label

alternative publishing practices

Linked to 22 items

from: Clusterduck (chapter)

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 Superinternet 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.
from: Clusterduck (chapter)

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.
from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 09:03 I wouldn’t say I’m exiting, but more operating on the edges, sort of trying to dip in and dip out of academic conventions where and when possible. So a good example of that is the ongoing collaboration with Transmediale and Aarhus University where I used to work. 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. alternative publishing practicesWe select a group of researchers, often PhD students, but not necessarily, and they produce texts online and comment upon each other’s texts. Then we meet up in physical space, and we work on a sprint publication, which is expressed as a newspaper, but it’s not necessarily the kind of conventional form of a newspaper. We produce it very quickly. We write together in a collective space, and increasingly we’ve used experimental publishing techniques for this, such as web2print. Actually, a couple of times with Gijs, Open Source Publishing, but more recently with people from Varia collective, specifically Manetta Berends and Simon Browne. So we are increasingly trying to bring the process of publishing and writing much closer together, in dialogue, even in the same space.
from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. If there are mistakes, not to worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like. Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried, as the name suggests, to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. If there are mistakes, not to worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like. Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried, as the name suggests, to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

I could also talk about the software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. toolsThen we use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, to be able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative publishing practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we’re able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copyediting, or even the writing for that matter, just to have this as a very quick process. If there are mistakes, not to worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of alternative publishing practicesminor tech, and minor tech was a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech and to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like. Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content/form. We tried, as the name suggests, to think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Manetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called In-grid. alternative publishing practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole infrastructure for the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
from: Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 48:16 printed objectsThis is exactly what we tried to do with the Aesthetic Programming book, to think of the book as a computational object and to think of the printed form is one iteration of many possible versions that could be produced by multiple people. alternative publishing practicesAlso the reason I tend to work collaboratively and write collaboratively, I want to remove myself as much as possible from these 19th century models and reputational economies that are so prevalent in publishing. You know, try and develop collective names, for instance, for these kinds of things. That’s the idea of the ServPub collective as well.
from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 13:44 So, at the moment, we mostly have, I think, a browser-based practice in the sense that we use HTML and CSS as layout tools. alternative publishing practicesThen the output can be both online as a website, and can also be printed as a PDF. We also have tools that generate this HTML, so the more server-side tools can be Python, it’s mostly Python at the moment. When we go towards print, what we do is, essentially, print a website, so it generates a PDF, and then often this PDF needs to be transformed. So it’s a toolkit of PDF tools. So you have PDF2K, which allows you to take out pages, to combine PDFs. We use GoScript to manipulate the colour space, we also sometimes have new tools to manipulate, like crow boxes, but that’s very technical.
from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 40:28 governance and ownershipI think there’s federation in two ways. I guess the first form of federation is not exactly federation, but it’s about a tool being used by other people or institutes; and its usage creates a demand but also creates the energy for this tool to be supported and maintained, to make sure that it keeps on working over time. Then I feel like open source is an answer to this tool — the code being distributed and allowing other people to download the new version of the code and use it. The idea of federation, where servers exchange or copy over material from each other, is a little bit out of reach for me. Software is extremely fragile, especially if you run server-side software because it means that somewhere there needs to be a computer that is continuously executing this code, it’s being maintained and it’s being kept safe. What I think is interesting about a tool like Paged.js is that it’s client-side, it’s written in JavaScript and is an extremely stable platform, with a lot of care of backwards compatibility, which in this case would mean that old JavaScript still work on contemporary browsers. The combination of HTML and JavaScript is quite stable, but also to us, sustainability, or maintainability, is important, and I think that there is a third element there which I would say is archivability. Archivability means, from the start of the project, thinking about in which states the project will be and what would this object look like in archived form, in the sense that it can mean that a certain part of it disappears. alternative publishing practicesThis means having a hybrid publication, or a publication that can have multiple forms, both a website and maybe a printed output. You could decide that you only keep the printed output and keep the PDF and keep that as a sort of file. That is sustainable. It can also be that you freeze your website in the sense that it doesn’t depend on server-side software anymore, but that it’s only HTML files that are rendered, and they’re only static files, then your website is much easier to archive in the sense that you can copy the HTML files. It includes the images, the scripts and the media files, and you can essentially put them on a zip drive or make a copy on a cloud somewhere or an existing backup service. So I think that’s the answer for me. Currently, the answer is to make it sustainable by accepting that the object in its software form is unstable, and you need to sort of think about how you can make archivable, relatively stable objects out of it.
from: Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Carolina 54:52 alternative publishing practicesThis conversation is sort of reminding me of something that came up today. To link different conversations, we were talking to Irene de Craen and she mentioned just stopping publishing, and then we talked to Geoff Cox, who was more along the lines of thinking about poor publishing and creating shorter connections between the elements of publishing that sometimes come with more mistakes. So I’m wondering if you feel like this type of work is also doing that; I don’t know if poor is the right term, because there is (at least in my head) the vision of these kinds of tools as quite functional and less messy, at least in the user side of things. How do you see this fitting into this idea of reducing the connections between publishing elements? Geoff mentioned several projects in which the work of the writer, the editor, and the designer are a bit more mixed and closed and they happen almost simultaneously and with less time or room for things being missed. So I don’t know, do you see your work being able to synthesise those processes more directly?
from: Irene de Craen (chapter)

In other words, alternative publishing practicesI see Errant Journal as an alternative to the exhibition format. But this got me into trouble when a funding application was rejected for this reason. I’ve been rejected for funding many, many times, but one of them happened in the beginning when I said Errant Journal is like an exhibition. And they were like, no, it’s not. So I thought about it and realized that for many people, an exhibition is a collection of images — something that is visual. For me, an exhibition is something that tells a story and is able to do this from different perspectives. So I thought that was a funny experience, sometimes you learn from rejections.
from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Then everything got spoiled. So I’m not so sure that I’m the best person to talk to about what’s happening now or the future because alternative publishing practicesI’ve actually withdrawn from circulating works publicly. I’ve tried to maintain a practice of private publishing now, of unique publishing, of making one-of-a-kind things that, although informed entirely by the digital, are mostly analog in their production because they cannot be usurped, hijacked, or detorned in the worst ways possible that really just ended up happening to everything on the web that I loved. So I’m trying to just make a protected space for myself because I’ve been doing this for so long. We’re coming up on 30 years of UbuWeb, which still functions, but I’ve lost my passion for the digital pioneering that I was so invested in. I feel sad. I feel lost.
from: Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 57:20 politicsI mean, the notion of silence is violence, it was only one type of discourse that was allowed to be spoken anyway, as you’re saying, a discourse of noise was not permitted. A discourse of nonsense was not permitted. A discourse of perversity was not permitted. This was a totally contradictory notion. There is only one type of voice that’s allowed to be expressed. I find that kind of repression to be fascistic in its own way. So, it’s become complicated. alternative publishing practicesThere’s an English word that’s called woodshedding. Sometimes, guitarists in particular, would just drop out for a really long time to work on new techniques and to just go into the woodshed and disappear for a while and come out with some other thing. So I think that this notion of disappearance can be really productive and also really radical, but also, there’s just so much fucking noise. I mean, everybody now has to be so public all the time. What is that? Why do we have to be so public?
from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 08:07 I see it as crucial. traditional publishing practicesThe point in which “Entreprecariat” and small independent publishing intersect is in the fact that making a book in the traditional sense, in a way that lasts, is distributed, has an ISBN, et cetera, is very difficult. The actors that are active in making this happen are very minimal. Especially for the kind of literature that I’m interested in both reading and writing, the options are small and they are becoming smaller. Currently, that’s my primary concern. I’m sorry if I take too long, but I think it’s a crucial point to articulate my understanding of expanded publishing. alternative publishing practicesIn the past I’ve been mostly interested in the weird experimental EPUBs or booking a JPEG, booking a floppy disk, a super long form that is interactive and so on… Nowadays, it’s a bit of a disappointment that many of digital objectsthese experiments, after about 10 years, are completely forgotten unless there is someone who, again, converts them into the traditional book — by the way, that’s what happening, for example, with the book by Annette Gilbert and Andreas Bülhoff that is coming out now for Spector Books, “Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism”.
from: Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesThe thing I appreciate of independent publishing (without going too much into this) is that kind of selfless, thankless job of putting the community in the front without that ego reward that the author gets. I think that an author, at one point, should also be active on that other side and communityit would be nice if every author would dedicate part of their time to do the less visible job of bringing to the front the work of the community, the intelligence of the community. Another point that comes to mind is that very often the publisher is an individual, literally an individual. For example, the publisher of my last book is an individual who has boxes in his house, so I think something is fascinating about the fact that it’s hard to imagine that behind the publisher, very often, there is just a very generous, very committed individual.
from: Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 26:34 It’s cool to think about this, really. alternative publishing practicesIt’s like an interactive publishing somehow because you get instant feedback and you can also integrate this feedback in a live play. So I think toolsTwitch is a very interesting format now because you are very close to the community and the community aspects are central to the experience on Twitch. So if you play a game and say something critical, another person can respond instantly in the chat and you can have a discussion around that topic. But also it’s not just because there’s a community, it doesn’t have to be progressive. Of course, there are also right-wing or other communities as well. Although, there’s a chance to use that as a publisher. With streaming, you can reach a different audience or bigger audience. I think what’s interesting for people is to maybe be a part of it, but also why is it interesting to watch? Maybe because it somehow works when you watch someone doing a social thing. Maybe this is another medium, it could be like a reality soap or something like that. So you have the feeling something real is going on and something which is authentic and also reliable. So you are having a close connection to the person doing something, in this case, playing a game. Maybe you also know the game, so it’s like you are thinking about what would I do or what would I say? And you ask about the critical aspects when doing this. I think there are two opportunities. You can play critical games and look at what they bring up, or you can play a mainstream game and criticize it, but you have to make this your focus. I think this focus is not often present in the moment when you look at what kind of people play Fortnite or something like that for fun, which is also fine, but if you ask about critical aspects, you have to bring those into your stream.
from: Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 1:01:48 Maybe firstly, I would discover the value in positions that are not present yet or mostly not present. What I also mean is to see whether there are new ways of thinking about things such as video games, for example, and expanding on those areas. alternative publishing practicesWhen it comes to the publishing itself, find ways to get rid of the stand that there’s maybe like one person expert for a whole area, try to have a broader or a pool of people working on books, and to see if the books themselves, I know there’s always a problem, but how can you make them public for everyone? To have them online and in some way digitize them is very important, but maybe there would be a way to have this book presentations you can record for YouTube or something else. So people can have a summary of it and even an interactive one in some way. Or you can do an event where you have a chat function and people can react to parts of your books, maybe this could be before it is published. So maybe if you look at video game companies, they do this beta testing where they have the mostly final version of the game, but it’s not finished yet. Then people can openly play it and you can see how they react to it and how they work with it, with your game. Of course what their opinions are. Maybe this could be something in publishing a book that not only the publisher gets the text beforehand, but also some people can read it and give their impressions about it would be another thing which comes to my mind. But I think the important part is get it published in some way that all people can have it for free in some way. I know this is very difficult to do with the financing system nowadays, I know.
from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 05:27 toolsI have had four different times in the past three years where instead of publicly publishing pieces, I just leave my Google Doc open with comments left on, sharing it privately with people and saying, you can share with friends, but don’t share publicly. And those pieces were very widely read and engaged with. alternative publishing practicesThere’s an interesting thing where if information feels like you are not meant to see it, or you have to work a little harder to see it, it becomes more interesting because effectively all information online today feels like an advertisement. So if there’s something that’s not trying to be seen, that’s automatically a point of differentiation. I just keep finding a lot of success communicating that way. Some of my friends run a project called MSCHF, which does strange releases. They have a Google Doc that they title Friends and Family Discounts, and they share the Google Doc with direct links to purchase, and things will sell out from that even more than they will from a website. I think Substack is a great tool. I use Ghost for my personal website, just because I don’t want Substack to be my website because then it just looks like everything else.
from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there’s a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audience and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It could be me. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we’re almost always going to be disappointed and we’re going to lose our voice. But instead flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.
from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there’s a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audience and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It could be me. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we’re almost always going to be disappointed and we’re going to lose our voice. But instead flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.
from: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 25:21 I like the idea of making anything collectible. And the idea of making a piece of digital work something that can stand on its own as a single thing to engage with and interact with. I think the hardest thing most creative people and writers of all types struggle with is distribution and being seen. And I don’t think these are good dynamics. I think these dynamics are often problematic. alternative publishing practicesBut it’s very easy to imagine a world in which a release could offer to add referrals to the split. And you could say 10% of the split from this release will be distributed among everyone who refers a sale. And all we would need to do as a platform is to provide unique share codes when someone copied a URL. And it would just incentivize people to share. It would also incentivize spam. But I think that there are interesting ways to think about opening up the split or opening up contribution.
from: Introduction (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesAs a toolkit for expanded publishing, expert-referenced tools and resources were tagged and linked, creating a navigable framework for exploration. Recurring topics from our conversations served as organizational tags, allowing the text to be read thematically and non-linearly in its web format.