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Conversation_with_Silvio_Lorusso
2 July 2024, 3:30 PM
Introductions
Carolina (00:01:33) - Hi, Silvio, nice to see you. We will go through a series of questions that explore your relationship to publishing and your practice. Based on these expert sessions, we will develop an outcome that reports and documents them. Would you like to introduce yourself in a sentence or two?
Silvio (00:02:06) - First of all, thanks so much for having me. It’s nice to try to reflect a bit on many years of involvement in publishing. My name is Silvio Lorusso, I’m a designer by training, an artist, and more and more, an author. My involvement in publishing and experimental publishing has several branches, I started at the INC with an interest in researching business modelsprint-on-demand, which at the time was a new thing — you can imagine how many years ago we are speaking of. This led to a certain interest in the platformization of publishing, such as Amazon, Kindle, and systems of rights management. Then I did my PhD thesis in Venice on experimental publishing, which was focused on the artistic experiments around platformization and enclosure.
(00:03:40) - The main byproduct of that is still online, called references"Post-Digital Publishing Archive". I recently changed the code, so it doesn’t look like a shady website. I was also involved for a couple of years in an initiative called the referencesPublishing Lab, which was a series of collaborations with real-world partners in terms of creating publishing outputs.
Why: Politics of Publishing
Carolina (00:04:19) - It’s nice that you’ve mentioned your PhD project because our first question relates to that. In thinking of how you archive these post-digital publishing practices, looking back on it, what would you change now, what was missing, and what didn’t materialize in this archive, or in the way you built it?
Silvio (00:04:43) - 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. The part which I find very precious about the archive is the fact that it has a lot of detail in every project. fragility and stabilityThis 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. 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 contemporay art with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Bas Jan Ader etc?
(00:05:49) - 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 references"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. workflowsAnother 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 referencesInternet Archive, and some archives are taking that strategy, for example, an Italian archive of radical publishing, which is called the referencesGrafton 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.
Carolina (00:07:32) - Speaking of scarcity of resources: ahead of this conversation, we were also talking about the “Entreprecariat” book. We noticed how perhaps the scene, the labour and platforms have also changed since then. How do you see the role of small publishers like some of us here within this landscape?
Silvio (00:08:07) - I see it as crucial. traditional publishingThe 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 practicesIn the past I've been mostly interested in the weird experimental EPUBs or booking a JPEG, booking a floppy disk, a super long form that is interactive and so on… Nowadays, it’s a bit of a disappointment that many of physical 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 that is coming out now for Spector Books, references"Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism".
So if that kind of publishing has a value — of course, it’s beautiful, it’s interesting, it shapes things — but at the same time, it has a degree of volatility, that is still a problem. So the point is, how to make a lasting publication? When I say lasting, I don’t mean necessarily something printed and solid, but unfortunately, it seems to me that that kind of authoritativeness that the printed distributed book, meaning physical objectsthe book that you find in a shop with an ISBN, is still something that people take seriously, more seriously than the long-form. I know it by experience. I wrote many long-form essays and blog posts that were mostly ignored and now, that they are bound in a printed book, they are taken seriously. So the experimental part nowadays for me, from my point of view as an author and someone who wants to read good stuff and write good stuff, is the question of sustainability. That is the part where that requires more experimentation, more than coming up with a new file format. In a way, I think the file format derives more from the sustainability issue.
Carolina (00:12:15) - Do you mean financial sustainability in this case?
Silvio (00:12:21) - 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. 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, to make the writing, the publishing, the magic happen.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
Carolina (00:13:38) - You’re already kind of answering other questions that I had prepared, so you’re doing everything yourself, great! [laughs]. Do you see yourself operating within this triangle? And if so, do you have a specific workflow where you use the space of the blog to have that testing ground, let’s put it like that, to then go into the more “legitimizing” spaces?
Silvio (00:14:14) - 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. 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.
Carolina (00:15:52) - Just going back a little bit to the Infrastructures of Publishing that you find yourself in, how do you ensure or work towards a sustainable practice, whatever that might mean?
Silvio (00:16:17) - That’s the hard part. Broadly speaking, I think that event engagements are better paid than writing engagements. If everything is good, you are paid 500 euros for a 45-minute talk, and if it all goes well, you are paid the same amount to write an essay of many pages. So this doesn’t make any sense, right? This means that if you care about something other than the event, as a cultural organizer, as someone who has the chance to invite other people, you have to see that event, that thing that you organize, not just as a service that the speaker does, it’s not about the person coming to the stage. conditions of workYou're sustaining the practitioner's writing for other days. So how, as a cultural organizer, how can you facilitate this? Not creating burdens for the author, in the sense that you don't ask necessarily something new. You don't insist too much on the format of the slides. You don't ask too many meetings in advance. I have a text about this. I can send it to you. I have like a list with this.
Carolina (00:19:41) - We were talking about how, within this project, we’re also dealing with different realities, even being a European Union Funded project, Creative Europe, but we don’t experience a uniform Europe in the sense of the realities of small publishers and experimental publishing. You see a different reality in the Netherlands than you see in Italy or Greece, and I’m just pointing out the countries of this consortium. How have you experienced this as someone who has worked across these countries?
Silvio (00:20:25) - 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 makes sense, there is a worrying situation that is not just about single countries, but about Europe.
Who: Community of Publishing
Carolina (00:22:49) - Thank you. We’ve covered a little bit of the why you do what you do; how, within infrastructures of publishing, and just touching a bit more on the who, so the community or networks that you surround yourself with. I think Marta had a good example question: do you want to elaborate?
Marta (00:23:18) - Sure! It’s about the way one operates within a network of other publishers, authors, and designers, and if you see yourself being part of “a scene”, and if you participate in that, how that influences you or how you are critical of it. There’s an idea of the “post-individual” that’s developed by one of the speakers we’ll be talking to later, Yancey Strickler, and about moving away from the “genius” into the “scenius” and the value of community which can, on one side, influence the work positively, but sometimes it might be constricting. What’s your experience with this?
Silvio (00:24:17) - I have some ideas. I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to express them in the way I would like, but I will try. I will try to put it as bluntly as I can. Scenes exist, groups exist, conformation and other-than-individuals exist, but, at the end of the day, who is the actor that pays rent, that has to pay the bills, is an individual. In most cases, especially when it comes to writing, most people write as individuals. We shouldn’t forget the individual from a practical existence point of view. governance and ownershipI'm all for the idea of nourishing communities, but this shouldn't become a sort of romantic veil in front that hides the fact that, after all, this sustainability question is about individuals.This is even more clear nowadays if you consider that many of the association forms of the so-called “scene” — I would say that I belong to various groups of people — are very weak. communityCollectives are formed and destroyed in a couple of years. So, what is more substantial? I think that the individual wins, not because I like individuals or “the genius” idea, but simply because of a realist understanding of how practices work in this sense.
Discussion
Ilan (00:26:56) - Hi Silvio, thank you for joining us. I think that the question of struggling comes at the same time with considerations of abandoning and exiting both the creative world, the publishing industries, and all these ideas about communities. And I’m wondering if you see this abandonment as a form of resistance, as it has sometimes been framed in contemporary art. We know many examples of artists that decided to leave the art world and they are known as artists and their “finale furioso” somehow was abandoning the art world. I’m wondering if we could imagine a future like that, as a form of expanded publishing, a form of exiting the publishing world.
Silvio (00:27:45) - Wonderful reflection. I’m very much in this line of thought in the sense that I appreciate a lot of people who have taken on this kind of idea of abandonment, jumping ship not only from the art world but also from academia. governance and ownershipOne positive side of this is that many people have lost reverence towards institutions. They realize that in most ways they don't work. They don't work for them.Academia, for example, and I speak again from my experience, if you want to put down ideas, is the worst place. I’m not the first to say it. conditions of workSusan Sontag already said back in the day that the best writers of her generation were destroyed by academia.What’s the concrete reality of abandonment?
The people I’ve seen manage to cut ties with traditional institutions, when they manage, it’s an exceptional and somewhat uncertain path. I’m talking about people starting Patreon. But if you want to have a sustainable life with Patreon, you need to have an extremely huge user and fan base. And that also limits your output in the sense that the fan base, the people that will pay the five dollars every month, expect from you the same thing that you did the month before. So I think the most convincing negotiation between abandonment and staying, I found it in a book, which probably you all know, called references"The Undercommons". This idea that you stay in the institution because, to a certain extent, you cannot escape it completely, unless you are a superstar. conditions of workAnd you steal from the institution: you steal the tape, for instance. Of course, it's metaphorical, but you create spaces within the institution without reverence to the institution to pursue your goal. And why don't you feel guilty? You don't feel guilty because, after all, what you are doing is what you are paid for, to do research, to write, not to not to embark on managerial jobs.These are necessary things, but if they take 100% of your time, then better go to corporate, no?
Marta (00:30:59) - I had a question relating to what you mentioned earlier, about this sort of list of things not to burden the author. You were saying it’s a fictional piece? Can you tell us just a bit more about that? What we’re trying to learn about from the people we’re talking to are tools — as a very general term, not only software but also good practices in the world of publishing. So maybe seeing that as a tool, if you want to talk just a bit more about it?
Silvio (00:32:18) - It was a commission to do a book of fictional memos, the ones you have internally in a company. For example, Zuckerberg sending them to Meta. And my idea was to imagine a giant company that was called Culture Industry. I wanted to say, “Okay, from now on, we behave like this when we invite a guest”. So, for example, the first thing that I say is: “Let’s begin with the basics. From now on, you will relinquish the nasty habit of withholding the fee amount in the very first interaction with guests. Especially when the fee is symbolic. You won’t make them feel uncomfortable by asking at the bottom of the reply.” It’s not something that changes the world, this series of guidelines. emotional labourBut in the micro-economy of small gigs, this changes a lot. For example, when you have to chase payments, that takes hours in most of the production of what is published. And all that time, it's time stolen from content, from research, from ideas, from works.I hope this helps explain it better.
Ilan (00:34:23) - I think that’s a great practice. Fine-tuning the system so that you cut the corners of transactional friction by trying to reduce the moments where you have to respond to track payments, as you said. But I’m wondering, can we imagine something like really large strokes that would have an effect, a considerable impact for most cultural workers? I was wondering with your book, “Entreprecariat”, we feel that we are not only victims but also responsible for expanding and entertaining an abusive and exploitative system. Everybody probably has inflicted other people with abusive labor through assistance, through interns. So I’m wondering, is criticality enough? Being critical, is it enough? Or do we need a large stroke change in the way we relate with each other?
Silvio (00:35:34) - First of all, I thank you for having this reading of the book, which is not a common reading. What you say is true, it’s in the book. emotional labourAnd what I say in the book is that we are not just victims, we didn't just internalize the toxic activity. We need to consider ourselves partly responsible, otherwise, we don't believe in any kind of free will, in any kind of autonomy. This kind of take also derives from a consideration, based on direct and semi-direct experience, that small and medium artists/designers are worse actors than companies in terms of bad practices, and exploitation, and that’s scary. Criticality is not enough because criticality is not a tool of change. This is also explained in the book “The Undercommons”, criticality is a form of professionalization of institutional critique.
governance and ownershipInstitutional critique, to a certain extent, is paying homage to the institution, believing in its power and its value.And we go back to the fact that people don’t even take the time to write the institutional critique, because they don’t believe in its relevance anymore. I’m going to say something a bit controversial: I think that, to a certain extent, things that change, that have an effect, are based on something that traditionally has always been powerful — and that’s culpability. Generally, when you make the critical statement, you don’t mention names, you speak of the institution, you speak of the system, while a lot of examples of what you would call “call-out culture” ostracize the toxic actor. I can give you examples, such as the Excel sheets with terrible internship situations within the design world. And then the studio, even if it’s small, has to take action and say, “Hey, I’m going to change this and that”. communityShame is a powerful source of change, it acknowledges the partial autonomy of one of the actors. It's a dangerous path, but I think it could be useful in certain instances.
What: Future of Publishing
Carolina (00:38:56) - Thank you for that. I was hoping you would bring up some of those controversial statements you make. We are compiling these conversations as research into what experimental expanded publishing is now and what it can be in the future. We ask ourselves, can we ask about the future? What is the future? Can we imagine one or not? And some guests can answer it or not. But if you could define or expand on expanded publishing, what are the main urgencies that you see within publishing as an industry and its future?
Silvio (00:40:21) - 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?
Not even to suggest the very idea of saying “This is more than a blog post, this is more than an Instagram post”. Facilitating, supporting. The problem is that language is consumed, and exhausted. The language that we have at our disposal to express this all goes under the umbrella of “care”. Care was like a tragic disease for the art world in the sense that it removed all the power from the notions of “helping out”. communityJust helping out, for example, is way better than caring for at this point given that the language has lost that power. The mission becomes helping out, helping yourself, being helped out and helping out. Now, the future. As I did with the industry, I need to make like a little parenthesis on the word future. The future is like care, it’s been manipulated too much. My view of the future is this: somehow, what we call the future futures, preferable futures, in our design field is a bit of an obsession. It’s a trap because it’s yet another way of calling the present. So, I wouldn’t spend too much time defining the future. I think that this urgency to think of the future is fabricated by extrinsic needs. It’s not our urgency to think of the future. Everywhere we look around, we are pushed to think of the future, we go to the cinema and we think of the future. You can call it future, helping out, wanting to call, wanting to have that small post into at least an essay, into something published. I don’t know. Call it the future. Call it present. I don’t care. Nowadays, future-orientedness wastes energy.
Carolina (00:45:19) - We’re trying to relate the idea of the future with urgency, while thinking of the future pushes away the actual urgency perhaps, or the needs that we have right now — for instance about people being able to do what they’re doing without burning out is something that we need right now. And it’s happening as we speak. Thank you for that.
Lorenzo (00:45:54) - I was intrigued by your observation about individuals and communities. And I somehow interpret my work (as a publisher) as a constant effort to build up a community. And of course, I agree with you when you say that a community is built up of several individuals. But I think at the end of the day, publishing is community-based, especially right now. Even the resilience of the traditional book is based on that. When you talk about the triangle of negotiations between the author or cultural producer, small institution, or big institution, is also based on that. So big institutions guarantee a community somehow. It’s not a question, it’s more about understanding if small institutions are independent, in the way they’re able to produce their own communities without negotiating with a bigger institution. I think that is crucial and is crucial for creating a consensus, but also to creating a sort of sustainability around the project. So I don’t know if you have something to add to that.
Silvio (00:47:46) - It’s really good that you say that, interviews scare and worry me because to pass a message, sometimes I sharpen it a bit too much, I make it too pointy. In writing, it wouldn’t be like this. Of course, I believe in the strength of these ties. It’s interesting to define what the publisher is because I consider myself a small publisher, a bit active in publishing in the sense that I have a little journal in the University where I teach, nothing that requires as many resources as what you all do. But it means trying to bring these people together, text editing, publishing, posting… you know it all.
alternative practicesWhat people appreciate of independent publishing (without going too much into this) is that kind of selfless, thankless job of putting the community in the front without that ego reward that the author gets. I think that an author, at one point, should also be active on that other side and communityit would be nice if every author would dedicate part of their time to do the less visible job of bringing to the front the work of the community, the intelligence of the community. Another point that comes to mind is that very often the publisher is an individual, literally an individual. For example, the publisher of my last book is an individual who has boxes in his house, so I think something is fascinating about the fact that it’s hard to imagine that behind the publisher, very often, there is just a very generous, very committed individual.
And for the occasion, I made a meme, ”All modern digital infrastructure”. And then you see: “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”. So I think there is a really strong analogy between the state of the internet, of the web, where a small library of NPCs crumbles down and all the websites shut down. And the cultural infrastructure, which is full of “the random person in Nebraska”, in Eindhoven, in Bari, thanklessly publishing. For me, reformulating the mission based on this is about how to take care, helping out this part, this little piece, and if you take this piece out, everything crumbles.
Ilan (00:53:02) - We were able to define the publisher. Let’s try to define community because it’s a word we use a lot. As a publisher, I try to understand who is buying the books and the image gets very complex. Because we see people buying books but they are not reading them. So what kind of community is this? It’s not a community of text, it’s a community probably… the support becomes something very abstract or very immaterial. I’ve been spamming everyone about this article that came out two months ago called “No One Buys Books”. Silvio, you probably read it and it’s a beauty. We’re making all this effort, we are discussing for hours, about print-on-demand, great paper or what the state of the image is printed with this kind of premium tier against the free version, etc. But then, in the end, you publish a thousand copies and you sell 200 and 20 people read the book.
(00:54:15) - My question is, if the community is based on something so immaterial, is publishing such an important part of the consolidating factor to continue to sustain? I understand Nero or Topovoros or whoever is this person in Nebraska, we understood the metaphor — every one of us is a person in Nebraska somehow. And I’m wondering if it stands on so little, then we need to understand better who are we addressing and if the means we are using to address them are sufficient and enough. That’s why projects such as this one have to do with the future of publishing, with the expanded use of publishing, because we are all in a panic attack somehow.
Silvio (00:55:07) - It’s a fantastic question. Do you want me to address it? It’s a question I have myself, I can say something about it.
Ilan (00:55:19) - Please improvise, we are sharing thoughts, it’s more of a brainstorming.
Silvio (00:55:20) - I don’t want to over-speak, but the way I see it, the problem with the word “community” I have is that it pushes a perspective of indistinction. A community is like this node, this big network of identical nodes, the community is like a graph — it looks like a graph when I imagine it and this is the marketing use of the term community. That’s why I would start by bringing forward other ways of conceptualizing this group of people. For example, from my point of view as an author, editor, very micro-publisher, the individual nodes are countable. The people I refer to as graphic designers, as authors, I could read their texts and they could read mine or publish them, you count them in two hands, maybe in four hands. They are both passive and active to a certain extent. My metaphor to imagine this group of people, first of all, comes from my point of view because it’s not replicable for any other actor, each one has their own. So words that I would use are, for instance, co-conspirators, as to avoid this relationship to the big institution; Or allies or even — this is a bit of a dangerous reference so take it with a grain of salt — individual anarchism, things like Stirner, the idea of a community of egoists in which the individual prevails, but is not alone because it has to find these like-minded people. Again, with a grain of salt, it’s not Ayn Rand I’m talking about.
communityBut some ways allow the node of the community to be conceptualized both as a passive receiver of the publication (a buyer in the marketing sense, who cares if they read the book or not), but also as someone active in reproducing the scene.To me, it’s a nice exercise to sit down as an author and say “Who is this group of like-minded people that I interact with?” Many are in this room, so I’m happy to participate exactly for this reason. It gets very simple when we get rid of certain mystical terms. And I think a lot is about getting rid of certain mysticism in order to understand the urgency. But I know that in consortia, you have this problem of having to come to an agreement and that takes a lot of time, right?
Lorenzo (00:59:09) - This morning we were talking with Clusterduck and they came out with an interesting thought that may be related to this theme: that the impact that collective imagination has on our reality is much stronger than any kind of technological device or disruptive device, so maybe we can define community in this sense. I mean, it’s a sort of collective power that can impact reality much more than any technology, any tools, any device. Even if I understand what you’re talking about, we refer to super small communities and I still believe in the power of this collective imagination. And somehow I think we are facing a moment in which we should help ourselves, but also defend ourselves from super powerful platforms or technologies that are impacting our reality, producing all sorts of weird visions or weird habits or behaviors. So I think the function of these small communities is also based on that.
Marta (01:01:00) - A way to maybe think of this concept of the squads or squad wealth from what I’ve personally seen, I think I may be part of communities, but when it comes to the practicalities, it’s the small group chat that gets stuff done, or it’s like two or three people. And while there might be a narrative of community, when it’s operationalized it’s a few people sitting at a table or a few people speaking in a group chat. In a sense, that similar understanding of the bigger narrative of what a community is and then the practice of it, that’s much more peer-to-peer individual allies or co-conspirators, which is quite interesting. Maybe we want to move towards a conclusion. I don’t know if you still want to reply to this last intervention, Silvio, before we wrap up.
Silvio (01:02:16) - 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. First of all, because I am one [person that works for the 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.
But the part that I liked was exactly this kind of sort of tactical carelessness and not reverence, to use what’s out there, this full bricoleur attitude, by any means necessary, that part was nice. So I think it’s a good reference to at least try to go out of the term of the more classical terms like scene or community. In the Netherlands, a good work in this sense has been done by Pascal Gielen, a sociologist who wrote an article on what “scene” means or the visibility issue of that part, which I think could be interesting from the publishing point of view. The book is called references"The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude".
Carolina (01:05:04) - Good reference, thank you. We’re also writing all of this and working on our forms of expanded publishing from these conversations and reports. We’ll also be able to update you on that. I think we’ll wrap up for now, this was a great conversation so thank you again for joining and offering your points of view and new words, we’ll keep in touch with you.
Silvio (01:05:45) - Thanks so much. It was really nice to discuss this and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of new imagination you develop. Keep me posted!