pad

Clusterduck

CLUSTERDUCK, 10:30 2nd July 2024

1. Introduction

Introduction to the team, intro to the structure, recording

• in meeting: silvia, aria, and noel

(notes: streamlining note taking, better intro)

1. Why: Politics of Publishing (Mission/Theory/References/Ideals/Goals) - 10 mins

• introduce yourself quickly

• - participatory experiment// in the clusterfck // *

• Why do you operate in the way you operate? Do you have a mission, ideal, goals that guide it?

• If you were putting together a syllabus on publishing practices, what would be some references, theories, materials?

• Memes and memetic, how (complex) narratives impact our reality, they might seem superficial or frivolous

• started around 2016

• why are we not able to solve our issues on a practical level? because narratives are much more hard to adapt than laws, complex collective narratives are seen as unchangable facts

• that is why it is hard to steer away from catastrophes

• all aspects of multimedia have an impact on this, hence their multimedia approach

References:

- early internet, net art community, early 2000s italian scene, slavatore iaconesi, oriana persico cross platform, les liens invisibles, eva and franco mattes

- communities and bubbles they were part of, the weird facebook community, using the platform in a way opposite to what the zuckemberg policy asked (nymwars mask vs face culture), communitarian practices of zine diy/independent publishing ethos

2. How: Infrastructures of Publishing (Tools, workflows, operations, (revenue) models for Writing, Editing, Printing, Distributing, Promoting, etc ) - 10 mins

• What are the main tools you are using and which ones would you like to use more in the future?

• What does your workflow look like?

• How do you ensure or work towards a financially sustainable practice? - how is your work funded?

• exposed to a lot of communication, content, text, shitposting was what they wanted to analyze because we were receiving a lot – but publishing nothing

• their first work was a documentary that did not ever see the light of day

• they were working without knowing what iut would eventually become/amount to/

• what they were publishing was going to nurture a neural network, even posting had a responsability attached to it, eventually an all seeing being will come to organize it, that is already here stable diffusion – which is actually making things more messy

• all the things we have analysed, they are not going to be stiopped, find a way to absorb them without being absorbed, so we need to think about the methods to not be absobed by them

• telegram groups and chats

• corporate job tools - taking them and reusing them in creative practice

• “you have to own the tools you use otherwise theya are going to use you” - we felt judged bc we were using these tools/mainstream platforms but we felt like we could “trick them”, now we see what those older activists were saying / were warning us

• the “leaving fb” movement, attempts to migrate to mastodon/web3.0, but exiting thsoe platforms is not the solution cause you lose a huge audience, miss out on the dialogue for how controlled and censored it might be, it’s a huge loss

• “work life balance” has been present a lot in our lives

• combing professional needs with collective ones, apply for residencies, avoiding excess of online communication, focus on well being to not lose focus, keep some free time and out of office time

• working 17 hours per day is not healthy, when you start and you love what yo don you don’t realize how much work it can take

• meme manifesto experiemnt in publishing “publish the internet on a 20 metes wall”, passion for archiving, scraping reddit/4chan/telegram

• from corporate jobs in communication we learned basic rules of marketing and applied them to our art and publishing pratcices e.g. changing transmedia environment, landing page, talking out loud about what is happening online was therapetutical for partecipants, work and the internet are very addicting, we were addicted to both, surviving all the content, self exploiting the enthusiasm of the peers - but we should instead find ways to protect ourselves

• • deep fried feels, their new work is about their feelings, empathy,e meotions on digital media
• • when you publish content you are epxressing stories but also conveying emotions, dig media does it very specifically, how we talk now it gives illusion that this is like real life, but after 8 years of working online, we relaise something fundamental was missing and crtaing problems betwene us,

• self exploitation in corporate industry, relation between corporate jobs, theya re probloematic, but the deal is quite honest and direct, ci thrives in gray zone, colonizes and criticizes those passions/work tiem/gray zone

• work life balance in north europe versus south europe which is quite challenging,

3. Who: Community of Publishing (Network, Collaborations, Readers, (sustainable) engagement) - 10 mins

• How have you created your community? (Who is your audience? How do you engage them?) — highlighting online communities

• In what ways do you see the role of the editor as a creator of community?

• community as medium

• beauty of talking in places and seeing them, we don’t actually have a specific idea of who our audience is, materializes during events and feeling taht we are part of a greater community, web community, filter bubble probolem and locality - fb groups, telgram chats, people with which we have collaborated in our jobs, jules durand for meme manifesto, suepr internet programmers/web developers,

• talking about tools is not easy, how to share our work in a correct ways we are still trying to learn, organizing our work has changed, background of activism helped with horizontal decision making, even if we have many tools, decisions are made by seeing each other (video) rather than email, we have know how on how to start a collective,

• one more thing on community, dark forests, a lot of work, not as much time as we would like to
  4. Open Discussion - 15

lorenzo: we talk about tools - decentralised network and “super internet” - experience wiht blockchain and these types of tehcnologies?

silvia: - 2016 - meme propaganda: first participatory operation - referenced by noel, trying to understand memes as propaganda - but later on the super internet evolved with other orgs

• their position on crypto currencies is a careful, attentive one: covid and nfts, watching this happening - digital art is much more than a jpeg/multiverse/platform

• super internet experience relates to clusterduck - citing silvio lorusso / sebastian schmieg

https://silviolorusso.com/work/a-slice-of-the-pie/ - everyone can post into a collective “pie” and then people could say they exhbitied in kunsthalle zurich - mimicking the internet - used it in the meme manifesto - in the kw exhbition this year they also credited around 300 people - https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/kw-digital-poetics-of-encryption/

• they use these tools to give back something to the community they interact with

aria: both blockchain and ai - major tech themes in the last years - massive environmental impact - data production - trying to be careful as possible on this - 2020 - devloping a branch of meme manifesto/propaganda - meme and climate crisis protesters and the uses of memes in those protests - having a pracical approach / use them how they can help to build online communities, but also try not to idolise tech

noel: against tech determinism, magical emancipatory tech web3 will magically fix web2, but collective narratives are too powerful, late capitalism will continue to extract value (eg ai),

silvia: we are not just critical, we also use them, bu grass root idea of using the tools against the master has failed a bit, we are too weak

illan: limits of criticality - we can be as critical as we want - but can change reality? can we imagine a post-critical world?

silvia: i was at cern, in geneva -

beauty of tech by your side - we are critical because we are screwed /excluded/ i wouldn’t be critical of tech if we had a place like cern for artists

would be good to foster collabs between engineers and culture - humanities and culture / arts/ should arrive before the technology (and right now this is not happening) - we are so critical because in a way, that’s all we can be

tommaso: new forms of publishing - what are the main constraints you found in publishing, in this multiple role you work in?

publishing books has been a nice experience for us, even if its not that familiar - collabing with publishers that share thier values

accessibility of printed books, we try to be agnostic, books have possibility of reaching unlimited target audience

• noel: constraits as a way to push the boundaries of creativity - referencing - deep fried feels - referencing deep fried memes circumvent censorship on social media because they become undetectable for ai etc - https://clusterduck.space/deepfriedfeels

• can have a positive effect on creativity

silvia: refrecning book possorelli??

paul solelli ? twitter bots book

• helpful to print something - to print the internet - important

unrepresentability of reality, so printing is concentrating on something very specific, the mushroom at the end of the world, contraints can be cirumvented

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mushroom_at_the_End_of_the_World

5. What: Future of Publishing (Defining and Speculating together on Expanded publishing) - 10 mins

• What are the more urgent aspects that need to be addressed in the future of publishing?

• How do you imagine publishing expanding in the next few years (audience, medium, tools, models)? In which directions do you see it progressing and in which do you see it regressing?

• we did a workshop on how we can’t imagine the future anymore

• noel: digital tools make it esy to publish, so distribution and visibility are the challenge, we have tsunami of content, paradox of invisibility, overwhealmed by it, that’s the challenge, how do we find content that is relevant to the right public, “the algorithm” in organizing content, success of tiktok lies in the relevance of the content presented to the audience

• aria: distribution for present and future, role of transmedia experiences, bringing internet on a printed page, or bringing paper to the internet

• internet as bridging, filling gaps

lorenzo: defining communities, resilience of traditonal publishing, irl commmunities can be more defined and less fragmented:

silvia: online communitites are quick to form and highly specific, coming from how much you love a chair or peeling an iguana, so very ephemeral, traditional publishing can exploit the speed and visual language fo the internet (what nero,aksioma,inc are doing)

many attempts at making a book something that is not only a book, exploiting power of printed medium, but doing it in a fast way, using and exploiting feedbacks from social media communitites

this consortium: building a community around publishing, in a fast way, intagrammable,

“publishing has to be fast so you have to be in convo while its happening” - exploring the power of a book as a printed medium but doing it fast and using the feedback loops that can continue the conversation

Clusterduck

Communitues online and offline

Memes and memetic

how narratives impact on our reality

raise awarenss about how digital narratives impact our view of reality

Technolgical derteminism

Collective narratives

Alternativ use of social media