label

community

Linked to 23 items

from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

Where did the promised boom of multimedia books, and with it, the advent of a new reading culture, go wrong? How do we deal with the fragmented environment we are publishing ourselves into? The singular focus on profit and power maximization of tech enterprises has become overwhelmingly clear in the past decades. So has the incapacity of the legacy publishing industry to respond to the hostile takeover. Today, the only real space of agency and alternatives can be found among communityDIY initiatives, loose collectives, renegade programmers, underpaid artwriters, small presses, local bookshops, and geeks with riso printers- in short, in cultural publishing. But is it even remotely realistic to expect a disorganized network of cultural practitioners to organize a new reading culture, in the face of big tech power?
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

Silvia 37:34 The easiest way to understand who our audience is wherever we give talks. It’s very beautiful because there you see, “OK, so they were listening to us”. This is very important. And that is what we missed during Covid. In situations like festivals or gatherings — for example, there was one very nice symposium called “Organized by None”, communityor when we go to Aksioma or the Institute of Network Cultures — we have this feeling that we are part of a greater community that is discussing the same topics as we are. But also all of us developed a community on the web. As everybody’s doing what you like, you become part of a discussion. Just like when Noel was talking about Weird Facebook, it was when we were a lot into Facebook groups and we were discussing a lot about virtual reality, technology, post-Internet, and memes. I remember that Zuckerberg had to make the Facebook group functional because of the filter bubble problem, he wanted Facebook to be more local, so we exploited that feature in the platform.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

39:55 The community is diverse. Every time we go places, we invite people as a follow-up to join our Telegram chats. communityAnd then there is a network of people who we collaborate with in our jobs. And so during the years, every time that we wanted to do something, and we wanted to collaborate, for example, with a developer or with a designer, people were adding up to the cluster family. For example, the collaboration with referencesJules Durand, an interesting (type) designer, was vital while working on the Meme Manifesto. There are others, developers like Pietro Ariel Parisi (aka superinternet), and Gregorio Magini, that are helping us with the development of websites we did.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

Noel 43:40 The Institute for Network Cultures published a book which addresses the topic quite well, a dark forest essay. (Marta: Actually, that’s my book!) We love it, it’s a very great concept to describe what online communities can be like in a positive sense. You know very well how much work it is to manage a community. communityAnd to be honest, we sometimes feel that we have to put so much work into making things work between us as a collective that we would love to put more work into community management, growing communities and addressing communities. You know how much work that is. So we don’t always have enough time to do that as we would like. But we have a lot of love and respect for anyone who does so, and there are some great people out there who are great at doing this.
from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

In terms of traffic and security, we’ve had some attacks, and it requires work on our part. It’s not easy to run a server but it’s possible: there are so many community servers communityout there and some of them are run by artists. Many communities have their own infrastructure, but they are often overlooked, invisible and considered “too geeky”. These marginal practices are crucial for working and experimenting with the web over the long term.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 24:49 communitySo, there is an interesting community that’s called “Pre-Pros Print” that tries to bring together practitioners of experimental publishing and experimental graphic design. They organise events for people with similar practiceses. There’s also the community behind the software and these tools, but at the same time, I don’t engage that much with the community of Ghostscript or Inkscape or GIMP even though I’m aware that they exist.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 1:20:56 That’s a difficult question. One thing I’m thinking about is, once again, ambivalence, and it’s a conversation that I had with Sepp Eckenhaussen from INC. communityLooking at initiatives like OSP, Hackers & Designers, and Pre-Post Print, I recognise they are communities of designers and programmers who experiment with tools but don’t necessarily have the desire to create singular tools. There’s a certain desire to develop individual experiments that do not go towards a single solution, but foster these universes or fediverses of tools more than seeing one solution for everything. What’s tricky is that there are different desires — those experimental practices also answer to a desire for experimentation. co-publishingThis is not always applicable or relevant, but it would be very interesting to think about how the two needs can be combined, supporting both the individual experiment, yet being able to communicate in a way that supports something larger, a more stable tool or development, or that it creates a knowledge and a network of both users and creators of the tools for publishing, and one that is more engaged with the materiality of the technology that we’re dealing with. For me, both Pre-Post Print and paged.js are very interesting examples. Paged.js is a plug-in used by many in experimental workflows, but this tool is also nourished by those individual experiments, specifically through plugins or by maturing this tool that tries to generate and facilitate needs for generating or creating complex printed or page objects from a browser, while not necessarily wanting to fix the full pipeline, meaning that paged.js can be used in combination with WordPress as well as with a handwritten HTML file.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

As stated above, I’ve been working with Ghiwa from Kohl and they organize what they call ‘writing circles’ through which they make their journal collectively. I have always been a bit of a loner, but working collectively is something that I am definitely considering for Errant. I have to be honest, groups kind of freak me out. communityI think making publications is the world of introverts, but I also talk to people who do translations collectively and I think that is a very good way to think about publishing. I think the outcomes of that could be very valuable, so it’s worth a try.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 50:57 With the rise of populism, it really does feel like the 1930s again, and so many of the people that were proponents of radical ideas of publishing, literature, and web have been banished and de-platformed. The avant-garde, sometime around the twenties, became villainized. Again, it’s just a repeat of what happened in America in the 1930s, in a time where fascism rose and economies collapsed, that art had to have an element of utility to it. So you’ve got social realism in America, and anybody that was affiliated in the 1920s with what was called ultramodernism, I’m thinking particularly of a group of composers, found themselves banished, de-platformed out of work, right? It’s the same thing now. communitySo I find my community marginalized, de-platformed, it doesn’t have a voice. What felt really cohesive back in around 2010 really feels completely shattered now. All the people are doing great work. We continue to do our work, but it has very little receptivity.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 24:17 I have some ideas. I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to express them in the way I would like, but I will try. I will try to put it as bluntly as I can. Scenes exist, groups exist, conformation and other-than-individuals exist, but, at the end of the day, who is the actor that pays rent, that has to pay the bills, is an individual. In most cases, especially when it comes to writing, most people write as individuals. We shouldn’t forget the individual from a practical existence point of view. governance and ownershipI’m all for the idea of nourishing communities, but this shouldn’t become a sort of romantic veil in front that hides the fact that, after all, this sustainability question is about individuals. This is even more clear nowadays if you consider that many of the association forms of the so-called “scene” — I would say that I belong to various groups of people — are very weak. communityCollectives are formed and destroyed in a couple of years. So, what is more substantial? I think that the individual wins, not because I like individuals or “the genius” idea, but simply because of a realist understanding of how practices work in this sense.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

governance and ownershipInstitutional critique, to a certain extent, is paying homage to the institution, believing in its power and its value. And we go back to the fact that people don’t even take the time to write the institutional critique, because they don’t believe in its relevance anymore. I’m going to say something a bit controversial: I think that, to a certain extent, things that change, that have an effect, are based on something that traditionally has always been powerful — and that’s culpability. Generally, when you make the critical statement, you don’t mention names, you speak of the institution, you speak of the system, while a lot of examples of what you would call “call-out culture” ostracize the toxic actor. I can give you examples, such as the Excel sheets with terrible internship situations within the design world. And then the studio, even if it’s small, has to take action and say, “Hey, I’m going to change this and that”. communityShame is a powerful source of change, it acknowledges the partial autonomy of one of the actors. It’s a dangerous path, but I think it could be useful in certain instances.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Not even to suggest the very idea of saying “This is more than a blog post, this is more than an Instagram post”. Facilitating, supporting. The problem is that language is consumed, and exhausted. The language that we have at our disposal to express this all goes under the umbrella of “care”. Care was like a tragic disease for the art world in the sense that it removed all the power from the notions of “helping out”. communityJust helping out, for example, is way better than caring for at this point given that the language has lost that power. The mission becomes helping out, helping yourself, being helped out and helping out. Now, the future. As I did with the industry, I need to make like a little parenthesis on the word future. The future is like care, it’s been manipulated too much. My view of the future is this: somehow, what we call the future futures, preferable futures, in our design field is a bit of an obsession. It’s a trap because it’s yet another way of calling the present. So, I wouldn’t spend too much time defining the future. I think that this urgency to think of the future is fabricated by extrinsic needs. It’s not our urgency to think of the future. Everywhere we look around, we are pushed to think of the future, we go to the cinema and we think of the future. You can call it future, helping out, wanting to call, wanting to have that small post into at least an essay, into something published. I don’t know. Call it the future. Call it present. I don’t care. Nowadays, future-orientedness wastes energy.
from: 07 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: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

communityBut some ways allow the node of the community to be conceptualized both as a passive receiver of the publication (a buyer in the marketing sense, who cares if they read the book or not), but also as someone active in reproducing the scene. To me, it’s a nice exercise to sit down as an author and say “Who is this group of like-minded people that I interact with?” Many are in this room, so I’m happy to participate exactly for this reason. It gets very simple when we get rid of certain mystical terms. And I think a lot is about getting rid of certain mysticism in order to understand the urgency. But I know that in consortia, you have this problem of having to come to an agreement and that takes a lot of time, right?
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 20:24 I think this also applies to other areas. If you’re like a biologist of course you have an interest in biology and are talking to other people interested in that topic. This is also true for games, communityI’m a gamer myself and I hesitate to call myself that because it can be a very toxic term. So on the one hand I’m part of it and on the other I’m critical of it, but this gives me a room to really see tendencies and to explore the direction of the community. So I have talked to gamers and I reached out to them for panels, for example, to a store owner who sells these classic game consoles, and if they don't see me as some academic person trying to research the next hot topic then they’re much more likely to open up to me. Of course, it’s important for me to think about them when I publish something. I do not want to only write for an academic bubble. Community work was present on the panels but they are, as I tried to explain, part of our publishing practice. So this is like practicing what we are writing about. I would say this was the one community I was part of. For us it’s not only researchers, it’s also other people writing text. So people who produce text in some way, we are the other community and we were also of course dealing with them, reaching out to them. A special thing for our anthology was that we were handpicking them: we had some topics we thought were important and reached out to experts to write about them, something they responded positively to.
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

communityThen I discovered a small community gathering around game studies and doing practical or theoretical things in this area. It all started with my PhD where I discovered there are some institutes which now accomodate people working with or researching games. Especially in Cologne, there’s a big bubble of researchers. I think I wrote an introduction and also a paper for Benjamin Beil, and he’s one of the professors here at University of Cologne. I was looking at trauma representation, as I said. Yet now I would say that one has to go beyond that.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

communityMaybe that’s the difference between community and fandom. Fandom is probably the more dominant model online which we mistake for a community. You and I both might be fans of the same things for similar reasons. We are not in a community with each other but our fandom makes us co-aligned in some ways. co-publishingWith Metalabel I’ve always found it important to make a distinction, to say that this model of releasing work like a label is not to say that you are collaborating, necessarily, but as to say you are co-releasing.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 17:05 We are not just a collective, we are not just individuals, we are both. We are learning how to be both. We’ve had a mode, especially in the West, for the past, who knows how long, sixty years, of thinking there’s one way. We’ve been individual-maxing. We hit the apex, and it was kind of lonely and not that interesting. So now, people react to their conditions. There’s the K-Hole quote I always go to. community“Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are individuals and have to find their communities.” That is the person online today. That’s how the world is being remade. It used to be one person, one vote. On the internet, it’s one identity, one vote. The notion of personhood or what something with rights is has changed. And I think all of society will, over time, be remade in that notion of what a person is.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 29:04 There’s never been more words published in a day in history. It’s a content bonanza and an economic catastrophe at the same time. I think the future of publishing is incredibly bright. It just requires us to think of it, not just books and physical magazines, or even ad-supported magazines. I communitythink if we think of the individual writer or the small band of writers, we’ve gone from a world dominated by empires shrinking down to nations, and shrinking down to the 20th century corporations largely shaping the world. I think the 21st century is about small groups of people shaping the world. It keeps getting smaller, what you can punch out of. We’re still in this mindset to be legit in publishing. You need to be one of the big four, a big magazine with an office in midtown Manhattan. That’s just not it. Fitzcarraldo, is like 10 people. Other Internet, 12 nerds. That’s who shapes culture. That’s where it’s going. People are doing amazing work. The impact of their words is huge. The economics of it are probably pretty good altogether, but it’s so diffused. It’s so not what we’re used to.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

printed objectsChimeras was a statement, and an experiment in distributed cognition. Cognition is a networked activity, referring to the extensive capacity of living organisms to control and organize their internal structure while establishing their limits. Chimeric cognition, as the book imagined it, is accomplished through a sophisticated interaction of semi-independent parts—the chimera’s limbs and heads—that function beyond the usual frameworks of traditional advanced thought processes, without aiming for complete integration in a cohesive whole. The composite nature of chimeras and their capacity to navigate between different realms and symbolic domains, such as life and death, earth and sky, of the familiar and the monstrous, did not merely provide a convenient metaphor, but also a model for hybridity reflecting the distributed qualities and the amalgamation of various independent traits. communityChimeras activated an expanded network of peers to think together through a complex topic. As one of the book’s contributors, the philosopher Anne-Françoise Schmid suggested that a model of collaborative interdisciplinary research is particularly fitting in the context of complex systems where multiple prismatic perspectives are needed to account for a research object composed of different models, incompatible scales, and heterogeneous objects. sustainability of workflowsChimeras didn’t attempt to foster a common language in order to bridge the gap between different regimes of knowledge production, but aimed instead to make of this gap the very same condition of working across disciplines. conditions of workThe book was shaped spontaneously from multiple short-form contributions and artworks—the independent but interrelated components and processes—in a relatively asynchronous and decentralized way, which in other media expressions would have made the process either too expensive, too slow, or extremely dependent on institutional support to initiate.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

And yet, open-source tools address only part of the problem. The Expanded Publishing Consortium project aspires to explore how books can also reshape the ways cultural stakeholders can work together. What was in Chimeras an experiment in distributed cognition can, in the context of Expanded Publishing, be scaled one level up. communityUnlike a network consisting only of artists and authors from different areas of research and expertise, the Expanded Publishing project involves federated stakeholders with different professional capacities in book publishing: small presses, reading communities, and self-publishing initiatives, but also contemporary art centers, nonprofit organizations, research institutes, and university departments that use the book format to disseminate their work, consolidate their audiences, and maintain an institutional memory of their activities.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

Perhaps what is suggested by the expansion of publishing practices, to include online video production and distribution, is to start considering often behind-the-scenes engagements with media as opportunities for community making and engagement. In short, making public the production process. But if we take this mantra seriously, it creates several unresolved challenges for THE VOID. The most relevant for us at the moment is that of online hosting and distribution infrastructure. We have slowly migrated from Twitch to PeerTube as toolsour primary streaming platform, mostly thanks to our collaboration with UKRAiNA TV, a member of the StreamArt Network (SAN) we are also part of, and who had an instance running on university servers. SAN communityis a collective strategy to distribute know-how, labor, and infrastructure,hopefully to be able to sustain these sorts of streaming/video publishing practices in the long term and position them as an alternative governance and ownership logic for online publishing, opposed to that of corporate social media.