pad

Caroline_Busta

• Berlin-based writer and editor; co-founder of New Models (est. 2018), a media channel and community addressing the emergent effects of networked technology on culture; previously, editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based critical art journal Texte zur Kunst (2014-17) and an associate editor at Artforum magazine (2008-14) in New York.
• https://newmodels.io/
  • NEW MODELS was founded in Berlin in 2018. It’s initial aim was to create a media space outside of the “physics” of Web 2.0 platforms by hand-aggregating links and seeding a community beyond the feed. In the time since, we have built an international member network and Discord server, staged many IRL and digital/physical events, published swarm-generated content with Highsnobiety, Kaleidoscope, and Novembre; released an album’s worth of unhinged radio plays by Lil Internet, created an Internet perfume with Society of Scent, and facilitated the creation of an interactive digital glossary (NM Webdex) and a physical book (NMCodex)—both collectively-authored by the NM community—indexing the experience of being online together during the extremely online year of Y2K20.
  • Originally content aggregator, developed into podcast+community
• Part of the Dark Forest collective
  • https://darkforest.metalabel.com/dfa2
  • https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/
  • https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/essays/losing-yourself-in-the-dark/
• https://carolinebusta.github.io/
• Themes: internet culture, dark forest 0. Intro

xpub is a consortium between Nero Editions (Rome), Institute for Networked Cultures (Amsterdam), Aksioma (Ljubljana), and Echo Chamber (Brussels) for a biennial of experiments on new publishing formats. The idea is to bring to light knowledge and practices developed by members over the past years in publishing, which continues to expand beyond the classic terms of traditional linear publishing. The idea is to create a definition and operational model for Expanded Publishing.

[+chloe to take notes]

You are partecipating in an expert sprint -> an informal space to discuss freely about your practice and ideas. While our focus is on expanded publishing, we want to know about your field, We are recording this with plans of creating a hybrid report, and eventually a toolkit or publication, but mistakes silences and uncertainty are part fo the plan

a seires of 10 interviews with experts, artists, editors to understand the whys, hows, whos, and whats of expanded publishing. That is how the interviews will be structured, allowing 10 minute for each, with a moment of open discussion. The other interviewees are Clusterduck, Silvio Lorusso, Thomas Spies, Irene de Craen, Geoff Cox, Open Source Publishing,(Yancey Strickler, Kenny Goldsmith, Dušan Barok.

Questions:

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

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

What do you hope to achieve with your practice?

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

“betraying the platform” –> betraying legacy media, betraying publishing

working in publishing since 90s - wanted to work in mainstream media, then worked as editor of art forum, then in 2010s the nature of media really fundamentally changed - the print magazine was no longer a viable container for information

• new models: can we make the signal better, the noise less?

• discord community, podcast - generative community - producing an audience and not a magazine - continue to think how media is changing - AI and LLM - neural media - thinking of AI through media

Marta: influence of the betraying the platform - do you betray legacy media? do you recommend it?

it was during black square online - being translated into action online, realising the emptiness?

media is us and if its mainstream media it’s a “bad from of us”

the most important gesture is to filter

editorial process becoming dependent on platform logics

in network media, content no longer delivers information

we can not be loyal to any media, only human

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

How is an editorial product born, developed, and published within your practice?

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

What is the life/evolution of your editorial objects?

What does your workflow look like?

*What is your revenue model for writing, editing, printing, distributing, promoting? *

How do you ensure or work towards a sustainable practice?

what happened to channel xyz, your experience with blockchain

Dark Forest workflow and leakiness -> what are the setbacks of legacy media and publishing, and what can we learn from the workflow of the dark forest space?

• during covid it very much felt dark forest-y -> their nature has changed a lot - we learned from fashion that collabs are the way - clout bombing

• its not as dark anymore - you can have a dark forest in any kind of space

• regardless of platforms - fast language production - terms that create new worlds, key terms create imaginaries - speaking different languages

creating an object: self publishing - emergent - what layer are you producing? - embbeding

• in relation to search engines?

• is a believer in printed objects - printed form archives particular language from a time

• example of metalabel and print on demand - our archive is not dropbox, its printing moments - we should do that regularly, thats how we have memory

• internet desintegrating in different ways - can be various clubs and groups

urbit planet

• protocols as essencial to communities - digital identities: we will publish ourselves even more and more

marta: example of incelectuals as a leaky thing like this

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

How have you created your community of readers and collaborators? Who is your audience? How do you engage them?

*In the DF anthology there is this meme/image that reads: editors don’t make magazines, they make audiences *

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

How does one capitalize on community? How do you turn social capital into capital? Is it exploitative to do so? Is community a viable business model?

marta: how do you get messages across this chaos?

matching audience to content - thinking - who is your audience?

• example: lana del rey coachella, she was always going to have an audience ready to interpret this message - understood how to tap into a zeitgast, a frequency - because that wiring is there - this is going to be valued - good to think about the circulation of media through this

charli xcx - gen z pop culture - also feeling a but forced about it - something sad because its so forced - cannot be architected

vibes level tunning

forced meme

clout bombing

4. Open Discussion - 15

think before you print, but do print

podcast is fast theory

commercial objects, even if gimmicky, the hype object –> there’s a place for this

Ilan: you spoke about container - containers and impact? social or technical question?

container vs content

cloud, language, context giving in terms of podcast –> human voice adds so much, frequency,

sympposium,

ilan: book is used to be resilient

book not totally random - the ideal pocket book size - to be thoughtful of the reader

• i dont want design objects - choose when you print

tommaso: shifting from print to digital to physical - how to expand in terms of media? podcast, are they a publishing object? - these editorial proceesses are also very different

• well edited text: important!

• respecting the listenings time - cut something clear -

• we do a lot of things at the same time - we scan more than read, go deeper if we are interested - videos we literally scan through it - question of how to package it? - commercial objects / gimmmicky objects make people think about things in different ways

do you have experience with immediate publishing - livestream ?

• citing citarella’s work - livestream is limiting in terms of population - flexible work, no children, - was quite specific to a demographic / covid times?

• tommaso - making it more of an event , putting more attention or care

• metalabel release - live stream live event - but still contingent to the audience

lorenzo: what is your business model? tokens, patreon etc?

• patreon / substack supports a baseline - in adition, they use r&d arm to do commercial consulting / white label and NDAs

channel.xyz // https://www.channel.xyz/

co publish with other entites

web3 is gnarly - not supporting the social and intellectual goals - their tool is open source and someone else can build with it, with a splinternet?

north south europe divide, funding,

looking at solutions

thinking about how does capital circulate? people want to have the best products, best conversations etc

what can 100k could do for a constallation for a few small publishers?

bs cope in applying for funds

there is no formula!!! no tool kit? :(

thielbuck

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?

If you could have a say in how the publishing industry will expand and evolve in the future, what would you want to see more and what would you want to abandon?

the ones with the most muscle = good agregadors

studios and practices that are good in tapping people into their world - building a universe of collaborators

the wish would be for these nodes to have a good quality arm - not necessarily a wish but an interesting place for publish to exist

anne imoff, kanye, denma, >>studios <<

nodes with publishing arms

multipolar publishing world

not diminishing academic and theory publishing

vanity press/publishing

why are museums taking the bait, precious real estate, matters not so much in digital publishing

paths of circulation don’t work anymore

future of reading

fiction will remain, narrative still remains important

theory might not

fast theory - shumon basar, douglad coupland, hans ulrish obrist the extreme self

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58326444-the-extreme-self

infectious ideas

reducing and refining ideas helps read deeper

people dont read theory from page 1 to 100 - they scan through museums, maybe take it on the train to read further - be respectuful of peoples! how can publishing integrante into the new ways our brains are wired?