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sustainability of workflows

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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: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

sustainability of workflowsBy reducing the once mighty publishing apparatus to a single button and making it available to all, independent of purse and gatekeepers, bookmaking became child’s play. This is also reflected in the names the platforms have given their offerings, such as “BoD Fun” for BoD’s basic product. And unlike the typewriter, mimeograph, copy machine, and home printer, that were once the first choice of self-publishers, POD publications are industrially produced, making them look like “normal” books and giving the impression (at least to the lay person) that they are on a par with regular bookstore products. All of this together has caused book production to virtually explode, and self-publishing has, as Timothy Laquintano states, “move[d] from the fringe of the publishing industry to become a small and fluid part of its core.”⁴
from: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

Unlike the production and distribution process, POD does not revolutionize or expand the book itself. Quite the opposite. The quality standards for production and the choice of materials and design features have decreased, especially in the low-cost segment for everyone. For example, Lulu currently offers just four types of paper and sixteen book formats (see fig. 2). Silvio Lorusso identified this dilemma early on: “[I]n order to produce unique copies, paradoxically, they [POD systems] enforce the limitations of mass production by applying stricter standards.”⁸ sustainability of workflowsIt is this standardization that enables automated and cost-effective production, as well ensuring the print job is executed as consistently as possible across a global network of partners.⁹
from: 03 Annette Gilbert (chapter)

In the end, sustainability of workflowsPOD has proved to be an astonishingly precarious genre, despite unlimited print runs and enduring availability being touted as selling points of the POD publishing model. A considerable number of titles (not limited to the apod.li collection) are now no longer accessible, whether due to acts of censorship, alleged copyright infringement, economic considerations, changes in formats, materials, or design features, price increases, or even the closure of POD platforms. With this in mind, one has to agree with Silvio Lorusso, who identifies volatility as a pressing issue for expanded publishing and concludes: “So the point is, how to make a long lasting publication? […] the question of sustainability […] is the part where that requires more experimentation, more than coming up with a new file format.”³³ But perhaps its temporary nature is the very essence of experimental publishing? Institutionalizing and perpetuating the experiment is, after all, ruled out by definition. From the artist’s point of view, then, what is needed above all is a certain tenacity and versatility, as practiced by Joey Yearous-Algozin: “to put it bluntly: these things work for now and once they stop working, we’ll find something else.”³⁴
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

17:30 It was a dream to have a saviour, a very intelligent being that somehow would come and save us from this mess and kind of organise this mess. But now we are realising that this has already happened in the case of Stable Diffusion and that’s a lot messier… the results that Stable Diffusion brings back to us implies that they are scraping and stealing our work. It’s a six-year parabola because now we understand that all the published things that we have already, and that we want to analyse, are not going to stop. sustainability of workflowsWe have to find a way to absorb it without being destroyed by the amount of things. We need to think about the methods to save ourselves from this mess.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

24:19 We all have different roles. And sustainability of workflowsthat we try to combine our professional life and professional needs with the collective’s, trying to apply for residencies, for example, to share as much time as possible, or visiting venues around Europe to connect and be physically together to avoid an excess of online communication. It does not always work because managing these kinds of balances can be quite tricky and difficult. But we try to focus on our well-being and the pleasantness of our experience. We try to not lose focus and to send our presence online through that, and we also have learned over time to keep free spaces and out-of-office time in which we don’t respond or take in more work, as it can be challenging to have a whole round through the year of continuous work, both in our corporate employments and in our collective activity. That’s mainly it: trying to focus and keep track of your well-being and being present when possible.
from: 06 Clusterduck (chapter)

Silvia 26:09 When we did that interview, something changed, COVID happened, and after that, sustainability of workflowswe realized that working 17 hours per day was not very healthy. When you start and you love what you do, you don’t realize that working so much can be bad for your health. Now we changed throughout this process a lot, we understood what was best and fortunately, the work that we did brought us on.
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: 10 Geoff Cox (chapter)

Geoff 19:00 sustainability of workflowsIt’s hard not to, of course, because to be a successful academic, you have to publish and you’re encouraged to publish with particular publishers. So it’s difficult to break out of that chain. I’m a bit older and I’ve got a reasonable position in the university so I can afford to be a bit more experimental. But I recognize that if you’re a younger academic, you can’t do this very easily. So that’s part of the motivation for the Transmediale workshop really, it’s a kind of forum for younger researchers so that they can, on the one hand, publish a little bit more experimentally with the newspaper, but then we invite them to submit a longer article, much more conventional to an online journal that we run, which is in the open journal system, and facilitated by the Royal Danish Library. It follows the more typical conventions of double-blind review and academic reviewers with the right kind of credentials. So it allows you to operate both within, and sort of outside, some of those structures.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 29:23 When you say sharing knowledge and thinking about how to share it and how to communicate about concerns, there’s always the ideal, and then there’s the realised. There is an assumption that you have an open-source tool, you allow others to use it, and a README comes with it, that also explains what the tool is, and with which questions in mind was it developed. sustainability of workflowsThe tool in itself can be used and expanded but in reality, this documentation work takes a lot of time, and this time is not always available. And there’s also something about the quality of your code — to what extent can it be reused by others, and to what extent is it flexible? For example, Etherport is actually about making code that was developed within other projects accessible or available to others and allowing others to expand and extend upon it. So, within our practice, we have moments where we can share our concerns, pose our questions and hear the questions of others, and there are moments where, in a way, the process is experimental. The challenge is making time to document it and to make things accessible, both in documentation and in code. That’s a challenge when you're working with any practice and a downside of making the tool development part of the design process. Towards the end, you’re so busy with finishing the object that the documentation of that work becomes less of a priority.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Janez 1:01:29 I don’t know if I am lucid enough to formulate this question. Listening to you and also now when Lorenzo asked the last question, I always had in mind this question of accessibility concerning our research on expanding publishing. So I was wondering, for example, if we would want to expand the concept of publishing by using several tools, including open-source, sooner or later we will encounter a compatibility problem. I see the way you can operate and investigate. sustainability of workflowsMaybe I’m wrong, but because you do it in a closed network of geeks and specialists who can operate the code and design their own tools. I’m fascinated by this empowering attitude, but if I have to think about myself, I see this accessibility threshold being too high for me. This is exactly what you are saying now, you were asking yourself whether you want to democratise the access or keep an entry-level that is high for specialists and so on. I’m not working alone as well, I would need, perhaps, to convince or force a set of people around me to adopt the same tools if they are not compatible with the one that I’m using. You know what I mean? But it also works the other way around; if you are an open-source convinced believer, and you want to convince other people that it’s good to be able to own your tools and design, you would probably be able to convince more people, if the tool that you are producing can interface with tools that generic people are using — to facilitate the interoperability of the systems, in a way. I stop here because it might be confusing, but the whole open-source culture is fascinating and I have followed it for years, although I was never really able to join it because I never had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, and I was always looking at other people to play.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Tommaso 1:10:16 sustainability of workflowsI was thinking about what Janez and you just said, and reflecting on the idea of democratisation. Sometimes I also get annoyed when I don’t understand a tool and say, “This should be easier. This should be way more user-friendly” — because we’ve been trained to have everything as user-friendly as possible. But at the same time, there are so many things that are not user-friendly and we don’t take for granted. If you think about graphic design, you will always ask a designer to design a poster. If you think about writing a text, you’re going to ask an author to write a text, but then when it comes to using tools, we have been used to thinking of them as becoming easier and easier to use, like browsing the web. It’s something that everybody needs to know. I think what you are contributing as OSP is to take a step back and reflect on the infrastructure behind tools. So, should we be more user-friendly? Should we be less user-friendly? I probably know your answer in that sense, but if we refuse the idea that everything has to be user-friendly, how should we implement this workflow into an already existing workflow? Otherwise, you can very easily go into a conflict instead of like a conversation.
from: 11 Gijs de Heij (chapter)

Gijs 1:13:03 I guess it depends on what you mean by user-friendly. toolsI think it’s important for a tool to be user-friendly, but this does not necessarily have to mean for a tool to be easy. Some things are complex and those complexities cannot be abstracted away or removed by software. If they are removed by software, it means that a lot of assumptions and choices have been made in designing the tool. We ask ourselves, “What would be possible if we try things differently?” — and we find different forms of collaboration that become possible because the content is not written by individual authors on their own computer and then sent to an editor, but it’s from the start edited on a platform. Then we take the output or the content from the platform and make it directly available on the web and allow it to be printed. If there is a content change, there’s no authority structure where the editor has to ask the designer to do it, but the contributor can do it directly on the platform. sustainability of workflowsThis is not necessarily easy to install or maintain, but tools need time and energy to be understood, to be able to be used or maintained. At the same time, these tools mustn’t be hostile, in the way that they are made, but also in the community that’s behind them or the documentation that they come with. In that sense, our tools are not always welcoming, and to come back to Ethertoff, this tool can be quite hostile to a new user. At the moment, it still needs an interpreter with it, but that’s also a situation we’re trying to change.
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

So one of the things I’m very happy about with a publication is that it doesn’t have a space. Especially being an independent publisher, there is no space to take care of. sustainability of workflowsI also made sure that Errant is not published periodically, I publish whenever the hell I am ready to publish — and this is a structure that I’ve set up that funders find a little bit hard to understand. When you are interested in including certain voices, you should also give space to people to have those voices. I always use the example of the second issue, which was about the environment, and it was delayed because one of the contributors was in a court case against Shell. So this is a good reason to extend the deadline, and because there is no space, you can create at your own pace. It is the same with Gaza: the last issue was delayed a bit because someone was trying to get a friend out of Gaza. emotional labourI’m trying to set up an organization that can make space for people’s lives, and the issues people are dealing with that are usually directly connected to (geopolitical) issues Errant aims to address. In this way, the work is not removed or cut off from the actual lives and work of people I work with. Do you want to know more about how I work with the actual contributions or with editing?
from: 09 Irene de Craen (chapter)

Irene 1:08:09 Thank you for recognising my self-exploitation! This is also why, in the past, I’ve burned out many times, which is why now I just cancel events if I don’t feel like it. In the Subversive Publishing, the centrefold has twenty points to consider if you’re publishing subversively. It’s meant as a manifesto of sorts. One of the points is ‘consider not to publish,’ which we already discussed. Another point in the manifesto is to make sure you’re having fun. So, my main red line is that I have to enjoy the process. It’s stressful, there comes a point when I’m completely freaking out, but I’ve also learned to press pause now and then. sustainability of workflowsMy business structure allows for that because there is no pressure of time. So if I’m not enjoying myself anymore, I know I need to take a break. So this is the way I do self-exploit, but as long as I’m enjoying myself, as long as it’s enriching me, I’m allowed to self-exploit myself. That kind of self-exploitation will not lead to burnout, or at least that is what I think, because I’m just a hypersensitive person. This is why I like to stay at home and avoid public events, I get overwhelmed very quickly. I thought when I was doing the interviews for the publication; it was nice that came up from other people as well, the fact that we have to enjoy it. Otherwise, there’s no point. So, I keep that in mind. I say no to things that other people would not say no to, like money, for example. Sometimes, I really don’t like the person or the organization, or sometimes, I think it’s going to give me a lot of stress. I think they’re going to ask me things that I’m not comfortable with. So you know what? No. I’ll figure it out another way.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

sustainability of workflowsI will try to apply the same positivity that you said before. We should actually keep on going with everything we are doing. I think there is one word that has come up a lot during all our discussion. It has to do with the sustainability of things. The proposal of federating, that the internet can also be this place in which work and labor can be shared, and things can be connected in a different way than platform is trying to convince us that they are. Have you ever had any thought about this idea of Federation of Networks?
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

sustainability of workflowsSo I guess that’s nice, because it’s been a real shit show for 30 years, moving UbuWeb, being chased from one server to another because we’re doing everything pirate. It’s been a real hassle. And if years ago we could have been federated, is that what you’re calling it, a federated site, then we would have saved ourselves a lot. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 04:43 That’s a really interesting question. It’s a very material question in the sense that it’s a question of time, because when you are doing a PhD, if you’re lucky, you have all the time in the world, meaning that you can dedicate a lot of time to the metadata. sustainability of workflowsThe part which I find very precious about the archive is the fact that it has a lot of detail in every project. This is something that required a lot of time, a time that after the PhD, I couldn’t afford anymore. This is something that in experimental publishing, in new modes of publishing, is always forgotten. You have to, somehow, bounce against a reality that is made of scarcity, scarcity of resources. expub The question of struggling comes at the same time with abandoning and exit. Is leaving the creative, publishing and artistic world a form of resistance, as it has been similarly framed in contemporary art with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Bas Jan Ader etc?
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

05:49 sustainability of workflowsOne mistake that is often made — I experienced it myself with other projects — is to reinvent the wheel, in imagining giant systems that would last forever. You can make a comparison with another archive that, from this point of view, was way more lean and in this sense, successful, which was the “Library of the Printed Web”, Paul Soullelis’ work. You would buy the publication, since it was print-on-demand, take a couple of pictures and write just a little description. The archive was physical, and there were financial resources there, it was way easier to give a sense of coherence. Another thing I would have done is connect it to a platform or a stable service, that exists beyond yourself. The perfect example would have been the Internet Archive, and some archives are taking that strategy, for example, an Italian archive of radical publishing, which is called the Grafton 9. The work is to upload it to a collection in the Internet Archive because, you know, that it will be safe, even if you don’t have the time or the resources to pay for the domain and so on.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 12:21 Yes, and more. I mean, the way I see writing happening — writing, publishing, solidifying, crystallizing a series of ideas — is not just a matter of money. It’s a matter of other resources as well. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all about money, but you have to consider the aspect of creating time. Resources of time and access to books are always in negotiation with bigger institutions. sustainability of workflowsThe triangle I see is: the author/practitioner/cultural producer; the small publisher/small institution, and then the big institution that somehow explicitly or implicitly, creates the space, even when it doesn’t want to make the writing, the publishing, the magic happen.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 14:14 It’s a matter of opportunities, in the sense that sometimes you think you need the timeliness of publishing it tomorrow. And of course, if you want that, you have to have this intermediation process where you publish on the blog. sustainability of workflowsMy workflow, in a way, is based on this idea, a programming concept which is “release early, release often”. My idea of publishing as an author is never based on the final, definitive, monumental publication. I see everything as a sort of Polaroid of a publication to come, so there are various iterations of the same text, as a blog, as a journal paper, as a zine, as a book. And even as a book, it’s just a single artefact, just a snapshot in time of a constant thinking and researching process.
from: 07 Silvio Lorusso (chapter)

Silvio 40:21 I’m gonna try to say a few disclaimers which I think are important to point out. What I call publishing is not an industry, it’s a set of people who do other jobs for a living, put in a lot of effort and end up in a lucky position and manage to publish things. sustainability of workflowsI need to define what I’m talking about when I’m talking about publishing. You cannot call that an industry, you call it some like-minded, willing people. My clear concern is to have these people keep doing what they do without burning out. So that’s the mission for you, that’s very practical for me. For example, I read a paper or even an Instagram post by someone who I consider says something original that deserves development: how can I make that post happen in terms of budget, in terms of putting this person in contact with someone who has the structure to publish?
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

Thomas 11:53 It was clear to us that we needed to reflect on the diversity of content at the editorial level. So the three of us connected, coming from three different generations and three different fields of work. Holger Pötzsch is working in Norway and is the oldest among us, he also has numerous publications in media studies. Şeyda Kurt is the author of the two books I mentioned, so she was coming in as someone writing in a very different style. I myself sit somewhere between writing academically and also organizing those panels – the let’s play critical panels. sustainability of workflowsSo we regularly exchanged ideas, via Zoom, due to Holger being in Norway. We also met in person several times. For us, it was very important to give the authors a sense of working together on a project, which is why we set up a joint meeting before everyone started writing. For this, we specifically asked experts to cover various areas. And fortunately, no one declined. We granted them relative freedom, including in formatting the text, resulting in both classic academic and essayistic texts in the final volume. Then we found a publisher, Transcript, a German publisher from Bielefeld, willing to support and finance the entire project. This is not common as publishers usually are not prepared for such volumes. As you know, they either focus on academic publications or non-academic literature. So, normally academic volumes are funded by universities, but we were not based on any university for this volume, even if we worked on them or at universities. So we had to find a way to finance the whole project. As I said, business modelsTranscript has this funding from, I think, different universities from Germany. They have a pool of money and they can split it into different projects. So this was very good for us, and they also funded Open Access, which was also great.
from: 08 Thomas Spies (chapter)

Besides that, we have also changed how our anthology is produced and thought about the authors that are freelancers. In academic works or volumes for them, you don’t get paid. So we had the problem there. sustainability of workflowsWe somehow had to get money to fund them and this was also not part of Transcript's funding, because they never thought about paying the authors. So we had crowdfunding, we ran a campaign, had a video for that, we put it on social media and it came to be very successful. In this way we could really pay all the people involved. Now, after the volume was published, we sent out some copies and are promoting it through classic channels.
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)

The same year as the publication of Chimeras, a Creative Europe consortium — consisting of the contemporary art center Aksioma in Ljubljana, the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, the publisher NERO in Rome, and Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based media research think tank—initiated a project on expanded publishing and alternative models for publishing. The Expanded Publishing research project aimed to reflect on the main challenges that are prominent in the multilingual European publishing world. Primarily, conventional publishing seemed to us increasingly limited in accommodating new forms of knowledge; collaborative works such as Aksioma’s *(re)programming, time-based participatory practices, or long-term and durational creative projects cannot easily be contained in rigid traditional formats. Moreover, the timescale of conventional publishing is misaligned with the demands of projects that necessitate faster production pipelines — an urgency vividly examined in INC’s Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing. Additionally, sustainability of workflowssmall, specialized publishers in Europe, which are also the most impactful, face difficulties in sustainably engaging and reaching their audiences; their current experimental approaches are isolated, and the often innovative technological tools and distribution methods publishers implement are neither shared nor replicated by their peers, preventing them from having broader, lasting impact.
from: 02 Ezequiel Soriano (chapter)

sustainability of workflowsThe goal with these books was to give them an ISBN and add them to my CV in order to increase my publications section as a PhD student. A few months later I came across this article: ‘A researcher who publishes a study every two days reveals the darker side of science’. Apparently, “Thousands of scientists around the world publish at least one study every five days”. It seems that my naive act of hacking the curriculum is an act that is carried out with worse intentions and better means by academics all over the world.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

Notably, editing and distribution collapsed onto a single production moment: we don’t have to edit/process the camera’s output and then upload it to a server anymore, but the camera, like those integrated in our many portable devices, is always already connected to the internet streaming whatever images come out from it. sustainability of workflowsThis not only reduces overall production time, but embeds post-production — cutting and assembling footage as well as keying the green screen — into the live performance. This requires our live events to be conceived and organized in such a way as to create the type of multi-layered images we were producing for the podcast-like episodes. These are thus comprised of different short presentations, music or art performances, dialogues, or screenings, in which the activities of searching for, selecting, and displaying online images on the green screen become central. What our guests are prompted to do is to use the tools and visual language of desktop web-surfing and gameplay commentary streaming in front of a live audience, producing a hybrid outcome, both a performance and a video.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

Even though we recently started experimenting on our own PeerTube instance, yet, we still rely on Vimeo and SoundCloud when it comes to long-term audio and video archiving. So, taking note from feminist self-hosting and sustainable computation initiatives, if we also consider hosting and digital sustainability of workflowsinfrastructures in general a moment of community organizing rather than merely commoditized services, we need to reflect on the sustainability of our practice at our current scales. Scale is understood in two senses: the number of people our events can reach at a distance and the technical infrastructure needed to do that, as well as the scale in terms of the amount of information (bytes and pixels) to be stored somewhere and managed by someone. Online video is second only to AI when it comes to informational intensity. So, to have a minimum of control over the infrastructure to store so much information, we either need to start questioning video as our main medium or collaborate with trusted partners who already have the hardware and expertise to host this kind of production. Most probably, we should do both. That is, we need to think tactically and critically about our tools (radio is never out of the question) and our content. What we stream, what we store, and what we publish are strictly connected to our infrastructural dependencies. Therefore, it is crucial to consider these dependencies in the same way we consider our audiences, namely as a form of community organizing.