chapter
Conversation with Geoff Cox
3 July 2024, 12 PM
3 July 2024, 12:00 PM
Introductions
Geoff
(00:02:45)
My position is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, as the name suggests, it’s in London, in the south of London. It’s a very particular kind of university. I suppose it would describe itself as a technical university. So it takes very 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 Goldsmiths, or LSE, or Oxford, or Cambridge, it has a very particular character. There, I’m co-director of a small research center called (Centre for the Study of the Networked Image) [https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/]. As the name suggests, it’s concerned with what constitutes a contemporary image, you know, not singular, networked, distributed, I 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. I’ll talk more about that later. I’m also a co-director of a MA programme called Curating Art and Public Programmes, which is a collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery. Then in terms of my research interests, I’m obviously interested in image politics. I’ve already said something about that. But I suppose I’m operating in a field of what you would describe as software studies. But then, of course, as much as that kind of leaks into discussions around AI currently, and I suppose my concern is more image-based AI literacy. Of course, I’m interested in publishing, the practice of publishing, publishing even as an artistic medium, as a broader sort of cultural practice.
Why: Politics of Publishing
Marta (00:05:14)
Maybe building on that, if you could pinpoint to even a theory or syllabus, missions or references, ideals that guide your interest or are also connected to your work in university.
Geoff (00:05:35)
Obviously, the job of an academic is to publish and there are kind of metrics for this, so you’re sort of 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. So a couple of these books were published by MIT Press. So in a sense, they’re very conventional, even if MIT has attempted more recently to make its books open access, it’s the sort of 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 circuits and networks to some extent.
Marta (00:06:28)
How come, if I can ask?
Geoff (00:06:30)
traditional publishingWell, I'll go on to this as well, but because the processes are so painful, slow, and inefficient. They often have very small readership. If they make mistakes, they have very sort of weird procedures of how to correct mistakes, like adding addendums and things like this, rather than just actually going into an online portal and making a change. All these sort of 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. Obviously they often operate with paywalls as well, they rely on academic institutions subsidizing, ostensibly this is a commercial practice. So I would oppose that as well. It's a longer discussion, maybe we'll come back to it. So what I've tried to do is operate within a realm more of self-publishing, so working currently on two book series, which, again, are collaborations. One, which is called (The Contemporary Condition) [https://www.sternberg-press.com/series/the-contemporary-condition-series/], is a book series with (Sternberg Press) [https://www.sternberg-press.com/], and another is called (Data Browser) [https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/data-browser/], which is with (Open Humanities Press) [https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/]. So there’s sort of a sense of more independence in those sorts of infrastructures through which they operate, Open Humanities Press, I suppose, being the best example of that. That book series was previously with Autonom Media. So it’s another example, I suppose, of relative autonomy over a publishing process. So 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
Marta (00:08:30)
Yeah, actually, that touches upon the next theme, which is the how’s and 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?
Geoff (00:09:03)
[[workflows | I wouldn’t say I’m exiting, but it’s more operating on the edges, sort of trying to dip in and dip out of academic conventions where possible. So a good example of that is the ongoing collaboration with Transmediale and Aarhus University. I used to work at Aarhus. As I said, I have this adjunct position, and we’ve been running for the last 12 years, a research workshop, which is derived from an open call. We 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. Actually, a couple of times with Gijs, Open Source Publishing, but more recently with people from (Varia collective) [https://varia.zone/en/], especially Minetta Behrens 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. ]]
[[tools | I could also talk about software. Varia and other collectives are using an adaptation of a MediaWiki that I also use. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. Then I use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, and then being 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. The 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 copy editing or even the writing for that matter just to have this as a very sort of quick process. If there are mistakes, not worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of minor tech, and minor tech was a reference to (Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature) [https://iberian-connections.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Kafka-Toward-a-Minor-Literature-by-Gilles-Deleuze-Felix-Guattari-z-lib.org_.pdf], to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like. Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content form. So we tried to, as the name suggests, think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Minetta 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 Ingrid. We were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole sort of infrastructure of the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.]]
Marta (00:13:41)
I was just 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?
Geoff (00:14:06)
It functions differently. It allows you to reflect, I think, 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) [https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/projects/open-book-futures] project, which comes out of Coventry University, is worked on with the publisher (Minor Compositions) [https://www.minorcompositions.info/]. If you come across that as an imprint of (Autonomedia) [https://autonomedia.org/], it’s run by Stevphen Shukaitis. On the one hand, we’re interested in his writing about organizational forms, and 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
**Marta (00:15:24) **
There’s this quote 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 at 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 even 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?
Geoff (00:15:29)
Well, I suppose first, I could talk about some references for this. For example, Stevphen Shukaitis is one. I mean, it’s a really excellent essay, I think, written in collaboration with Joanna Fiegel. It’s called (Publishing to Find Comrades) [https://csalateral.org/issue/8-2/publishing-comrades-temporality-solidarity-autonomous-print-cultures-shukaitis-figiel/]. Have you come across that essay? I think it’s really excellent. They draw upon, I suppose, this relationship between publishing politics and labor. They even reference people like (Ned Rossiter and logistical media) [https://nedrossiter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/08_Rossiter_LogisticalMediaTheory_2021.pdf ]. This notion of logistics, I think, is quite important. Through Stephen, it’s hard not to make that connection to (The Undercommons) [https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf], Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, I think about that. So I suppose there’s that sort of intersection of ideas, I think, that we’ve tried to draw upon to this sort of management of pedagogy and the management of research, which is, in academic circles at least, tied to particular companies and to big techs, Google and other institutions of that kind. So that would be a further concern in answering the politics 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. I think something similar is happening in the Netherlands, actually, and probably everywhere.
**Marta (00:18:26) **
I come from a background of media studies and theoretically, you’re very critical of the 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.
Geoff (00:19:00)
[[sustainability of workflows | It’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 guess 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) [https://archive.transmediale.de/content/phd-workshop] really, is 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) [https://aprja.net/], you know, it’s facilitated by the Royal Danish Library, but it follows the more typical conventions of double-blind review and lists of academic reviewers, with the right kind of credentials. So it allows you to operate, I think, both within and sort of outside to some extent of some of those structures.]]
Marta (00:20:20)
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? Or who is your network?
Geoff (00:20:47)
Yeah. Well, the network is both inside and outside. The current project is called Serve Pub. This is a collective of people both in universities. 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. Then a group called Ingrid, which are 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. Then Sister Server, as I mentioned, who are outside of academia, and then Simon and Mineta, of course, who also are outside academia, though Mineta teaches in the expub course in Rotterdam. So, an eclectic mix of people at different connections to formal academic work.
Marta (00:22:12)
What about your readers or your audience? Do you see your work resonating mainly or mostly within the university field? Do you think you’ve breached out? Or how do you think about your audience?
Geoff (00:22:27)
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 go to that festival. So, in a way, it’s quite self-contained. The work with Open Humanities Press, I suppose that’s much more like a typical academic audience, people who, 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 a kind of art crowd more, has a very particular distribution through galleries and art bookshops. So, different kinds of audiences for different kinds of works.
Marta (00:23:56)
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?
Geoff (00:24:19)
That’s a big question, isn’t it? I mean, obviously, a lot of these projects are based on the legacy of free open source software production and distribution, but also mixed with feminist pedagogy largely. I mean, you can see that from the collectives that we’ve tried to work with. I mean, open access and free and open source software is fraught with problems, of course, in terms of remuneration and sustainability, but I still think the ethics and the principles are crucially important. So, I suppose there we followed the discussions around federated approaches, the work of people, again, around the (xpub) [https://xpub.nl/] community at Rotterdam without trying to be evangelical about it at the same time.
Discussion
Ilan (00:25:46)
How would you define publishing? I know it’s a very broad question. I have a book in my mind, which is like the (Content Machine) [https://anthempress.com/the-content-machine-mbp] 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 potentially theoretically can 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?
Geoff (00:26:36)
I don’t know that particular reference. I like this sort of way of describing publishing as making public of things so in that way that phrase suggests making something public, putting something in the public realm, but also the sense in which it can produce a public, that discussion of what constitutes publicness. So I suppose that’s more the way I would see it. I talked about the reference to Stephen Shikatos’ work again, this idea of drawing attention to this connection of publishing to labor and politics, and that you’re producing kind of 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 of publishing. 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.
**Ilan (00:27:55) **
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) [https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books], about the catastrophic sales of two of the biggest publishers, like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. While defending themselves on the trial, they said that they will sign influencers, because influencers come already with their 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 the article is that 90% of the books they publish, they don’t make money. A very big percentage don’t sell more than 1,000 copies. Even 5% of the books sell less than 12 copies. These are the biggest publishers in the world. This is a multi-billion merge 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? Like, if it’s so grim for big publishers, Nero or Topovoros or INC, without structural subsidies or public funding, how can they survive in such a competitive environment? Survival not only in terms of finances, but also in terms of moral and ethics. How can you wake up and find motivation in running a small business like that?
Geoff (00:30:02)
Yeah. 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. I am concerned about the circulation of ideas and culture to more of the smaller presses that you’re describing. Also the future of books: I love books, of course, I have 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. The 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 this is where they’re printed quite cheaply. It’s again, the Sternberg model. We pay for it from research grants. So we try and build in a contingency in the research we’re doing to distribute the ideas that come from that research, but also make sure that it is distributed, it does get out there. It does reach the 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. So 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 you as an academic come with 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.
**Lorenzo (00:32:39) **
You mentioned several cases in which the contents are produced through different mediums, and they’re also distributed through different tools or I would say even environments, online and offline. You talk about the limited advantages of open source contents and publishing, and I’m curious to know your opinion about this kind of hybridization of publishing. So why do we somehow turn to a traditional medium, like a printed book or paper book?
Geoff (00:33:47)
Yeah, it’s interesting the way we’re developing this conversation because of many of your questions. I’m curious about what you think as you’re asking the question. Maybe we can come back to that. I think it’s just a very different reading experience. You receive information in very different ways when you receive it for a particular medium. You read on screen in very particular ways, knowledge is constructed in very 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 kind of 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 have it lying next to your bed, and you might just read a couple of pages before you go to sleep. All these things affect the way that you understand the material, the way you even take pleasure in the material.
Lorenzo (00:35:02)
I can give you my take since you were asking. This is a big question for us, but I think somehow, we turn back to traditional publishing, also for a pure question of economical sustainability. So in that case, you have a structure 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 only have that device available. But I think one of the reasons is that we are forced to stay in that model because we don’t have any alternative, economically speaking.
Geoff (00:36:37)
I mean, I can see these are concerns for you, as you’re running a publishing project. I’m not, I’m just involved in publishing in ad hoc ways. So the financial stability is less 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 these 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 something for some small amount of money. So I don’t really have that same economic anxiety, I suppose, although I’m always looking for money and there’s never enough, but things are possible.
Lorenzo (00:37:51)
We also discussed this constant negotiations with institutions that is part of our business model, as you mentioned, Stenberg, also Nero. For our publishing, they’re super expensive books with colors, big formats and so on. Of course, we are served or forced to negotiate with institutions that can support us or apply for public funds and so on. So it’s also interesting to understand this frame and within this limitation of cost and negotiation with big institutions, what’s the future for independent publishing? How is it possible to be independent from institutions while publishing autonomously?
Geoff (00:38:45)
[[digital objects | [[physical objects | My interest in that is more conceptual, so this project (ServPub) [https://servpub.net/] 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) [https://aesthetic-programming.net/], which was published by Open Humanities Press, we released all the materials, all the writing on GitHub 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 can then make their own.
Then the 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, so to learn how to become a systems administrator to some extent as a way of exerting more autonomy over the technical processes through which publishing takes place. So not rely 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 one person.]]]]
To speculate with them on future forms of their workflow, to think how they might use (Media Wiki) [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki], 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 that they think they’re engaged in. I don’t know if that was very clear, but I think that’s the worry of minor compositions, that what they’re doing as a project that broadly comes out of an anarchist and autonomous Marxist tradition, how they might think about their own kind of working practices and organizational structures that reflect more their sense of project.
Ilan (00:42:19)
Geoff, 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 developed also by Geert in the 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 with specific audiences, and then find a way, a super organism that will manage all the production process, distribution of the books. This 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. So 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, a bit of publishing, but I think it can be quite interesting to see more of this in the sense of a non-fiction and academic writing.
Geoff (00:44:27)
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.
Ilan (00:47:02)
I think it’s very interesting that you use the word forking. If we can start thinking about books as a GitHub repository, obviously forking and branching are very interesting ways to see. There are some tools that allows us to think about a book with a new metaphor, because I think the way we have been conceptualizing mostly, to say it broadly, is still something that 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, we each have.
**Tommaso (00:49:01) **
**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. You’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 and let them print 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. We’re going to talk with Gijs in a few, and I think that’s probably more a question for him. **
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 like an autonomous server? I’m just putting a lot of things there.
Geoff (00:52:25)
I mean, these are some of the problems we’ve had, even when working with the 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 out an 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 like economic challenges, but then at the same time, there’s a certain, 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 false.
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 London context so that we can have a much more hands-on workshop-based approach to the work that we’ve been trying to develop.
Tommaso (00:55:17)
Thanks. Probably as 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 it’s very solid, but I mean in terms of protocols. This is more like a theoretical question. How can we put together this idea of showing the labor behind all of this?
Geoff (00:56:09)
These are the kinds of questions that (Aymeric Mansoux) [https://monoskop.org/Aymeric_Mansoux] has 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 the 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 sort of struggling with structures that can sustain themselves.
**Lorenzo (00:57:16) **
Sorry, it’s a curiosity. I’m really not an expert of technology or these kinds of things, but I’m curious to know your very experience in technology and codes, if there are like some technical tools that can help in sharing the incomes, the revenue, the credits in a common collective production, if we face for a moment, that technical utopia where this kind of share would be possible. So I’m curious to know if you can give us some good practice or examples of this.
Geoff (00:58:26)
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, constantly developing their own license, of course, for the distribution of work. So absolutely. Other kinds of models like blockchain and DAOs. Yeah, I mean, I’m a bit more skeptical 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
**Marta (00:59:04) **
I think we’ve been touching upon the sort of the final question a lot, which is, I guess, the tough question of what’s the future of publishing? Kind of hard to answer, but I think we’ve been able to sort of pinpoint some interesting potential direction in which it could develop. More as a final comment on this aspect of the future of publishing, what do you see to be some directions you would like to see publishing going, and maybe some things that you think we should not focus on anymore that we can abandon in the past?
Geoff (00:59:54)
I’m sort of interested in your project in relation to other projects, really, like the work at Coventry. I mentioned this in the online meeting that I came to 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, but we just find that many of the students that we are employing for these projects come out of xpub. So 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, I suppose, would be my question.
**Tommaso (01:03:54) **
Just to specify, I think the meeting you were referring, this is like an in-between project, in the sense of like the project that you were in contact with me previously 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 September last year, so from the previous year. 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.
Geoff (01:04:56)
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. A small group in Amsterdam through Annette Dekker that we collaborate with quite heavily, Aarhus, of course, 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 with at least.
Tommaso (01:05:52)
Yeah, I think what we are in a very federated 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. Just maybe something that I wanted to mention, because you just mentioned Amerik, and I was having a conversation with Amerik last week. This has to do more with this idea of expanded publishing, this idea of the book 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 a lot in terms of audio as publishing, video as publishing, event as publishing. And then Amerik gave a lecture about permacomputing that I think is a concept that is very interesting. And my first question was, oh, how do I combine the video publishing with permacomputing, or like a live stream publishing with permacomputing? He first 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, because I think it takes a lot of imagination as well, to rethink everything in terms of minor tech, and that’s what you were referring to your issue, and permacomputing as another term. So I don’t know, also trying to implement this idea could be interesting to really go in a different direction, and not to replicate big, but we should maybe go in the direction of small. This might be very abstract.
Geoff (01:07:41)
I’ve also been following this discussion, of course, you know, the one of our PhD students is Marlos Tafolk. She’s been writing extensively about this, and about scaling in particular, and referring to the work of Anna Singh, 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 their glossary. I’ve forgotten what it’s called now, the thing that refers to Stewart Brand, the online glossary. What’s it called again? The Whole Earth Catalogue. But this has all those sorts of references, doesn’t it? And you can, and in Marlos’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.
Tommaso (01:09:01)
The whole idea is that, well, I don’t know if it’s the whole idea. So one of the ideas out of this discussion is also to publish sort of a repository of all these terms. We still don’t know the shape of this, but, yeah, also, you know, Then we should go to Marlos and to, and I might call this for sure. So that’s interesting how many of this actually there are, because we were talking with Silvio, and this is more in terms of publishing and Silvio PhD thesis, Silvio de Russo, is a post digital publishing, and it’s like a repository of all the reference about, you know, basic experimental publishing. But then there is also another repository that is looking very similar, it’s experimental publishing. So in that sense, I think it’s also, yeah, I don’t know, it’s a part of it.
Geoff (01:09:51)
It’s a really rich area, isn’t it? I think, you know, obviously expanded publishing, you know, the reference that most people think about is expanded cinema. And, you know, I can’t help think of how that’s used in the Hito style essay as well on poor images, you know, and think about what poor publishing would look like.
Marta (01:10:00)
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.
Geoff (01:11:03)
Thank you. I should update you on the book that we’re working on. The open book features as well, because that’s designed 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 this 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, et cetera. That’s the idea. Although we’re only at the early stages of that.