label

politics

Linked to 23 items

from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

Expanded publishing is not yet another genre, format, or technological upgrade. It is an evolving field of hybrid practices, tools, workflows, business models, and approaches to editorial objects. politicsExpanded publishing is also a critical lens to how, for whom, and with what tools and politics this is done. It emerges from the crises of traditional publishing and the exhaustion of innovation cycles in the digital realm.
from: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

But that says nothing about the actual latitude that POD leaves for the development of one’s own expanded publishing strategy. Oulipo is probably the clearest proof that compelling artistic solutions can be derived from a constraint. The history of printing has also shown time and again that it is less the companies and their inventions themselves that break new ground, than their users. This was already true for the Xerox machine: “[D]espite its banal original as a time- and moneysaving office technology, the history of the copy machine has been deeply shaped by its users’ imaginations.” This is related to the fact that copiers were very soon liberated from these contexts of use and “quickly adopted and adapted by workers as a tool of subversion—a form of perruque for the information age,” as Kate Eichhorn explains.¹⁰ politicsThis sort of emancipation and détournement of technologies and infrastructures for one’s own artistic or political agenda can also be observed in the field of POD platforms.
from: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

politicsTo publish is, fundamentally, a political act.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

54:23 politicsThe most powerful technology is collective narratives. And as long as we don’t change the collective narrative in which we are, and at the moment this is the dominating collective narrative, still that of late capitalism, whatever emancipatory or liberatory potential those technologies have, will not be able to fully manifest in this society we have at the moment. On the contrary, it will be used to enhance control and the extraction of value and so on. That’s what we are seeing with artificial intelligence and all the other technologies that were named.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 46:04 I think there is a certain duality there. If you look at the practice of Open Source Publishing, there’s also a certain joy and interest in these technical questions. So that’s also driving the motivation to do this. For me, our work and its experimentations are interesting and it’s more interesting than working with existing proprietary tools. politicsThere’s also a political layer where making graphic design using proprietary software limits your choices very strongly. In the case of publishing on the web, that’s ironic because, from the onset, it has been open-source, and developed with the idea of people expressing themselves, but also maintaining their own infrastructure and its ever-continuing centralisation. So for me, it is extremely relevant to maintain and develop your own infrastructure and to use tools which support or even invite you to do this. I mean, there is a challenge there, because it needs to be maintained and it crumbles by itself. Existing platforms have developed a business model where that kind of work that’s sometimes also boring can be financed and can be supported. But I’m not sure I fully answered your question. I notice I get stuck a little bit, because there’s always an ambivalence of being both optimistic about open-source and being a pessimist in that there are open questions that capitalistic models have found ways to answer, but we also see that those answers are often exploitative. I have a very strong desire to find paths around, but these are always fragile and complex and also situated, I think, in the sense of how they’re linked to specific people in specific situations.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

Irene 04:24 Well, apart from Glissant, there are a lot of other, mostly Latin American decolonial thinkers, as well as Ariella Azoulay, who’s also very important, especially her book “Potential History”. Her background is in photography, so she talks a lot about images and archives, especially the violence behind archives and structures. Of course, publishing, writing, and communicating in the English language is not ideal, and I always say, maybe at some point, I’ll be fed up with all the limitations of publishing, and I’ll move on to another format. politicsBut I think there’s a lot to be done within this format, a lot of opacity is important, a lot of refusal, and a lot of subverting in how you put things together. I find it interesting because by doing that, you question how we think about knowledge and how we think about what is important and what is not.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

Another example is ‘citational rebellion,’ inspired by Sarah Ahmed. She wrote a very cool essay on her blog about how citation works within knowledge creation and publication. Then inspired by Zoe Todd, who wrote about Ahmed, politicsI’ve come to realize how citations work to legitimize the work of some, while ignoring those of others. For this reason, Todd describes how she will only reference Indigenous thinkers. Her point is that the white men that are always cited — she talks about Bruno Latour specifically — were not the first to think of something. Nine out of ten times, they were not. And you can find an equal source from someone else, someone of colour or a woman for instance. I currently want to expand the Subversive Publishing series. I’m going to apply for funding because I’m working on open access, I want to make a collection of texts that go into this a little bit further and are also an umbrella of how I think about publishing and Errant. I hope to do that next year.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

Irene 1:10:26 I could be very cheeky because, from the colonial perspective, there is no future, this whole concept is fraud. But I won’t go into it, you can read the first issue of Errant; there are some thoughts about that. Maybe the future for me is not so much about technical development or progress in a traditional sense. politicsHowever, the process of learning to give more space to fit the politics of what we are trying to do into the working methods, I think this is very, very important. This comes down to giving space to “other” voices, and the question is, how do you really make space for that? I am talking about how I organize things and how I see them, and I have to fight for that. So far, people don’t get it. They don’t get that this is the only way for me to move forward. Of course, privately, I go through depression, and burnout, but it’s not just me who’s hypersensitive, it is everyone that we work with in the cultural field, especially those who have to deal with real precariousness. Art or cultural sectors have been too bent with political wills, especially now when we see the direction taken to the right. We have to resist this, which we can do by ourselves. Doing these very small things, little subversive acts is resistance. Things I have been developing and thinking about last year are definitely not done, so I keep going, and I am planning to publish more about it and hopefully infect other people with some of these thoughts.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Ilan 42:02 One of the things we learn from you is that we don’t care if we are read — we don’t care if people are reading us. I mean, readership is just a statistical mass of people that needs to be quantified. Every author is frustrated about the amount of books being sold. The artists are frustrated, asking how many people came to their opening, how many reviews did they get, how many sales, et cetera. And we learn from you is that politicsthinkership is what matters, not readership. So, people that you can think with, right? So, a book is just a signal to a community of thinkers.
from: 13 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: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

So their taste was wrong, so it was just reifying some sort of stupid traditional notions of literature. politicsThey just didn’t have the imagination or the taste, or actually I want to call it perversity, to feed the machine stuff that would break it, because they couldn’t afford to break it. They needed to monetize it. Artists have always been the best, really good at breaking things rather than trying to make something stable. Again, it goes back to the W. H. Auden quote that says poetry makes nothing happen, Its beauty is its lack of utility. So when you try to harness art to become useful, you betray its base quality. Its quality is to be useless. Poetry makes nothing happen.That’s why it’s beautiful in a culture where we’re so geared up toward productivity to make a space where nothing happens. That sounds really radical to me, and that’s the way I read Auden. It’s probably the wrong way to read it, but I really am inspired by that quote.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 20:25 I’ve been involved mostly in the Netherlands, in Italy and now in Portugal. I have to say politicsI’m concerned because I think that somehow, even though I’m a bit critical of the way the funding structure is dealt with (especially when it comes to publishing in the Netherlands), the new political climate is not good. We have seen what’s happening to BAK and other institutions in the Netherlands, that’s not a good sign. That kind of limitation of funding will have repercussions throughout the continent. Nowadays I think that sustainability should be a sort of “international coming together” to defend the funding of the centre, of the core, because the core also affects, somehow and in a small way, the margin and the periphery. And this is interesting because in the past years, “the periphery”, so to speak, the margins, have rightly so developed a sort of pride in saying “we are autonomous, in terms of language, we don’t want to depend on and replicate the agendas of the rich European countries”. While this makes sense, there is a worrying situation that is not just about single countries, but about Europe.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 1:02:16 Of course, I was following the development of those concepts such as squad wealth. I think some things upset me about that formulation, while others were saying something similar to this idea of the individual still being part of the community. What annoyed me there was the depiction of the institutionalized person. In the text, if I remember well, there was a meme depicting the person who works for the institution as a “wage cuck”. You know, like a cuckold. That annoyed me. politicsFirst of all, because I am a person that works for an institution, and also it doesn’t acknowledge this dynamic of being inside, which to a certain extent, is going to be true. If it’s not true, it’s very hard to survive without that “wage cuckness” sort of thing. I would be very curious to see what’s the state of this squad now, in terms of who got the professorship, who started this and that, without any envy or jealousy, but just to check the validity of the theory, because after all, they were like institutionalizing themselves by that.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

politicsThose of us who are operating under the previous set of conditions, how do we resize? How are we re-relevant, or what is still relevant, and what is not relevant? Those are hard questions, but just thinking purely as someone who reads and writes as naturally as I do anything, I feel like it’s never been better. The future is individual voices or voices of small groups of people being incredibly influential in ways that will probably be very problematic in some cases. I think the future is more free form. Once people perfect these systems, like Twitter, Instagram, all these things have been perfected, then you have people looking for how else do I express something. Earlier this year, Tavi Gevinson, star writer of Rookie Magazine, released a zine she made about Taylor Swift that she put out on a standalone website with the print-on demand button. You could click to get a copy, you could download it, and that worked great. It’s hard. It’s competitive. It’s noisy. There’s so much. That sucks. But it’s also great.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

Yancey 35:55 politicsIt is important to own your identity. We’ve seen a lot of examples of platforms going defunct and data being lost, and what felt safe was not. I think homesteading on the internet is advisable, but not everyone has the geek in the group. For a lot of creative people, every one of those steps is the antithesis of everything that they want to do. So it’s like: “give me the thing that does the thing”, and I find generally people start that way and then, as you get more advanced in your career and you have more of a reputation at stake, you start to look for more of the self-hosted solutions.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

As a second step, as a second order, begin to reveal the ways it’s also better for you and the affordances it creates. politicsAnd it can’t be that software, and that is a political position, should only be open source, because then no one will make software, and no one will maintain it. You know, maintaining open source is a nightmare. You need what a lot of projects try to do, which is you have a pro-social give back to the commons relationship generally. The bigger you get, the harder that is. One could argue that Facebook’s contributions to the world of development have been huge. That comes from big tech, and it is something that we all rely on. Most engineers are interested in those kinds of solutions. They just get blocked by business objectives and say, you know, we can’t do that, but I think it’s a lot of great impulses and affordances that I hope we can stay open to.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

The purpose of the Chimeras book was to shift the conversation about AI away from a purely technical narrative to a broader discussion about the technology’s impact and potential. It aimed to foster an environment where alternative viewpoints could thrive, challenging the notion that computer science holds all the answers regarding AI’s influence and possibilities. The figure of the chimera was particularly evocative in that context; chimeras have often been used to address cultural anxieties or to symbolize the integration (or lack thereof) of cultural and natural elements, reflecting how societies understand complex interdependencies. business modelsBy employing various partial approaches and divergent disciplinary perspectives, the aim of Chimeras was to approach its subject indirectly—not to reduce it to its most essential, familiar, or structural components, but instead to complexify it. politicsThe interdependencies in that context were reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the book, which embodied a diverse range of epistemic perspectives that are less represented in the general discourse about AI, including interspecies, crip, monstrous, distributed, and decolonial approaches, among others.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

Two years later, the book Chimeras, much like the genetic outlier of its title, never quite saw the light of day in the usual sense. It never hit bookstores; it certainly skipped the fanfare of a grand launch and dodged any hint of the promotion so necessary for the life of a book. politicsChimeras wasn’t even granted a lowly mention in the newsletter of its supporting organization (the Onassis Foundation), despite having a corporate media powerhouse supposedly at its beck and call. Instead, the book found its true calling as a corporate gift, quietly nestled away like a tiny embarrassing secret, never quite escaping the cozy confines of the organization’s storage facility. While it did wonders for tarnishing the editors’ reputations and casting doubt on how seriously a large organization regards the community of artists and researchers who contribute to it, the book stood as a bold—albeit flawed—experiment in alternative publishing. Books like Chimeras—and there are many such examples—showcase the benefits of collaborative publishing but also provide a practical template for a federalized model in a highly asymmetrical landscape of national contexts and cultural policies. As the publishing landscape continues to shift, these collaborative, federalized practices offer a promising path for innovative, scalable, and community-driven publishing.
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)

Among many shitpublishers, the performative trolling character of the books is related to hacking. Sometimes, Poetry or Art functions as a hack to publicize things while avoiding legal issues. Money by Maker, for example, is a book consisting of 740 pages of scanned hundred dollar bills. politicsWhen printed by someone, the publisher, TROLL THREAD PRESS, cannot be held legally responsible for potential misuse, even though they don’t discourage it either. But besides the daring imagination of printing money, in 2018, Paul Soulellis published Steve, Harvey and Matt (2018), another 734 page artist book used to publicize sensitive political material. Soulellis describes the book on his github as follows:
from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

politicsSimilarly to what happened to shitposting, in recent years shitpublishing has become darker. Once upon a time, shitposting consisted of silly playful gestures by a bunch of online nerds. Nowadays, due to infamous characters like Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump, shitposting is becoming synonymous with far-right, racist, anti-feminist, and transphobic communicational strategies. Bannon’s quote exemplifies this turn: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Many right-wing parties in the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Spain or, Netherlands (among many others) have adopted strategies linked to shitposting (from fake news to spam) to flood the zone with hate speech, fear, and anger.
from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

politicsBut these acts of radical mimesis of late-platform capitalism's accelerated dynamics simultaneously reproduce these forms while criticizing them. Shitpublishing is digital publishing accelerationism. And we know that accelerationism is fine for aesthetics but that it is not a wise political tactic. Maybe shitpublishing is as political and activist as avant-garde literature could be. In this article, I have talked about shitpublishing as closely related to hacking. But, considering it in broader political terms, what is it hacking against? Perhaps the very idea of the book, the value given to the written word, or literacy as a technology. If it is those things, then it's the same as in Pop Art, Dadaism or Conceptual Writing. Maybe the political potential is not in the “genre” or the “tool”, but in the contexts you flood with shit.
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.