chapter
Dušan Barok
4 July 2024, 12:00 PM
Introductions
07:40 Hello everyone, it’s a big pleasure to be part of this. To briefly introduce my background: I studied Information Technologies back in Slovakia where I grew up. Parallel to my studies, I was involved in the local culture scene, mostly between art and technology, as part of the non-profit sector. printed objectsIn the late 90s, I started a small culture magazine, but then we lost the funding for printing. A friend introduced me to HTML and I realised that it could be a better solution than paper because, at that time, people already had access to the web. So it became quite exciting, and that’s how I discovered web publishing. We would redesign the first website, called referencesKoridor, every few months. digital objectsIt was so exciting to discover the ways websites could be organised and designed. We would use the word “portal” at the time. I was still living in Bratislava when I was part of this collective. The idea of setting up a new website that would document our work emerged, which then became Monoskop, two or three years after Wikipedia entered the market. toolsSuddenly, there was this exciting software where people could put stuff online without understanding programming, FTP and all the kind of nerdy things only accessible to a few. This was before content management systems, and already parallel to blogging. At the time, people still struggled to publish online, so we got quite excited. This MediaWiki installation is still there and operating.
In the early 2010s, I did my Master’s in Rotterdam at the Piet Zwart Institute, a program which is now called XPUB but at the time was called Networked Media. It was an eye-opener, especially in terms of using free software and an interventionist way of working with technology, and tools that built things. It involved writing HTML files in the text editor and not using any kind of pre-made systems, using Terminal and doing prototyping, which was very influential for my future and current work. I did my PhD in the Netherlands and I’m defending the thesis later this year. However, this was a different world — I entered the world of contemporary art museums and matters of conservation of mostly media installations, which have different needs compared to the classical art forms like painting, sculpture, drawing or even photography. With this kind of media installations, there’s always something different, such as a screen, different kinds of software, or different video formats. It’s always about adapting to the situation. Yet from the conservation perspective, you always need to follow the artist’s intent and stand for the truth of what the work is.
I was part of a larger research group, looking into how to support this process with documentation. I spent some time in museums, such as SFMOMA, Tate and other places for a few weeks, where I found out that they indeed set up Media Labs inside museums to care for this kind of art because there’s more and more of it. This expertise needs tools and frameworks where these works are being taken care of. It was interesting to find out that they would use Wikis, for example, SFMOMA would use MediaWiki to document media installations. They’re very easy, quite modular tools, they are flat so you don’t follow timelines like blogs. Instead, you have a list of things with a lot of links to go deeper and you can structure the content very differently compared to timeline-based publishing platforms. So this was maybe my contribution to the field of art conservation, as my thesis rotates around documentation practices behind museum walls. toolsInstitutions document these installations using their means, but when they started to use this content publishing — CMS content management systems, such as Media Wiki, WordPress or others — they are moving towards what others do with these publishing systems and often end up publishing documentation that represents or even presents works online. There are more and more examples of this, for instance, what Rhizome did with Net Art Anthology or LiMA in Amsterdam did with their digital canon.
Why: Politics of Publishing
17:08 Thank you. I also wanted to think through the idea of a living archive. We tend to see archives as something frozen or stopped in time, things that are stored in a dark room to be looked at and touched with gloves. How do you see new advancements and new publishing ways of fostering living archives?
18:24 In a way, digital objectsprint is archiving of the digital, so the digital is changing all the time. Oftentimes it disappears and it kind of lives in the web archive. However, even with live websites, things are being reformatted, designs, content and embedded media are changing, and so on. So with digital publishing, you never really have a final version, unlike the print. So at least in my practice, I see the print as a kind of archiving of digital publishing. This is also how any print publishing operates, working with the PDF as an intermediary between content production and the print.
Being in it for many years, of course, one can see how the environment and navigation changed — I would say that in the 2010s, people lived through the era of social media, which was more and more sucking attention. social mediaPeople would eventually stop clicking on those links and basically, we would just end up scrolling. This kind of silos would even prevent people from exiting it. It essentially shrinks the experience of the web to five or so websites, everything else being just invisible or sucked into these social media platforms. Today, it’s getting even worse with AI and how AI tools are transforming the logic of the search. In the past, we would use search engines by entering a few keywords, pushing enter and then getting results. Now we are pushed towards writing queries with a question mark at the end, this idea of a chatbot or talking to an entity and getting answers. To answer questions, AI vacuums the web and cuts the sources, without really pointing to the source of information.
I would say the question for digital publishing or web publishing is how to operate in this context, which I would say is very different to what the web was like 10 years ago. The experimental artistic approach would be, for example, to develop our own chatbots, train our own AI tools and just figure out how to work with AI, in a sustainable way that doesn’t burn the planet and credit the sources. Not in a general knowledge AI, but a focused, topical AI. If artists build these tools, they will treat what they do as a data set for training bots. In classical pre-publishing, this would be the type of thinking in making anthologies or where we collect different sources and bring them together under a thematic umbrella. alternative publishing practicesMaybe it will be interesting to think about publishing today as creating and producing content-based datasets that can train AI to serve different purposes and different audiences while being aware of what’s happening with this Silicon Valley approach, and how to do publishing sustainably.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
25:43 It’s interesting that you mentioned this because, for instance, where I live in the Netherlands, there are already some museums that are using AI to make archives more accessible, passing a little bit of that threshold of archival knowledge where you have to know how to search from a specific archival studies perspective. Then you can just ask the archive the way you’d ask a chatbot. In that way, it’s interesting to think of these technologies serving a more cultural purpose and within the fields that this consortium serves. How do you see these infrastructures also related to linked open data and how can we create stronger networks in between each of these repositories of data?
26:50 I was never good with linked open data, to be honest, for better or worse. Now, when people are looking at so-called shadow libraries, such as Monoskop, and Library Genesis, they say that really good work has been done to make these things available. On the other side, we end up feeding ChatGPT and all the Silicon Valley companies that generate a huge value out of this free labour. This is an interesting argument to think about not just in terms of shadow libraries, but in terms of anything being published online and to see what we can do about it. With Monoskop in particular, there are a lot of pages and files but this metadata is not as standardised as Wikidata is. There is a classical digital library, and there is always some kind of metadata, but it’s meant for a full-text search, I never thought it would grow this big. At the size where it is now, one can find anything with a full-text search, but the dataset produced by Monoskop is useless for training bots because there’s no structured data, it’s more of a collage of different texts, images and PDFs. Of course, on the other hand, this might have been a lazy approach but at the moment it looks counterproductive to what’s happening on the web, how this content is being sucked by these AI vacuum cleaners. But then, I’m also saying that we should build data sets. So I would say, yes, there’s a way to think about this without a grand-scale vision that it has to be an all-knowing machine.
I will just give you an example of one little project, which was done as part of Monoskop: an anthology of articles about shadow libraries. This is a data set example that can be thought of as something to be developed into a chatbot. So on the Monoskop Wiki, there are sections of shadow libraries, and lots of article mentions. So I would take all these articles, I would convert them in Markdown, and put them in one directory. Then I would run this TF-IDF algorithm. This is quite an interesting algorithm for finding words or expressions that are specific to each text. So if you search for Infrapolitics, it gives you Nanna Thylstrup’s text.
34:30 It’s interesting because, at the moment, we are taking notes and making a hybrid report that produces a digital and a print publication using a tool developed in collaboration with Open Source Publishing in Brussels and it has that function as well. So, we are thinking through the same things.
35:04 For text or a corpus analysis, it’s of course, one of the basic algorithms, but I think it’s very powerful. You can twist or tweak the algorithm in whatever way you find interesting. It worked for this anthology, but it’s a corpus analysis tool as its main interface. If I would do this now, I would probably end up with some kind of chatbot.
Who: Community of Publishing
35:44 I enjoy thinking about these new structures, and also new ways of reading. Tagging, and nonlinear readings, are ways that we can put publishing within new readerships and acknowledge this through communities, to see that these wikis are very dependent on collective labour. How do you see the sustainability of these practices in the longer term? How does one even maintain something like Monoskop in a longer term within a group of people and keep it as a sustainable space for publishing?
36:43 It was possible to sustain Monoskop for this long because we run and operate our own infrastructure. We have our own computer server, which was first installed in 2008. We don’t even have a rack. It’s not a virtual machine, it’s a real piece of metal, sitting in Prague in a small server house. It’s not just Monoskop but almost 100 different kinds of domains, platforms, and websites that run from the server, and we are two admins. I’m not good with server administration, but I’ve been learning this for many years, and I know how to set up an email account and a domain. sustainability of workflowsWe operate the server and we have control over the hardware and software environment that makes these websites possible to serve the public audience. The server itself is operated by two of us, but we are part of the NGO which has been running a festival for many years, so there is a legal body attached to the server. Partially, it used to operate from grants when we do events. Now it’s mostly donations, and we have one or two websites for larger cultural initiatives that give us some fees. We’ve been able to run it for 15–16 years. business modelsIf Monoskop were sitting on a commercial provider, I think they would cut us off sooner or later. In terms of the traffic and security we’ve had some attacks, and it requires work from our side, so I would say it’s not easy to run a server but it’s possible: there are so many servers and some of them are operated by artists. communityThere are lots of different communities that have their own infrastructure and I mention this because this is often overlooked, invisible and considered “too geeky”. It’s crucial to work with the web on a long-term basis and experiment with it.
Discussion
42:30 Thank you so much. I saw an interview with Femke Snelting, she was talking about how we only see infrastructure when it’s broken or when there’s a problem because we think of it as something so seamless and eventually invisible. This might be a good time to pass on the mic to the rest of the table. Does anyone have any questions?
42:57 I would like to know more about the editorial process. Of course, the platform is open to everyone, but I’m curious to know how you collaborate with collaborators, and how the editorial stream is conceived and processed. How do you or your collaborators select content? I’m also curious to know more about the workflow.
43:33 We never had a clear definition of what we were doing. So it’s not clear if it’s a publishing project, documentation, or artwork. No one knows what Monoskop is. I would say it was very much socially determined from the start, it started in a physical space, a media lab called Burundi in Bratislava 2004 and the first users were members of this place. When somebody would make an account on this Wiki, members would very likely contribute something because it’s relevant to what’s already there. This contribution could be changing information in an article adding some contextual information, a file that was missing or creating new articles. It’s always been relatively organic, I look at the recent changes almost every day to see what’s happening and very rarely need to delete stuff or talk to users who I don’t know in real life. If something goes off, then I edit the article and the authors accept it. Sometimes I email authors but normally they contribute to Monoskop mostly through social links. I almost always work with a few people who know the subject much better. For the sound art section, I worked with two people from the start. There is a section about federated networks. I talked to people who use them from the start and asked what should be there, so mine is mostly an editorial role. I have also worked with Ilan on the conceptual comics section and it was a technical help, mostly, although he can do almost everything by himself.
49:11 I started an archive of comics and I discovered Anna’s Archive which you probably know very well. Anna’s Archive is a huge repository containing 5% of the books that have been printed in Humanity. There are so many resources out there: LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Anna’s Archive — I don’t want to exaggerate — but as a researcher, it’s quicker for me to go get the books in Sci-Hub or papers in Sci-Hub and books in LibGen than go through my university’s library access, which is antiquated. I need to ask for permission and then the book comes two weeks later. Piracy works better than everything that is around. If Monoskop Log started now in 2024 and you were 25 years old, and because the generational question has come up, how would you make it? I have a feeling that it will not be enough to just put media online, we need to find other ways to deal with distribution and dissemination of knowledge. So what is the next step now? How do you distil all this knowledge in ways that are both democratic and with the same ethical principles that Monoskop started with?
49:21 Yes, it’s true that especially Monoskop started with discovering Russian shadow libraries, where suddenly you’d find lots of media theory books that we heard about, but never really had access to. This was in the late 2000s. There was a lot of excitement about putting things public. In 2008-2009, Gigapedia had hundreds of thousands of books, and it made sense to copy some of those files into something more thematic, the same goes for other large websites and the entire web. The majority of what is in Monoskop was always copied from somewhere, but it was credited where it came from. It was always the act of creating our context from what’s out there. So in a way, we’re still doing the same thing. The web has always been huge, and we are bringing very small parts of what’s out there, together in one page. I think this kind of filtering, selecting, highlighting and re-contextualising these things makes a difference. I would say it’s still relevant if it’s a data set or training AI, like what you do with conceptual comics. There are so many comic productions out there, but you came up with a specific idea of looking at comics through this lens of conceptualism. Then this created a separate library, which became a reference point for so many people.
54:08 I’m curious to know about your relationship with publishers. What’s your take on hosting books or PDFs of other publishers? Do you have a collaboration, silent communication with them or legal problems?
54:49 That’s a big question! For example, there is a multimedia institute — MaMa — in Zagreb that has been around for many years. They do amazing stuff with the public. Hardt and Negri published a theory book with them in Croatian in 2003. They find books that are in English and a few months later, translate them. In the 2010s, I visited MaMa and found out they really like Monoskop, so they decided that they would share all their publications with us. Each time there was something new, they would send me a PDF and it became like a huge MaMa library. printed objectsThey also promoted this in their own media, that one can always buy the book or download it from Monoskop. They never really went into selling PDFs, they stick to the print. It’s been working out very well. This is one really good example of how free digital distribution supports print sales because the more people read it, the more it’s discussed.
If you’re a researcher and you want to reference or find something, then you need a PDF. But if you want to read the book cover to cover, you just prefer print. That’s how it will probably always be. Of course, there have been some cases of copyleft publishing, yet in terms of copyrighted books that appear on Monoskop, as a general rule, writers are happy that more people can access their stuff. As for the publishers it depends, some don’t like a certain book to be there, and we delete the PDF. Sometimes we have a longer discussion, but sometimes it’s very short, and I delete it, but of course, these books are in other libraries — maybe they don’t know about it or maybe they do, it’s also not like everyone just searches for a book online before they buy it. People look for books online because they’re mostly researchers and they need to quickly find something. In that sense, I think that selling ePUBs doesn’t help so much.
1:00:13 I think you already answered my question and you showed a very good example of a collaboration with publishers. But my question is also about bad collaborations. I don’t know if you saw the news, but Internet Archive was forced to remove half a million books from their archive because of a lawsuit in the US: the big publisher corporation asked for all the books to be removed. I think this is a tragedy in this context. Have you ever encountered these kinds of issues and if you did, how did you deal with them? You said something about removing some books, and your context is slightly different, but maybe I can expand on what Lorenzo was saying before for example, some of the shadow libraries in Italy are banned. One cannot access Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. You can access them with a VPN, of course, but it’s becoming more difficult. I live in the Netherlands and the same is happening here. How do you position yourself in this? Have you ever encountered issues like that? How do you counteract?
1:02:34 Publishing is a very broad term, also if you look at books. Monoskop is not the website where you would find blockbuster books that were made as consumer products in the first place. You can probably find those on the Internet Archive, which might be why it triggered these publishers so much because maybe they were thinking in terms of pure commerce. So this is just one side of the story, that Monoskop is very kind of niche in terms of big publishing — we don’t have big publishing because it’s not relevant for this project. There’s still a difference between academic publishing, which is mostly publicly funded, and other types of publishing, which is funded by publishers not connected to university or academia. Sci-Hub mostly consists of publicly funded content coming from researchers at universities. governance and ownershipI think it’s ethically wrong in general to see what happened to the whole academic publishing field, that it ended up with five large publishers that own all journals. These university libraries, of course, need to cut down access to a lot of these journals or whole packages of journals because they just can’t afford it. What Sci-Hub does is almost a necessity today for researchers worldwide to survive, otherwise, the life of an academic is very limited, even with access to university libraries. But with other publishers who are not blockbusters and who are not academic, it’s mostly about the revenue. As I said, I think it’s a case-by-case thing. If the book is good, the free digital distribution does help the sales. There are examples such as books by Alessandro Ludovico that are openly accessible. I think his first book, “Post-Digital Print”, went through three or four editions and the book was launched on the Monoskop Log. On the day of the book launch, they gave me a USB stick, I put it on Monoskop Log and that was the first day the book was published. He did the same with these new books with MIT Press, it’s open access, and I think it does help the sales. So if the book is not good and it appears online, people might see that it’s just not good and they will not buy it, but it’s really hard to talk in general. I would say that I totally support all publishers and I don’t do it to distort them, I do this to support them and to give visibility and access to their work because maybe they can’t do it, even if they would want to, which was also a case I heard many times.
1:08:04 It looks like if you’re on Monoskop or a shadow library, it means that the book deserves attention, so it can be a way to give value to a publication.
1:08:18 Yes, especially on the Monoskop Log, sometimes people go, “bingo!” if they find their books published there. I think there is some truth to it, that the more it gets known, the more it helps the sales.
1:08:53 Dušan, you brought up open-access publishing. As an academic, I see there’s a new ideology evolving around it. We tried to publish a book with De Gruyter, which is an important academic publisher, and they asked for 10,000 euros for open-access. It’s a new business. Why do I have to fundraise as a researcher?
1:09:25 They can’t afford to tell you these kind of numbers. If you work with a normal, small-scale, semi-scale publisher, they would say “We can talk about open access”, but they would never ask you for 10,000 euros.
1:09:49 Exactly. I would like to contrast open access and piracy again. What is the new term for piracy? I thought it was an interesting way to remain in the system, but I’m more interested in things outside of the system with unsolicited networks of distribution. It doesn’t have to be a professional quest or something you have to pay, ask your university to find money to open access and I’m not accessing anything. I use proprietary things and then I put it on piracy. I send links to everyone. I provide access to SCDB, I just give it to every researcher who asks for it. I’m wondering if you see this tension also in Monoskop. It can be co-opted by saying it’s very important. For me, my ethics are: no, you should refuse interpretation. To say that you are involved in piracy, you are not involved with open access. Whatever they put away, you’ll take whatever you find interesting and put it on your website without any open access.
1:11:18 There is a language that developed around open access, with colours: golden, yellow and green. For example, my experiences with publishing in the Netherlands: I was at the university there and then we managed to publish two articles in journals which are not open-access. But the Netherlands already at the time — this was five, six years ago — had a program where it was relatively easy to tell the journal that I’m from a Dutch University and they connect to it and charge them, so I didn’t need to do much. Maybe they had only a limited amount of papers they could support every year, a few thousand. I don’t know how is it now, but this was the case at the time in the Netherlands. I’m not an expert with open access, it’s probably better if you talk to someone else, Janneke Adema or Gary Hall, who spent a lot of years researching this. Open access is like a really broad field within which you have kind of different modalities and different economies and I don’t know how they exactly operate.
What: Future of Publishing
1:13:45 We talked a little bit about the future of publishing, like you said, in the beginning, which is usually something we bring up at the end of these conversations. Could you share one final short thought on the future? Where do you see publishing going, and where you would like to see it go?
1:14:23 In terms of digital publishing, the websites have, in general, a three-year lifespan which is very short, due to many reasons. Sooner or later, we will need to look at archiving platforms digitally. There is a project, called Art Doc Web that I worked on recently in Berlin. It was a prototype, the idea was to create a web archive of artist websites based in Berlin, and we approached 20 of them. I collaborated with one other person, we were responsible for developing web archives and ideas around web archiving of platforms or websites. I was surprised to see that the tools are already out there that are relatively easy to use. They’re open source. We only get permissions from the artists, - they didn’t send us anything: we would just go to the website, run this tool, and it would, for example, scrape, or make an archive of somebody’s Instagram account. Each of these web archives is just one file, when I click on it, a wacz file is loaded, opened and rendered in a browser in a way that it feels like it’s a live website, but it’s not live. Then you can search for images and text within this archive website, so it has functionality. I would emphasise the importance of thinking about these platforms, that we want them to be live, to have things added to them. At the same time, we also want to keep them — so this can go in parallel. This is a small bit about web archiving and how exciting this field is.
1:17:47 Absolutely. I think this is relevant as a lot of artists use social media to catalogue, to show their work. Silvio, who we talked to this week, is using Instagram stories to do a lot of design critique. These places are also incredibly fragile, so then it’s also the role of cultural work and publishing to preserve them. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, your projects and your thoughts on this. We will keep in touch with you about the future of this project. We’re using these conversations as research material so we can keep developing a model for expanded publishing and we’ll keep in touch with you.
1:18:45 Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.