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community

Linked to 22 items

from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

Caroline 05:06 You can’t escape network media. But you can play into or against its properties. Speaking in early July, I’ll use the example of Lana Del Rey’s recent Coachella entrance, which has been one of the most iconic pop images of 2024. A motorcade of suburban leather daddies riding retro-classic (but actually EV) motorcycles carrying Lana, in a glittering cheerleader look, hair blowing in the wind, through the crowd to the stage. More than performing songs, Lana performed an image – communityan image that we can imagine her fanbase (myself included) collectively, subconsciously desiring. One could picture Lana’s fans generating a scene like that using Stable Diffusion or another text-to-image model but here she was actualizing it in real space and time so that her fans could record (rather than prompt) it. And having personal proximity to a spectacular event today is akin to witnessing a religious apparition. Lana created circumstances, raw material, in and with which her fans could make original content, content that when posted would ignite their various networks. There is something distinctly contemporary about this way of thinking about the circulation of media. I don’t typically consider an individual’s family history but it’s probably significant that in the 1970s and 80s both of Lana’s parents worked for Grey Advertising, which produced some of the most memorable mass market taglines of the late 20th century. Lana’s intuition about how to craft and transmit an effective image, how to worldbuild through image and affect, is exceptional.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

communityAnd who goes back and watches a live stream? I participated in live streams before. I guess there’s a little bit of kismet to it. Are people on? Is it hitting at the right moment? What just happened politically at that time? I keep thinking that all these forms of media are still contingent on the audience. With the rapport with the audiences and how connected they are to the subject matter. I really dislike giving video lectures to students. I’d much rather be in the room live. But that’s logistically more complicated and more expensive for everybody.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

Caroline 35:30 communityThe channels are essentially broken. The most frustrating thing is that you can have something very interesting that doesn’t catch on because people aren’t paying attention to it. And people do judge the book by its cover and it’s more important than ever because they have no time to open it up. Something I appreciated about Ljubljana is that I don’t speak Slovenian. When I saw books in English, I was like “Oh, I’m really going to spend some time and see what’s in every single one of these books”.
from: Caroline Busta (chapter)

communityThe paths of circulation don’t function anymore. I’m stating the obvious, but publishing does matter when the community is defined because then they’re expecting it. We’re actually inspired by our trip to Ljubljana and the print culture that seems to be there. But also in Slovenia, there’s a big print theory culture, which is incredible. We were thinking we’d put together some kind of little handbook of essays by guests or excerpts of guests that we’ve had on the pod, along with an updated glossary, and circulate that and just have it be print-on-demand. Then anybody in the community who wants it can have it as a record of the past year or two. It’s also interesting to them as an archival object. You just need to be very selective about when you push print, but also who you’re pushing print for. It’s probably difficult to have a business model that relies on the regular circulation of a high volume of books because that’s probably no longer so sustainable.
from: 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: Clusterduck (chapter)

39:55 The community is very diverse. Every time that 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, who is a very good designer and type designer, was very precious in the work on Meme Manifesto. There are some others, like developers, Pietro Arial Parisi, Super Internet, and Gregorio Macini, that are helping us with the development of the many websites that we did, but also intervening in other ways, because all of our collaborators are very interested in a lot of things.
from: Clusterduck (chapter)

Noel 43:40 Can I add just one thing on the community topic that we were addressing before, just one small thing? I think the Institute for Network Cultures published a book which addresses the topic quite well, which is a dark forest anthology. (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 very well 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: Dušan Barok (chapter)

Dušan 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.
from: 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 where people with similar practices can exchange, that’s an important community meeting. 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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 so there’s this gaming community and I hesitate to call myself gamer because this can be a very toxic expression or toxic term for something the community can also be. So on the one side I’m part of it and on the other side I’m criticizing it, but this gives me a room to really see tendencies and to explore where the direction of the community goes and also they take me seriously. 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 see me as not some academic person just trying to deal with the next hot topic then they’re much more likely to open up to you. 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. So this is like acting out 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, as I said, 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. This was also very good because they all responded very positively to that.
from: 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, I think. So I discovered there are some institutes now having room for dealing with games or researching games. Especially in Cologne, there’s like this 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: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

communityMaybe that’s the difference between community and fandom. Fandom is probably the more dominant model online which we mistake for community. You and I both might be fans of the same things for similar reasons. We are not in 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: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 17:05 We are not just 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, of 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: Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 29:04 There’s like never been more words published 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 thinking 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 to shrinking down to nations, to shrinking down to I think the 20th century was about 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, it’s 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.