label

conditions of work

Linked to 13 items

• from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

  business modelsFirst, there is no mass public and, therefore, little to no sustainably functional business model for experimental cultural publishing. Silicon Valley venture capital-driven hypergrowth is the only model to scale up. However much we value the cultural merit of video-in-books, people just don’t buy it. Second, whether they include riso print, experimental binding, or live annotation, conditions of workexperimental publications are costly and labour-intensive. Especially given the already precarious economic cycles of the often small cultural publishing houses and initiatives, taking on more workload to experiment can be a tall order. Third, mainstream publishing has a tendency towards cultural marginalisation and self-marginalisation. To recognize other formats is to recognize other knowledge. To legitimize multimedia publishing is to legitimize different rhythms, aesthetics, and publics. Mainstream publishing is unwilling to commit to this recognition. The “multimedia turn” in publishing is decades old — ignored not because it is new, but because its implications are radical. In reaction, those involved in experimental cultural publishing often embrace this marginalisation, creating illegible one-off publications in a tiny edition, developing the most unstable of software usable for insiders only, insisting on reinventing the wheel continuously, and speaking with contempt about the general public. To be marginal is to be real, allegedly.

• from: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

  However, this strategy does not really pay off in the long run. conditions of workIt saves paper and money, but not time. The production of the digital template for merging and superimposing different works is too labor-intensive, especially since it is not transferable to other publications, which all require individual solutions. Nonetheless, Bertrand values the process that allows him an economy of complicity and an upside-down approach: “For me, it was critical to consider design in this way. I think about it from the material to the publishing project, rather than from the publishing project to the material.”²⁸

• from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 06:52 I think there’s a lot to your question. The way I set up Errant, structurally and organizationally, is also very important for the content. There is the editorial process and how I approach each contribution, and then there is an umbrella over the process of how I approach the object of the book and how I subvert that. So, there are different layers to it. To start with organizational aspects, I was the artistic director of a very large space before I started Errant. conditions of workIn my experience, the bigger the space, the more limiting it actually is. One of the things that constantly frustrated me was that when we didn’t have any budget, we still needed to fill the space, which forced artists and others involved to practically work for nothing. This is the kind of situation that is causing burnouts, and I think it is ridiculous to have to perform for the funders in this way.

• from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Yesterday, I was looking at another magazine that hadn’t heard about yet. conditions of workThere are a lot of magazines out there that say that they’re giving space to ‘other voices,’ but one of the problems that I see is that a lot of these publications don’t pay people. They say they are open to everyone, but by not paying people, you’re not open to everyone, you’re open to people who can afford to work for free, which is a very small segment of our society. It’s very important to me to pay people, and that’s one of the main focuses when trying to reach ‘other voices.’ Although I don’t think I am able to pay people the actual worth of their work, I try to do my best.

• from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 16:17 That’s the hard part. Broadly speaking, I think that event engagements are better paid than writing engagements. If everything is good, you are paid 500 euros for a 45-minute talk, and if it all goes well, you are paid the same amount to write an essay of many pages. So this doesn’t make any sense, right? This means that if you care about something other than the event, as a cultural organizer, as someone who has the chance to invite other people, you have to see that event, that thing that you organize, not just as a service that the speaker does, it’s not about the person coming to the stage. conditions of workYou’re sustaining the practitioner’s writing for other days. So how, as a cultural organizer, how can you facilitate this? Not creating burdens for the author, in the sense that you don’t ask necessarily something new. You don’t insist too much on the format of the slides. You don’t ask too many meetings in advance. I have a text about this. I can send it to you. I have like a list with this.

• from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  Silvio 27:45 Wonderful reflection. I’m very much in this line of thought in the sense that I appreciate a lot of people who have taken on this kind of idea of abandonment, jumping ship not only from the art world but also from academia. governance and ownershipOne positive side of this is that many people have lost reverence towards institutions. They realize that in most ways they don’t work. They don’t work for them. Academia, for example, and I speak again from my experience, if you want to put down ideas, is the worst place. I’m not the first to say it. conditions of workSusan Sontag already said back in the day that the best writers of her generation were destroyed by academia. What’s the concrete reality of abandonment?

• from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

  The people I’ve seen manage to cut ties with traditional institutions, when they manage, it’s an exceptional and somewhat uncertain path. I’m talking about people starting Patreon. But if you want to have a sustainable life with Patreon, you need to have an extremely huge user and fan base. And that also limits your output in the sense that the fan base, the people that will pay the five dollars every month, expect from you the same thing that you did the month before. So I think the most convincing negotiation between abandonment and staying, I found it in a book, which probably you all know, called “The Undercommons”. This idea that you stay in the institution because, to a certain extent, you cannot escape it completely, unless you are a superstar. conditions of workAnd you steal from the institution: you steal the tape, for instance. Of course, it’s metaphorical, but you create spaces within the institution without reverence to the institution to pursue your goal. And why don’t you feel guilty? You don’t feel guilty because, after all, what you are doing is what you are paid for, to do research, to write, not to not to embark on managerial jobs. These are necessary things, but if they take 100% of your time, then better go to corporate, no?

• from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

  Thomas 18:05 conditions of workEspecially with the freelancers, we had a few problems to work out, because they are often underpaid or overworked. So we couldn’t make the deadlines or there were problems on the way to the final text. It is very important not to see them as production values, but as people, and also see that you have to do care-work if you are publishing. This is very important, because you are dealing with individuals and you have to find individual ways to make it work. This also included talking on Zoom for hours about different things in the text. This is what we think is important as a practice, along with paying them and not having crunch time, a term coined by the game industry, where people are stuck in a room for weeks, programming before a big deadline. We try to avoid that by having reasonable deadlines, by having some spielraum. So we could give them more time by not having a fixed date.

• 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: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

  But nowadays, due to the popularization of generative AI tools, these kinds of lists will contain much weirder books. conditions of workLook no further than books authored by chatGPT on Amazon. There are fascinating uncanny titles like The AI Cookbook V: “Mindful Munchies: AI Wellness” by George R. Martin III, The Ai-Eye of Argon: Or, I Wrote a Novel with A.I. Assistance, But You Probably Should Not by Martin Berman-Gorvine or Chat GPT for Babies by MR Mikhail Zerafa.

• from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

  With the advent of ChatGPT, StableDiffusion, and other broadly used generative AI tools, shitpublishing created a deeper uncanny book valley. The power of Large Language Models (LLMs) overpassed the gesture of publishing appropriated materials from the internet, copypasted non-sensical rubbish, classified material, or even entire websites. LLMs can produce realistic textual artifacts that meet the expectations of what a book should look and feel like. conditions of workChatGPT is capable of producing originality, legibility, and common rhetorical and literary figures just as quickly as copypasting. Now, lazy and fast books look more like actual books and, at the same time, they have become much more unpleasant and uncanny than copypasted books.

• from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

  Three years later, while we might not be confined to our homes anymore, alternative publishing practicesvideo streaming practices have successfully infiltrated academic and artistic research publishing. This mostly happens in unassuming ways — yet another online speaker series, another webinar, a publication launch, a lecture performance, or just a regular internal meeting — hybrid setups have become an expected, although downplayed, element of the publishing workflow. traditional publishing practicesOn one hand, this entails the repurposing of devices and practices of video production, once relegated to the highly professionalized industries of film and TV, later amateurishly adopted by video game streaming, video blogging, and video essay online niches, for the broader culture and educational sector. conditions of workOn the other hand, creates the expectation for both “creative”, “immaterial” workers and traditional publishers to become a new sort of (un)professional AV technicians and producers.

• from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

  A great deal of the research we do at THE VOID conditions of workis about embracing our newfound roles as AV technicians. This has allowed us to learn that working with “content”, with “ideas” or “theories” entails working with moving images–at the very least with images of ourselves or of a guest speaking, but most probably also with memes, all sort of internet found footage, software interfaces, and produced video content such as video essays or performances. Crucially, working with images also means working with hardware: with cables, monitors, cameras, video switchers, green screens, routers, lights, cloud storage, mixers, and a long etc. If moving the conversation away from content towards publishing is an acknowledgment of the material and social conditions of the production and distribution of the former, what alternative publishing practicesTHE VOID is then trying to advocate for is an expansion of the tools and social dynamics of print and online publishing to include those of video production.