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alternative publishing practices

Linked to 22 items

from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesSo, there's something really interesting that's emergent in the way Dark Forest spaces are operating in terms of self publication, creating an object. Of course, you know you have a built-in audience who wants to hear about these topics. But I'm almost more interested in what's happening in terms of emergent publication, a publication that is happening without knowing, publishing or producing non-consciously just by sharing a digital space, therefore sharing a language group, therefore interacting with major search engines and things in common ways. So you have a shared embedding. You hollowed out a section where all these terms relate.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

There’s of course the classic symposium. I think that what helps even more so than what’s transmitted during the lectures is who ends up showing up and having the informal corridor talk. alternative publishing practicesHow can one rethink the container beyond just the modes that we all know? What are some of the threads that you all are interested in, or I'm curious if there's anything that feels like the hot topic there?
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

Marta (00:16:34) alternative publishing practicesSomething interesting that has come up a lot is the idea of not publishing, poor publishing, low tech. In general, a reduction. I don't know if that's a container. It's a shrinking container.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI just wrote this piece on how, because of the level of information that we don't really read so much as scan and sense, and we're looking for these other cues to just get a sensibility. And then if we're interested, then maybe go deeper. Video, TikTok, or YouTube is so popular because people can scan and sense.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI would love to just be able to subscribe to a channel that would switch out. Maybe Matt and Holly are busy working on a Serpentine show (https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/holly-herndon-mat-dryhurst-the-call/), so they're publishing less and maybe we'd have somebody else who would come into that orbit and then would be able to supply to the same channel. I think there's a lot of potential there. I think Web3 is gnarly and the incentives of it were tuned towards speculative accumulation of value and did not support the social intellectual goals as well as they could have. For our part with Channel, that tool is going to be open-sourced. Hopefully somebody will build with it, or maybe it’s something that we’ll pick up again if we build out some kind of splinternet so that others in our community can also publish to it.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

Caroline (00:31:12) alternative publishing practicesThe model that comes to mind as the most viable is if we think of fashion and we think of art, we see that those with the most muscle end up being really good aggregators. So if you think of Virgil, or if you think of Kanye, or if you think of Demna, or if you think of Anna Imhoff, or if you think of even someone who's been around for a while, like Olafur Eliasson, or like someone like Trevor Paglen, or you think of these entities that have these studios or have these practices, which then are just very good at tapping lots of different people in their world. And they build their worlds through other experts. It's more horizontal.You still have these names at the top of it, but these artists are usually quite transparent about “this wouldn’t have happened without the help of X, Y, and Z people. Now go listen to their music” Or “go read their books”.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI guess my wish would be for these kinds of mega nodes, you know, the Kanye node, the Anna Imhoff node, the Demna node or whatever, for them to have publishing arms, for that to be increasingly a part. I think that's starting to be, I don't know if necessarily book publishing, but there's a sense that, in order for this world to be complete, it needs to have a good quality media arm. I don't know if that's my wish for the future of publishing, but I could see that as a viable and not uninteresting place.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesWhen it comes to theory, I'm really of the mind that people scan and sense as opposed to read. So fast theory, I think, will continue to be helpful. Schumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist and their series (The Age of Earthquakes, The Extreme Self), this obviously doesn’t have depth, but it did a very good job at gathering the zeitgeist of that moment. I can imagine this format continuing to be successful for the time being, at least. Perfect pocketbook size, something that you can flip through and get a sense of. You can take away a couple of one-liners.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

printed objectsI think there will always also be a place for very good longer form theory. I think the best longer form theory just needs to be in text because that's how we can take in information that's complex and there should still be a place for it. The books that transport themselves through you, they circulate themselves through you. You can very quickly pull out a line and in a conversation, they're kind of currency. That’s the way philosophy has always worked in a certain sense. It’s a kind of currency. It sort of infects you. It’s this idea that infects you. I do think that we’re going to be reading the very quick way. So ways to reduce and refine ideas, as sort of toxic as that sounds, is actually important for people to read deeper. alternative publishing practicesWe should consider making books that are non-linear, that pull out big ideas so that people and their attention can be secured, and they'll be enticed to read deeper.
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 Super Internet World Experience has something in common with Clusterduck and also with a very nice work from Silvio Lorusso, “A Slice of the Pie”. It was a project that we really liked, they were using a cake and everybody could try to join in the building just by posting their art on this cake. And what was happening is that if you managed to post on the cake, you could write on your CV that you exhibited at Kunsthalle, we love that. Super Internet Space does something in that direction in the sense that crypto as a technology makes it easier to assign a room to the artist that joins the project. And so to answer your question, Lorenzo, maybe it is useful to make the process easier. About the CV, we particularly loved that thing and we use that in the Meme Manifesto project as well. alternative publishing practicesThis year we were exhibiting at KW Institute in Berlin, and we asked the curator to write a very huge colophon of 300 names so that all the people who somehow (that we know) joined the project could write on their CV that they were exhibiting at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, which is, I think, the "higher" place in we got in. So we wanted to give back.To sum it up, if we can use any tool, script or whatever, we try to give back something to the community that we are interacting with.
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: Dušan Barok (chapter)

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.
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 it as one, when the printed form is one iteration of 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 from this 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: 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 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 practicesWhat people 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: 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.