label

digital objects

Linked to 19 items

• from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

  Finding or, more likely, sustainability of workflowsdeveloping robust alternative infrastructures for multimedia and transmedia publishing will not be easy, having to take on all of these problems, simultaneously, but, as we have observed before, it is our one point of hope. On the bright side, many exciting experiments are happening as we write (and as you read). In the recent post-Covid years, digital objectswe have especially noticed a latent breakthrough in the areas of liveness and the moving image. The question of how to integrate video in books has always hovered over the history of the unbound book, but has never really come to a serious culmination. Until recently. The 2020–2023 isolation and sheer amount of online cultural programs, and the question of what to do with this content, seems to have set a new tendency in motion, or at least propelled it to much greater reach. This book you are currently holding (physically or digitally) is dedicated to this new tendency.

• from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 07:40 To briefly introduce my background: I studied Information Technologies in Bratislava, Slovakia, where I grew up. Parallel to my studies, I was involved in the local non-profit culture scene, mostly between art and technology. In the late 90s, I started a small cultural magazine, but we soon lost the funding needed for print runs. A friend introduced me to HTML and I realised that it could be a better solution than paper because, at that time, people already had access to the web. That’s how I discovered digital objectsweb publishing. We redesigned our first website, which was called referencesKoridor, every few months, exploring different ways it could be organised and designed. At the time, we called it a “portal”. The idea emerged to set up a website that would document our work, which grew into Monoskop, two or three years after Wikipedia arrived. Suddenly, there was toolssoftware that allowed people to put things online without understanding programming. This was before content management systems like WordPress existed. The MediaWiki installation we set up is still there and operating. It has grown into a huge, lively, multilingual wiki for arts and studies.

• from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 18:24 In a way, printed objectsprint is archiving of the digital, while digital objectsthe digital is constantly changing. Oftentimes it disappears, or only remains in the web archive. However, even with live websites, things get reformatted, designs, content and embedded media change. So, in digital publishing, unlike in print, you never really have a final version. This is also how print publishing operates, working with the PDF as an intermediary between content production and the print.

• from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 26:50 I was never very good at linked open data. digital objectsNow, when people look at shadow libraries, they say that really good work has been done to make these things available. On the other hand, we end up sustainability of workflowsfeeding ChatGPT and similar companies that get a lot of value out of this free labour. This is an interesting argument to think about not just in terms of shadow libraries, but in terms of everything that is published online. What can we do about it? Monoskop consists of a lot of pages and files but metadata is not as standardised as Wikidata. It has a classic digital library, and there is always some kind of metadata, but it’s meant for a full-text search. I never thought it would get this big. At the size it is now, one can find anything with a full-text search, but the Monoskop dataset is useless for training bots because there’s no structured data. It’s a collage of different texts, images and PDFs. It may have been a lazy approach but at the moment it looks counterproductive to what’s happening on the web, how content is being sucked up by AI. At the same time, I think we should build datasets. There is a way to think about it without the grand-scale vision that it has to be an all-knowing machine.

• from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 54:49 That’s a big question! For example, the multimedia institute — MaMa — in Zagreb been around for many years. They do amazing things with the public. Hardt and Negri published a theory book with them in Croatian in 2003. They find books that are in English and, a few months later, publish them in translation. In the 2010s, I visited MaMa and found out they like Monoskop. They decided that they would share all their books with us. Each time there was something new, they would send me a PDF and their Monoskop page became a large MaMa library. digital objectsThey are also open about it: one can always buy the book or download it from Monoskop. They don’t sell PDFs, only the print copies. business modelsIt turned out that free digital distribution helps print sales, because the more people read the books, the more they're discussed. digital objectsIf you’re a researcher and you want to reference or find something, you need a PDF. printed objectsBut if you want to read the book cover to cover, print is better. That’s how it will always be.

• from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

  Dušan 54:49 That’s a big question! For example, the multimedia institute — MaMa — in Zagreb been around for many years. They do amazing things with the public. Hardt and Negri published a theory book with them in Croatian in 2003. They find books that are in English and, a few months later, publish them in translation. In the 2010s, I visited MaMa and found out they like Monoskop. They decided that they would share all their books with us. Each time there was something new, they would send me a PDF and their Monoskop page became a large MaMa library. digital objectsThey are also open about it: one can always buy the book or download it from Monoskop. They don’t sell PDFs, only the print copies. business modelsIt turned out that free digital distribution helps print sales, because the more people read the books, the more they're discussed. digital objectsIf you’re a researcher and you want to reference or find something, you need a PDF. printed objectsBut if you want to read the book cover to cover, print is better. That’s how it will always be.

• from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

  Geoff 38:45 digital objectsMy interest in that is more conceptual. ServPub is an attempt to think through what autonomous publishing might look like. Our speculation following a book that Winnie and I did together called Aesthetic Programming, which was published by Open Humanities Press. alternative publishing practicesWe released all the materials, all the writing on GitLab with the invitation that you could do anything you wanted with the contents of this book. You could add a chapter, you could rewrite it, you could fork it essentially. Some people took up that invitation. We’re really interested in that as a model of academic publishing, where you just produce an iteration of a book and someone could then make their own.

• from: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

  digital objectsThe further extension of that was to think not only about releasing the contents on Git and trying to think of a book as a computational object, as a sort of iterative form that can offer itself to different versions, but also to think about the technical infrastructure for that. To actually run everything on our own server, to learn how to become a systems administrator as a way of exerting more autonomy over the technical processes through which publishing takes place. So not relying on outsourcing to other technologies, but to develop a server, run it, use it as a portable device that you can take into workshops, but also to think about the whole mechanics of publishing as a system within which you can exert more control over, as opposed to publishing with Springer or something like this, where control is almost completely removed from you. So that was the conceit, but it’s more like a conceptual experiment than thinking of it as a model for a particular publisher. But then the small amount of money we’ve got from Coventry University with this Open Book Futures project is to work with Minor Compositions. It is a publisher in print, even though practically it’s run by one person.

• from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

  Irene 54:08 As for your first question, I’m used to working with artists because of my background. I’m trying to create a situation where people feel very free to just come with me with whatever, including artists wanting to expand on the publishing platform. You can leave it up to artists to come up with ideas. I was very happy that during the last issue, we published a sound piece from someone who responded to an open call with digital objectsthe idea of a sound piece, which in a way is separate from the publication, but it’s still part of the publication. So I thought that was nice and was happy to be able to give the space to this person to produce, and I was able to pay them for that. So, you can let the artist or the contributors lead. Sometimes, the limitation is cost. But overall, the people I work with are very happy to have their work appear in a physical paper publication.

• from: 07 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, book as 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: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

  Thomas 57:16 digital objectsThere’s a game called Citizen Sleeper. And it resembles a book more than a game. It has very nice graphics, but not moving graphics. It’s like standing still all the time. It’s perceived from a single view, and you see the characters that are talking. Other games did this as well, while thinking about how to present text in a modern way. So maybe there’s a connection. I think there were experiments in books, trying to look like Instagram or something like that, which doesn’t work very well most of the time. Maybe there’s formats which somehow copy back game text into a book, or the book cover or the marketing of the book. You could also produce a game which is related to your book, although this could fail because people are used to good quality now. I’m also thinking of graphic novels, which are classic books where you have some level of interactiveness as a reader. If you want to publish in-game or with games, you have to have people who really know what the game is about or how games work. If you want to appeal to the audience playing games, you have to have people experienced with games assisting you.

• from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  digital objectsIf I think about the future of Metalabel, I believe physical books and physical magazines, and physical media of all kinds are important. And I celebrate them. But I don’t think that that’s an audience that can grow hugely from collectors. But I think digital can be a huge space of growth with formats. Creating digital formats that feel legit and make an artist feel legit, and that make a consumer feel willing to pay for them. And that’s where I think there’s white space and opportunity. And any creation of viable formats is a net win for the entire creative community because it’s just a new vehicle for all of us to express our work.

• from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

  digital objectsThis is where we have this concept of a record. Think of a vinyl album‚ a record of work that has a cover, a package, and inside it contains a limited number of pieces. And those pieces can include a digital work, a physical work, a talk, or an invitation. And that’s exactly what Metalabel is. printed objectsIn The Dark Forest book, you've got the PDF, a physical edition, and you've got an invitation to join a Zoom call with the authors. That was $45. It’s allowing you to think beyond the boundaries that the market has created for us and to redefine them.

• from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

  These last years I have been spending my time publishing nonsensical books of illegible, plagiarized, stunning, low-quality, sublime, and uncanny content. I was developing a weird publishing project that aimed to grasp the extremely online poetics, displacing shitty content from forums, wikis, and digital platforms into books. Practicing trollish literature. These books display cursed memes, poorly translated novels, keysmashed text, random images, lorem ipsums, digital objectsYouTube comments, Wikipedia graffiti, niche forum discussions, motivational quotes, spam, ai-generated blog entries, pixelated and saturated photos, boring amateur poems, and automatic video transcriptions. In this article, I describe these publishing experiments as attempts to go from shitposting to shitpublishing.

• from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

  Besides the aggressive quality of this gesture, Kindle’voke Ghost Writers also plays on a more symbolic dimension of shitpublishing. digital objectsIt turns YouTube comments into literature. This conceptual publishing project is a shitpost play that challenges the notions of what is deemed worthy of being published in a book. It muddles the distinctions between literature and content, users and authors, posting and publishing. Like Angela Genusa’s Spam Bibliography, a book that presents all emails received in her spam folder between September 2012 and March 2013, formatted as a bibliography and sorted alphabetically. This work is described in the Library of Artistic Print on Demand (apod.li) as a “unique representation [which] makes spam messages appear as objects worth documenting and investigating”.

• from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

  Similar to many performers, shitpublishers engaged in this materialistic, appropriationist, and fast approach, challenge cultural valorization. politicsThey produce artifacts that question the notion of the book as an instrument of knowledge. This is the case for Holaquehase’s book Art Garfunkel ha leído más libros que tú [Art Garfunkel has read more books than you have], which compiled all the books read by the singer since 1960, posted by him on his website. Also, Gregor Weichbrodt published a brilliant comment on hard work and artistic valorization in his Dictionary of Non-notable Artists. digital objectsAfter his Wikipedia page was nominated for deletion from the German Wikipedia, Gregor wrote a Python script to download the contents of every “article for deletion”-page from the past ten years and filtered the results by artistic occupation, subsequently publishing a dictionary dedicated to these artists.

• from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

  Shitpublishing, of course, pertains to speed and irrelevancy. It is fast publishing but, of course, it is not urgent publishing. In Here and now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing, the INC reflects on the fact that digital objects‘Despite the promises of the desktop publishing revolution and the immediacy of publishing on the web, acceleration and optimization did not speed up the publishing process as much as hoped for’ Ampatzidou, C., de Bruijn, M., Dubbeldam, B., Lateur, B., de Leij, T., Lorusso, S., Molenda, A., Pol, P., Rasch, M., Spreeuwenberg, K., Verbruggen, E., & Vos, M. (2020). Here and now? explorations in urgent publishing. Institute of Network Cultures . Well, maybe it did speed up the publishing process towards weird places that are still unexplored. Towards practices and ways that we must try to understand in order to deal with the undetermined consequences they may bring. Maybe it will cause the fall (or bigger success) of platforms like Amazon Books, or it will challenge the classist approaches to books as cultural goods, and therefore, books will no longer be seen as something inherently positive. Perhaps reading will no longer be synonymous with critical thinking, and that’s something I still don’t know how to take.

• from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

  This uncomfortable expectations shift is more often than not manifested in the seemingly compulsory yet awkward troubleshooting minutes preambling cultural and academic events (how come the projector never works?), digital objectsour over-reliance on big tech’s software and hosting solutions (the other virus was Microsoft Teams), and the unappealing look and sound, to say the least, of hybrid events as aesthetic products (so much money was poured in the pre-2008 EU and elsewhere for building astonishing white cubes to end up “housing” culture on the Zoom interface).

• from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

  On another note, digital objectsgoing through the visual research process made us keenly aware of the contexts of circulation (closed Telegram channels, YouTube and Twitch feeds, questionable institutional websites, etc.) in which these images operate. These contexts are publishing practices not that different from ours, congregating communities around visual distribution and, relevantly, inducing behaviors and expectations with political implications. Producing visual outcomes from visual research is therefore not an innocent act of distant observation, but a politicstactical recirculation of visual production. To put it differently, it is the re-embedding of images implicated in operations of violence into cultural production.