of creativity. We know this from classical art. If we think about religious art, artists have always found ways to go around censorship in a very creative way. This is also something that relates to our work “Deep Fried Feels”, because that’s actually referencing deep fried memes, which is a treatment of memes that has been also used to circumvent censorship on digital platforms because it makes images difficult to recognize for artificial intelligence and for those scraping mechanisms that try to censor images. I’m not trying to encourage censorship, but I’m trying to say that limits and constraints can sometimes have a positive effect on creativity.
1:06:44 I remember I was very impressed by Paul Soulellis’ anthologies. I remember I was at Eyebeam in New York and there was this girl, Nora, she showed me a book where Paul Soulellis had printed all the Twitter bots on a book. It was called “Printed Web 5: Bot Anthology”. Printing a very selected archive of what is happening on the internet on paper impressed me. Then you can put it into question, as Noel would say. How can you contextualize something that is happening on a very broad, very strange and diffused medium like the internet? If you want to put it on print, what is happening?
1:07:55 When we were building the Detective World Guide, we tried to understand in which way we could record — because when you print, you have to record it — what is a collective performance because memes are a collective performance in a way. And they exist in a context, in a time, in a public situation, with participants. But when you print it, it’s not like that anymore, you are fixing it. And so, yes, as Noel was saying, it’s very helpful sometimes to try to print something, to print the internet.
1:09:01 It relates to the two biggest constraints of all, the unrepresentability of reality as a whole, and of complex discourses and the limitations of our senses. And one way to go around that is, as Silvia was saying with printing, concentrating on something very narrow and very specific. I’m thinking, for example, of Anna Tsing’s book “The Mushroom at the End of the World”, in which she tells the story of something as complex as the Anthropocene by concentrating on something as tiny as a mushroom. And I think this is always a good way of circumventing constraints.
What: Future of Publishing
1:10:14 Just to wrap up our presentation, I want to say thank you for being so generous. We’re trying to define, speculate on, but hopefully do a little bit more than that, and realize futures of expanded publishing. We’re also trying to understand what this term can mean for us and you. So what do you think are the most urgent aspects that need to be addressed in the future of publishing, however you understand publishing within your practice? And how do you see this progressing in the next years?
1:11:11 (laughs) You know, we did a workshop about how we cannot imagine the future anymore! That’s why nobody’s answering now.
1:11:29 For the present? Perhaps something urgent right now.
1:11:38 All the digital tools we have at our disposal today make it very easy to publish something. What is more difficult, I think, is the distribution and making it visible. I think we have this problem, we have a tsunami of images and content, which leads to this paradox of making content invisible. There are so many things that people somehow don’t see anymore because there are just too many. And they’re overwhelmed by it.
1:12:29 And I think this is the main challenge for the future of publishing. We all have this experience that we find something that is somehow relevant to us or to the research that we are doing. And maybe it’s not even something new, it’s something that has existed for years. And we ask ourselves, how is it possible that I discovered it just now? So how can we find a way of getting relevant content? But then that, of course, leads to a whole other discussion: what is relevant and what is relevant to whom? How do we find a good way of bringing content that is relevant to the right public? And then there is, of course, the role of what is generally called “the algorithm” in bringing certain content to certain people. TikTok is a good example of this, one of the reasons for TikTok’s success is that, compared to other platforms, it had a different way of bringing content to people. Many individuals felt that TikTok was very good at bringing them relevant content but that was unexpected and positive for them. But this, of course, has a whole set of implications that are very political and problematic. And which we probably don’t have the space to address here. But I think this is something that is for sure very relevant for the future of publishing.
1:14:15 Absolutely. Does anybody else have an idea? Would you like to add anything?
1:14:24 I think Noel’s intervention summed up a lot of points. I do agree that distribution is key, as we mentioned before. digital objectsThe only thing that I would add would be the role of cross-media and trans-media experiences. I do agree with Silvia about bringing the internet on a printed page. On the other hand, there are a lot of interesting and compelling projects about bringing paper to the Internet, so archiving and documenting all the different publications which may have not been accessible to everybody if they weren’t distributed online.
1:15:21 referencesFanzines are an imaginary we refer a lot to. Many times they are in their printed shape and they are very local, very specific projects that do not tend to cross borders and arrive at very different places and times in the world. With the internet, you can bridge this gap and make ends meet. So, I would say to think about the node of diffusion and distribution also in a cross-media environment such as the one that we live in.
1:16:12 One of the urgencies is defining a community. You have mentioned you move in both online and offline, real-life communities. I’m curious to know from you if, for example, the resilience of traditional publishing is based on the fact that offline and real-life communities are more defined than online communities, which are undefined or fragmented. I’m curious to know your opinion about that.
1:17:16 It’s true that online communities form very quickly. For example, the TikTok algorithm is very specialised. So, what is happening is that cores are becoming something very specific and sometimes communities start from how much you love a chair or how much you love peeling an iguana. And this is very strange because then it can be very fast and when you just stop to love peeling an iguana, your community is not there anymore. I’m joking, but what Nero did, and what the Institute of Network Cultures and Aksioma are doing is very similar. I love that you three are together because you are building a community behind publishing, which is very, very hard to do. But you’re also publishing in a very fast way and your covers are very Instagrammable. You are also trying to explore the communities that are forming in different social media. I see that you’re doing that. I think this is a very good strategy because it’s very similar to what we are doing when we create loops between the “real life” world and the URL world.
1:19:17 What I wanted to add is that in the past, with books like “House of Leaves” or I remember a project by Katherine Hayles, which was about electronic literature… there were many attempts of making a book something which is not only a book. I remember Geert Lovink telling me that alternative publishing practicespublishing should be fast so that you can be in the conversation while the conversation is happening.I think that you are already doing this. You’re exploring the power of the book as a printed medium (which is a lot, as we were saying before) but doing it in a fast way and using the feedback that you can create with social media communities. I think this is working somehow.
1:20:26 Thank you very much. And I think we feel the same way about you, in other ways, you’re also creating a community. Perhaps this is a good note to wrap up. I would like to thank you again for joining us and for sharing your practice and your thoughts.
1:20:51 We’ll keep you updated on the afterlife of this meeting. It will probably take an expanded form, or we hope so, at least. And we will be in contact.
1:21:08 Thank you. Thank you for having us.