Clusterduck
2 July 2024, 10:30A
Introductions
00:00 This is the first of a series of expert meetings on expanded publishing. I’m Marta, this is Carolina, and we’re the moderators for this event. And over here, you can see a range of people you might already know, our panel of partners. We’re going to start with just a quick introduction. Then we have three main questions, a moment for discussion, and then coming back with a final question. And Carolina will be handling that, and I will do more timekeeping. If you could start with just a brief introduction? Chloë is also connected for more notes.
00:56 Hello, we are Clusterduck. Actually, it’s just three of us, while usually the co-founder members are five. I’m Silvia. Then there is Aria. Francesca and Tommaso, unfortunately, couldn’t be here with us. Clusterduck is a collective that was founded in 2016 to unravel the mess of the social web and the internet. The aim was to do that together. What we did in the past year has been to connect our knowledge in terms of design, transmedia, new media studies and all the research that we do in the many bubbles of the social web to create installations, curating exhibitions or creating participative operations. So in a sense, we are experimenting with many mediums in the attempt to create something which is participative and which can help the discourse go on and maybe clarify something more about the cluster fuck which we are in.
03:02 I don’t have much to add to the description. We mainly focus on URL processes, and on the gap that characterizes the different communities online and offline. We also have this kind of cross-media research and practice in which we research on topics by doing our participative experiments. But other than that, I don’t have much more to add. I don’t know if Noel wants to continue.
Why: Politics of Publishing
04:17 Thank you very much, all of you. To start, we wanted to first go into what we call the Politics of Publishing, or the missions and goals that drive you to have started Clusterduck and still do it today. Could you elaborate a little bit on why do you operate in the way you operate? How is your collective shaped? Do you have a core mission, and goals that guide you through all your different work across all the mediums that you just explained?
05:08 One topic we have been working a lot on, as you might know, is that of memes and memetics in general. I think this also points to the red thread that goes through our work in other topics that we have been investigating, how narratives impact our reality. When we started getting into memes, around 2016, we realized that sometimes these complex narratives that develop on the internet and on digital media that might seem quite innocent at first sight, or even frivolous or superficial, actually have a very deep impact on our reality on a political level and in the way people perceive reality, the way they interact with reality — our work aims to somehow raise awareness about this.
06:23 Back when we started in 2016, at that moment, the priority was to show that memes mattered and were something important. It was not just something frivolous that you would share with your co-workers that wouldn’t have any consequences. I think nowadays in 2024, it’s not necessary to explain that as much as it was eight years ago. I think the awareness about this has risen significantly. But what still maybe lacks is, I think, the awareness that all the problems we are facing as a society can be solved on a practical level. So why are we not able to solve them? And that’s basically because the over-arching stories that somehow shape our societies are much more difficult to adapt than laws or politics. And that’s somehow what gives the whole situation in which we are this inertia. That’s why it’s so difficult to steer away from the catastrophe that we’re seeing in front of us. Because when it comes to these collective narratives that give meaning to our lives, most people are probably not even aware that they can be changed. They are seen as facts.
07:48 They are seen as things that cannot be changed. They are just there, like laws of nature. I don’t know if I steered away from the original questions, but I think that’s for sure one very important part of our work. And one part that drives us to try to interact with different mediums. Whether it’s real-life situations, on-the-street demonstrations or traditional media, like printed media or digital media, they all have a role in defining these narratives. So that’s why we try not to concentrate just on one strategy because we think that’s not enough. I think it needs, what is needed is a very broad approach.
08:40 I think everything that you described from raising awareness to, as you said, putting things out there in the public space, I think they can all be understood as publishing practices or gestures of making public. What are some of the main references, people or things that inspire you throughout your work?
09:14 I think there are too many, probably! The thing that brought us together in the first place was that we all come from very different backgrounds and communities on the internet. During the late 90s, and early 2000s, we were all doing different things in different platforms and navigating different communities. So the answers to that question would probably be shared but very peculiar for all of us.
09:56 I definitely feel a very strong bond with the referencesNetArt community, so all the work that was in the scene of the early 2000s in Italy where we’re based. That’s probably something that came up earlier, but Clusterduck is a transnational collective, the five co-founders are based in Germany and Italy, but of course, we collaborate with a much broader community of creators all around Europe and in some cases also outside of Europe.
10:40 I would say my main reference before starting working with Clusterduck were of course referencesSalvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico and Les Liens Invisibles, all the kinds of cross-mailing list, cross-platform communities in Italy at the time, but through Clusterduck we collaborated with referencesFranco Neva Mattes, a lot of other artists that were part of a common network when we started, but I’m sure any one of us had different kinds of connection and bonds to different scenes of the Internet. One of the things that brought us together was indeed to research and look at these different clusters of the web how they connected and overlapped sometimes and in which spaces were taking place. The matter of publishing or going public and the connection that this creates was a big part of our references at the beginning. I don’t know if Noel or Silvia want to add to that.
12:06 I think an important reference is certain communities and bubbles that we were part of when we started as a collective. So that would be, for example, in the early 2010s what came to be called the references"Weird Facebook" community. What we found interesting about it was that those people (and us too) were using those platforms in a way that was completely the opposite of what Zuckerberg and their founders were hoping you to do with them. For example, anonymity, posting content that would go against the guidelines, and repeatedly opening up new profiles all the time. Trying to somehow go around this very stark surveillance and rules that were put in place on those platforms. And somehow these communities were able to create something very meaningful and precious to us and to many people that lived through it at the time. And I think if one traces this back to the topic of publishing, maybe one could even go as far as to say that this goes back to certain communitarian practices, like self-published zines in the referencespunk communities or political communities. This DIY ethos of just doing your thing and not caring about what the rules and consequences are.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
14:01 I think you also touched on something that perhaps can go into our next theme, Infrastructures of Publishing, and I think you were already tapping into those DIY, self-organized infrastructures. Do you have a specific workflow or structure within your collective? You’re already talking about multiplicity, you are individuals, and you work across different geographies… I imagine that you also have your way of working together.
14:53 When we started it was similar to the situation in which we live now. It’s a situation where we are exposed to a lot of communication and a lot of content, a lot of images, a lot of text. When we started, publications, posting, and shit posting, were the things that we wanted to analyse. We somehow felt that we were receiving a lot and we were publishing nothing. The first thing that we wanted to do was a documentary that never saw the light of day. So, what I’m trying to say is that trying to absorb, curate or just understand all the information that we are exposed to is a very hard thing to do.
15:55 toolsDiscussing together about what was going on, especially for the three years after we started, was the main thing that we were doing. And we are realising it just now. We were starting to do things, such as curating the Roma Biennale and so we were publishing something. We were doing an exhibition at PANKE and creating a digital gallery that somehow told us about our topics. But what we were really doing, and I’m seeing it just now, was trying to understand what was going on. And this is something very interesting about how we started. We had the impression that all that we were going to post online was to nourish a future neural network that we were calling AAN, DRAN, whatever. And so, we had this feeling that even posting on Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform we were using had a responsibility attached to it.
17:30 It was kind of 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 happened already with Stable Diffusion and it is a lot messier… the results that Stable Diffusion brings back to us mean scraping and stealing our data. It’s like a six-year parabola because now we understand that maybe 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.
19:03 One of the main tools we have been using over the past years is toolsTelegram and Telegram chats, for example. That’s a tool that we have been using a lot for sure. And then all the usual tools, also many tools that we use in our corporate jobs, we try to bring them back into our creative practice if it seems meaningful to do so. One thing that we started noticing very early on when we started to work together as a collective and we were attending, for example, events like Transmediale here in Berlin, was this difference between the older generation of net artists and activists that also Aria was referencing and what our generation was doing at the time. The older, activist generation didn’t trust what we were doing.
20:20 They were trying to warn us, quote"You have to own the platform, you have to own the tools that you use because otherwise, they are going to own you somehow." Sometimes we would feel judged because we were using a lot of Instagram and Facebook and all those tools and maybe not worrying enough about the consequences. And of course, we were aware that those were proprietary platforms with very strong surveillance.
20:52 But as I was saying before, with this Weird Facebook thing, we thought that we could somehow find our way around it and trick those platforms into something else. And I think nowadays probably we would see what those older activists were warning us about and they had good reasons to do so. At a certain time, there was this big debate about leaving Facebook. I mean, this has come up time and time again over the past years. Now it’s been quiet for a while, but there were some attempts to migrate to other platforms, Mastodon and whatnot. And also the promises of Web 3.0 and how everything will be decentralized and democratized and so on. We have seen that these promises have not been fulfilled. Because of the way that platforms work, I still think that exiting those platforms is not the solution because you lose a huge audience and you miss out on the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with this audience. However controlled and censored this might be, I still think that it is a loss, if you look at it as a whole.
22:21 - We could spend a whole day untangling these threads together! You were just talking about how you combine your other work with the collective work and how you also bring your individual experiences into Clusterduck as a collective. When preparing this, I also saw in another interview that you gave that you sort of define yourself as business modelsemployed in the creative gig economy by day and meeting online at night. I’m curious if you can expand on that with how you ensure or work towards some kind of sustainability of your collective and how you operate in this way.
23:26 I can start by saying that, yes, we are all employed in the creative industry. We mainly work for digital communication agencies. So the theme of sustainability and, to use a term that I don’t like a lot, “work-life balance”, has been present in our discussions, both in recent and less recent times. What we try to do, as Noel was saying, is to extract information from our corporate experience and bring that into the collective to maximise the efficiency of the process and try to not burn out.
24:19 We all have different roles. And, of course, sustainability of workflowswe 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 with time to keep some free spaces and some out-of-office time where we don’t respond or take in more work, as it can be quite 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.
26:09 Let’s say that when we wrote that interview, something changed, COVID happened, and after that, sustainability of workflowswe realized that working 17 hours per day is not healthy. When you start and you love what you do, you don't realize that working so much can be bad for your health, and so now we changed throughout this process a lot, we understood what was best and fortunately, the work that we did brought us on.
27:00 For example, we didn’t talk about one of our main works, which is the one that Noel has behind him. Our research brings us to build huge walls of memes, called the detective walls, which is a spin-off of another project of ours called Meme Manifesto, and this says a lot about the tools that we use and also about publishing. We published the internet on a 20-meter wall, and we did that by using the tools that we are using already, for example, Noel mentioned Telegram, we use it to gather memes. Some of us, especially Francesca, have a passion for toolsarchiving and so we were toolsscraping Reddit and 4chan and a lot of different social media. In the end, we were publishing something, even in a very weird way, and the work was transmedia because we had many media in which we wanted to post it.
28:39 We published the little book with Aksioma, as a catalogue to explain the work, and there is a website supporting it. This is somehow something that we learned, as Aria was saying, from our daily jobs, the corporate jobs, because usually, web campaigns must have a landing page. These are the basic “rules” of marketing. But later on, as marketing was evolving, we also understood that the transmedia landscape was changing. The Meme Manifesto work can be an example of an experiment we wanted to make in publishing, but while doing Meme Manifesto we were in COVID lockdown. toolsWe had many workshops where we were trying to talk with people about what was going on in their personal and very alone lives on the web. We understood that even talking about that was useful for people, talking out loud about what is happening online to you and just you is something very useful. We started this process which was a therapeutical healing process. And we need that because, you know, the internet is very addicting. And work is also very addicting. And we were addicted to it.
30:54 It’s about finding a method to survive all this content, survive all this rhythm that somehow we are imposing onto us. The people thoat work in culture are doing it a lot. You are self-exploiting the enthusiasm that you and your peers have, while we should find a way to protect ourselves from these so that we don’t exhaust all the energies that we have. Our last work, which is called references"Deep Fried Feels” (https://clusterduck.space/deepfriedfeels) and that we haven’t presented, is also about that, about our feelings and how the media and communications together are kind of destructive.
32:43 I wanted to say something more about what Silvia was saying, about self-exploitation in the cultural industry, because I think it’s a very important topic. That’s one thing I wanted to address, this relationship between the corporate jobs that we have — which have a lot of limitations and issues and problems that I think I don’t need to address that are quite self-evident… But on the other side, the deal is very clear, and sometimes it’s more honest than what you have in the cultural industry because business modelsthe cultural industry thrives on those grey zones of informal work that Silvia was addressing. It's much more apt at colonizing your free time and your passions, while at the same time criticizing exactly those kinds of things, and that's what makes it feel very weird, to say the least, sometimes.
33:50 Another thing I wanted to address is, since we are a transnational collective, something that we also noticed is the differences in what it means to have a sustainable work-life balance, for example, in Northern Europe, and in Southern Europe, which is very different. And it creates very strong imbalances in our collective and is something that is not addressed enough in the creative industries. Somehow this all goes under the label of “we are all Europeans”, we all have freedom of movement. We are all the same. This is not true, because someone who lives in Greece, Italy or Bulgaria will have other possibilities than someone who lives in Denmark or Germany. And I think this is quite obvious, so I don’t need to dig deeper into that. Regarding the work that Sylvia was introducing, as she already started explaining, it has a lot to do with empathy and emotions and how those things travel in digital media. So if we want to bring it back to the topic of publishing, when you publish something, when you publish content, you are expressing ideas, a story, but often we are also trying to convey emotions. And digital media has a very specific way of doing so. For example, the way that we are talking now gives us somehow the illusion that we are in a conversation that is comparable to an interaction in real life. But after six years of working online — we started realizing this very strongly during the pandemic — something very fundamental was missing. And this was creating problems between us. That was the starting point for this work: reflecting on emotions and how emotions are conveyed on digital media.
Who: Community of Publishing
36:02 Thank you very much for going deep into this topic, which is also very dear to me. And it’s really important to put it in these conversations because we’re also archiving this and reporting on it and hopefully continuing something sustainable for everyone. Reflecting on what “Europe” means is also very relevant to this project. And I specifically like the mention of the meme as a healing agent. In the beginning, you also highlighted how you’re very much a part of an online community and are doing things not only with your collective but then using Telegram channels or using these online communities as your medium, I would say. How do you create your community around your work? Who is your audience, if we can say it in these terms? And how do you see your role within that bigger online community as a publisher of that community itself, like you described?
[[00:37:34] The easiest way to understand who our audience is wherever we give talks. It’s very beautiful because there you see, “OK, so they were listening to us”. This is very important. And that is what we missed during Covid. In situations like festivals or gatherings — for example, there was one very nice symposium called “Organized by None”, communityor when we go to Aksioma or the Institute of Network Cultures — we have this feeling that we are part of a greater community that is discussing the same topics as we are.But also all of us developed a community on the web. As everybody’s doing what you like, you become part of a discussion. Just like when Noel was talking about Weird Facebook, it was when we were a lot into Facebook groups and we were discussing a lot about virtual reality, technology, post-Internet, and memes. I remember that Zuckerberg had to make the Facebook group functional because of the filter bubble problem, he wanted Facebook to be more local, so we exploited that feature in the platform.
39:55 The community is very diverse. Every time that we go places, we invite people as a follow-up to join our Telegram chats. communityAnd then there is a network of people who we collaborate with in our jobs. And so during the years, every time that we wanted to do something, and we wanted to collaborate, for example, with a developer or with a designer, people were adding up to the cluster family. For example, the collaboration with referencesJules Duran, who is a very good designer and type designer, was very precious in the work on Meme Manifesto. There are some others, like developers, referencesPietro Arial Parisi, Super Internet, and Gregorio Macini, that are helping us with the development of the many websites that we did, but also intervening in other ways, because all of our collaborators are very interested in a lot of things.
41:28 Speaking of tools, it’s not easy at all to understand how to share our work in a very correct way. In the beginning, we were discussing everything on chats and for example, Aria who comes from a background in activism, was very good at teaching us how you can make horizontal decisions. governance and ownershipNow we understand that even if we have many tools, decisions have to be made in a video call. Via emails is impossible to have a smooth dialogue and understand each other. We have a lot of suggestions now, if you want to start a collective, write to us at hello@clusterduck.space because we are starting to be really good at it!
43:17 That’s great. You could have a manual on how to collectivise.
43:25 I think now would be a nice time to open the discussion for the rest of our room, which we will see in a second. I’m going to pass on this microphone…
43:40 Can I add just one thing on the community topic that we were addressing before, just one small thing? I think the Institute for Network Cultures published a book which addresses the topic quite well, which is a dark forest anthology. (Marta: Actually, that’s my book!) We love it, it’s a very great concept to describe what online communities can be like in a positive sense. You know very well how much work it is to manage a community. communityAnd to be honest, we sometimes feel that we have to put so much work into making things work between us as a collective that we would love to put more work into community management, growing communities and addressing communities. You know very well how much work that is. So we don’t always have enough time to do that as we would like. But we have a lot of love and respect for anyone who does so, and there are some great people out there who are great at doing this.
Discussion
44:53 Absolutely. Thank you so much for your final thoughts on that. I’ll pass on this microphone throughout the room. We’ve got one question.
45:27 Ciao! We talk about tools and you somehow experimented with a decentralized network with the super internet. I’m curious to know more about your experience with blockchains and this kind of technique or technology to understand if you find something interesting in terms of tools, in terms of technological dynamics that we can adopt in the future, even in publishing or in the art sphere.
46:24 The Super Internet Space is a multiplayer room in which everybody can draw, this was the start of it. Clusterduck organized things in this space in 2018 as part of “Meme Propaganda”, which was maybe our first participative operation. And it was the operation that Noel was talking about when we started to understand what memes can be, that memes can be used for propaganda. But later on, the Super Internet Space developed into something which is a kind of satellite of Clusterduck with other collaborators.
47:30 The position of Clusterduck in terms of cryptocurrencies is very attentive and critical, because financial streamswe saw what happened during COVID with the NFT craze in relationship to our network of digital artists, and it was very ambiguous. So we were watching it happening, and it was destroying the vision that people have about digital art because, for us, digital art is much more than a JPEG sold on a digital Metaverse or whatever platform/museum. The Super Internet World Experience has something in common with Clusterduck and also with a very nice work from Silvio Lorusso, “A Slice of the Pie”. It was a project that we really liked, they were using a cake and everybody could try to join in the building just by posting their art on this cake. And what was happening is that if you managed to post on the cake, you could write on your CV that you exhibited at Kunsthalle, we love that. Super Internet Space does something in that direction in the sense that crypto as a technology makes it easier to assign a room to the artist that joins the project. And so to answer your question, Lorenzo, maybe it is useful to make the process easier. About the CV, we particularly loved that thing and we use that in the Meme Manifesto project as well. alternative publishing practicesThis year we were exhibiting at KW Institute in Berlin, and we asked the curator to write a very huge colophon of 300 names so that all the people who somehow (that we know) joined the project could write on their CV that they were exhibiting at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, which is, I think, the "higher" place in we got in. So we wanted to give back.To sum it up, if we can use any tool, script or whatever, we try to give back something to the community that we are interacting with.
51:32 If I can add just a little something to what Silvia was saying… which I completely agree with. I would say that another part of our reflection towards both blockchain and AI, the two major technological themes in the last years is the environmental impact of mining and the database production that involves both of these technologies. We always try to be as careful as possible regarding this theme because we all do feel a deep attachment to it. In 2019/2020, we developed a branch of Meme Propaganda, that involves memes, the climate crisis and the protests of Fridays for Future, the use of memes during the protests. toolsWe tend to have an approach that is as practical as possible to this kind of technologies. We're glad to use them for what they represent and how they can help to build online communities and share the visibility and the rewards that come from collaborative practices, but we also try not to idolize technologies and see them in the wholeness of the picture, considering their environmental impact. I don’t know if Noel wants to add something.
53:29 No, I fully agree with you. Just one thing, building on what Aria and Silvia said… I think one has to be very careful about technological determinism. This utopian idea, that we all inherited from the 90s, is that somehow the internet is inherently free and uncontrollable. That maybe some new magical technology will come across which will emancipate us, be it blockchain or whatever. What we have seen over the past year is that the big promises that were made a few years ago about Web 3.0, that it would somehow solve the problems of Web 2.0, these promises still need to materialize. And I think this was to be expected.
55:12 But we are also trying to use these tools as we are using social media: we are not just critical, but we understand the grassroot dream. We are using tools, because we also want to try them, we are very weak, unfortunately. So we are also trying to find other solutions.
55:53 I want to ask you about the limits of criticality, because this is also an automatic thing in our small milieu, that everybody is critical about the technologies and the tools. But we also see that criticality has diminishing returns. We can be as critical as we want, but criticality does not change reality. And I’m wondering if we can imagine a post-critical way to address technology.
56:24 Yes, that is important. One month ago, I was at CERN in Geneva. I was there because of a movie festival that we’re making. I noticed how beautiful it is to have technology by your side when you want to use it. People stay there on a very beautiful campus and they just think all day about what they want to do. And of course, it would be a dream to have the same for artists, you know, a very beautiful space where you go there, you have your very nice breakfast and you talk all day about memes and art. I feel that sometimes we are critical because we are excluded by the power of using technology in the way we would like to use it. But no, we need to be critical because no one is doing that. We are doing this in Europe a lot. For example, in the U.S. it’s very difficult to even find artists that are critical about technology, it’s kind of a taboo.
58:02 It would be beautiful to foster collaboration between engineers and people. co-publishingI think that art, humanities and culture should happen before designing that technology. But this is not happening. And we see it, you see at Google all the people that were fired. They tried to integrate academies with the construction of neural networks, but they had to fire them in the end because they were not optimal for the market. It’s a very complex situation and we need to map it to understand what we can do, and maybe we are critical because it’s the only thing that we can do. I would like to be an artist who collaborates with a physicist, and with a lot of funding to understand, for example, memes through big data. But that’s not happening. I don’t know, maybe I would not be critical of technology if I had a place like CERN for artists.
1:00:04 Thank you so much for everything you just said. I have a question, maybe it can be a link to the final question. At the moment, we are a group that is discussing a lot about publishing and new forms of publishing. What are the main constraints that you have found in publishing? Because you have a very multidisciplinary but also multimedia approach. You are in this interesting position of being both an author and a publisher, as you said before. And I know that you have collaborated with some of the people around this table. And this is from my experience: sometimes we are talking about AI, we are talking about blockchain, but then here we are also talking a lot about books, paper books. What do you think are the constraints of this medium? What are the things that it can add to the Internet? And maybe to even make it broader, if it’s something that you ever had as an issue: have you ever felt constrained by this medium?
1:01:49 Traditional publishing has been, overall, a very nice experience for us. It’s not the medium we’re most familiar with, but I think this is another aspect that makes it interesting to work with transmedia projects and different kinds of outputs, one big recurring theme through all the different publishing platforms is diffusion. We worked on a video documentary which was published because of distribution issues and it needs to be distributed to meet the public. This is not something that we experienced in our editorial projects. It’s not our main medium, so we work with publishers that share common goals and ideas with us when working on printed books, such as “The Detective World Guide” that was mentioned, or the most recent publications that we’re working with Nero Editions. So I would say that it’s a very particular way of publishing. Another recurring theme in all our publications is accessibility, so another thing that we try to keep in mind when working on printed books is how accessible they can be, and which is the target they refer to, to make it as accessible and understandable as possible.
1:04:23 traditional publishing practicesWe try to go for more recent technologies rather than books, to evaluate which are the benefits and which are the possibilities of each medium we cross. For sure, books do have the possibility of reaching a very broad audience and a more unlimited target, in comparison with our web projects.For example, people who don’t understand how web projects can work can benefit from the existence of a book like “The Detective Wall Guide” to understand Meme Manifesto as a project.
1:05:23 I just wanted to say something very fast about constraints as a way to push the boundaries of creativity. We know this from classical art. If we think about religious art, artists have always found ways to go around censorship in a very creative way. This is also something that relates to our work “Deep Fried Feels”, because that’s actually referencing deep fried memes, which is a treatment of memes that has been also used to circumvent censorship on digital platforms because it makes images difficult to recognize for artificial intelligence and for those scraping mechanisms that try to censor images. I’m not trying to encourage censorship, but I’m trying to say that limits and constraints can sometimes have a positive effect on creativity.
1:06:44 I remember I was very impressed by Paul Soulellis’ anthologies. I remember I was at Eyebeam in New York and there was this girl, Nora, she showed me a book where Paul Soulellis had printed all the Twitter bots on a book. It was called “Printed Web 5: Bot Anthology”. Printing a very selected archive of what is happening on the internet on paper impressed me. Then you can put it into question, as Noel would say. How can you contextualize something that is happening on a very broad, very strange and diffused medium like the internet? If you want to put it on print, what is happening?
1:07:55 When we were building the Detective World Guide, we tried to understand in which way we could record — because when you print, you have to record it — what is a collective performance because memes are a collective performance in a way. And they exist in a context, in a time, in a public situation, with participants. But when you print it, it’s not like that anymore, you are fixing it. And so, yes, as Noel was saying, it’s very helpful sometimes to try to print something, to print the internet.
1:09:01 It relates to the two biggest constraints of all, the unrepresentability of reality as a whole, and of complex discourses and the limitations of our senses. And one way to go around that is, as Silvia was saying with printing, concentrating on something very narrow and very specific. I’m thinking, for example, of Anna Tsing’s book “The Mushroom at the End of the World”, in which she tells the story of something as complex as the Anthropocene by concentrating on something as tiny as a mushroom. And I think this is always a good way of circumventing constraints.
What: Future of Publishing
1:10:14 Just to wrap up our presentation, I want to say thank you for being so generous. We’re trying to define, speculate on, but hopefully do a little bit more than that, and realize futures of expanded publishing. We’re also trying to understand what this term can mean for us and you. So what do you think are the most urgent aspects that need to be addressed in the future of publishing, however you understand publishing within your practice? And how do you see this progressing in the next years?
1:11:11 (laughs) You know, we did a workshop about how we cannot imagine the future anymore! That’s why nobody’s answering now.
1:11:29 For the present? Perhaps something urgent right now.
1:11:38 All the digital tools we have at our disposal today make it very easy to publish something. What is more difficult, I think, is the distribution and making it visible. I think we have this problem, we have a tsunami of images and content, which leads to this paradox of making content invisible. There are so many things that people somehow don’t see anymore because there are just too many. And they’re overwhelmed by it.
1:12:29 And I think this is the main challenge for the future of publishing. We all have this experience that we find something that is somehow relevant to us or to the research that we are doing. And maybe it’s not even something new, it’s something that has existed for years. And we ask ourselves, how is it possible that I discovered it just now? So how can we find a way of getting relevant content? But then that, of course, leads to a whole other discussion: what is relevant and what is relevant to whom? How do we find a good way of bringing content that is relevant to the right public? And then there is, of course, the role of what is generally called “the algorithm” in bringing certain content to certain people. TikTok is a good example of this, one of the reasons for TikTok’s success is that, compared to other platforms, it had a different way of bringing content to people. Many individuals felt that TikTok was very good at bringing them relevant content but that was unexpected and positive for them. But this, of course, has a whole set of implications that are very political and problematic. And which we probably don’t have the space to address here. But I think this is something that is for sure very relevant for the future of publishing.
1:14:15 Absolutely. Does anybody else have an idea? Would you like to add anything?
1:14:24 I think Noel’s intervention summed up a lot of points. I do agree that distribution is key, as we mentioned before. digital objectsThe only thing that I would add would be the role of cross-media and trans-media experiences. I do agree with Silvia about bringing the internet on a printed page. On the other hand, there are a lot of interesting and compelling projects about bringing paper to the Internet, so archiving and documenting all the different publications which may have not been accessible to everybody if they weren’t distributed online.
1:15:21 referencesFanzines are an imaginary we refer a lot to. Many times they are in their printed shape and they are very local, very specific projects that do not tend to cross borders and arrive at very different places and times in the world. With the internet, you can bridge this gap and make ends meet. So, I would say to think about the node of diffusion and distribution also in a cross-media environment such as the one that we live in.
1:16:12 One of the urgencies is defining a community. You have mentioned you move in both online and offline, real-life communities. I’m curious to know from you if, for example, the resilience of traditional publishing is based on the fact that offline and real-life communities are more defined than online communities, which are undefined or fragmented. I’m curious to know your opinion about that.
1:17:16 It’s true that online communities form very quickly. For example, the TikTok algorithm is very specialised. So, what is happening is that cores are becoming something very specific and sometimes communities start from how much you love a chair or how much you love peeling an iguana. And this is very strange because then it can be very fast and when you just stop to love peeling an iguana, your community is not there anymore. I’m joking, but what Nero did, and what the Institute of Network Cultures and Aksioma are doing is very similar. I love that you three are together because you are building a community behind publishing, which is very, very hard to do. But you’re also publishing in a very fast way and your covers are very Instagrammable. You are also trying to explore the communities that are forming in different social media. I see that you’re doing that. I think this is a very good strategy because it’s very similar to what we are doing when we create loops between the “real life” world and the URL world.
1:19:17 What I wanted to add is that in the past, with books like “House of Leaves” or I remember a project by Katherine Hayles, which was about electronic literature… there were many attempts of making a book something which is not only a book. I remember Geert Lovink telling me that alternative publishing practicespublishing should be fast so that you can be in the conversation while the conversation is happening.I think that you are already doing this. You’re exploring the power of the book as a printed medium (which is a lot, as we were saying before) but doing it in a fast way and using the feedback that you can create with social media communities. I think this is working somehow.
1:20:26 Thank you very much. And I think we feel the same way about you, in other ways, you’re also creating a community. Perhaps this is a good note to wrap up. I would like to thank you again for joining us and for sharing your practice and your thoughts.
1:20:51 We’ll keep you updated on the afterlife of this meeting. It will probably take an expanded form, or we hope so, at least. And we will be in contact.
1:21:08 Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Silvio Lorusso
2 July 2024, 3:30 PM
Introductions
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?
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.
03:40 The main byproduct of that is still online, called “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 Publishing Lab, which was a series of collaborations with real-world partners in terms of creating publishing outputs.
Why: Politics of Publishing
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?
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. 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?
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.
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?
08:07 I see it as crucial. traditional publishing practicesThe 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 publishing 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 digital 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, “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 printed 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.
12:15 Do you mean financial sustainability in this case?
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, to make the writing, the publishing, the magic happen.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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
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?
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?
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
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.
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 “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?
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?
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 publishing 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.
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.
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.
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.
55:19 Please improvise, we are sharing thoughts, it’s more of a brainstorming.
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?
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.
1:01:00 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.
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.[[politics | 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 “The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude”.
1:05:04 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.
1:05:45 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!
Note: Silvio wrote about this conversation from his own perspective, read it here: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/one-finds-comrades-to-publish/
Thomas Spies
2 July 2024, 5:30 PM
Introductions
03:59 My name is Thomas. I’m living in Cologne now and working from here. I am a lecturer, a publisher. I’m a researcher. My specialty is game studies. So this is like my focus in media studies, but I did my PhD in this area at the University of Cologne about the representation of trauma. I’m also working on this panels which are dealing with video games from a critical perspective. I’m inviting experts from different fields to play live in front of an audience. To try to get some different angles on the medium. Because of that, I was also publishing an anthology together with Holger Pötzsch from the University of Tromso and Sheyda Kurt. He is an author, who wrote two bestsellers and also is a journalist and moderator of different panels. He is an activist and we together created or hosted this idea for an anthology and gathered different contributors for that. The anthology is called (Spiel*Kritik) [https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839467978/html?lang=de], which translates to game critique, you could say. We focus on different perspectives on video games and capitalism.
Why: Politics of Publishing
05:59 Maybe if you could get a bit into the whys behind your work or your politics of publishing in a sense. If you have theories, references that you work with that inspire your work. Could you put together a sort of syllabus on publishing practices that inform your own?
06:26 Okay, maybe I could start with the theories which are sharpening our understanding of dealing with video games and then see how they translate into our practice, because they are intertwined, I think, in many ways. For our anthology, we relied on a range of critical theories, beginning with the Frankfurt School, and also drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas about power, knowledge, and resistance, and government, of course. We incorporated Edward Said’s postcolonial theories, highlighting how knowledge production can reinforce colonial power structures and perpetuating stereotypes. We had Judith Butler, her insights into subjectivity and resistance. And this is maybe where this connection I already mentioned comes in. We tried to have a connection between acting and thinking. Often in universities, you’re only thinking about some topics that the world does not deal with. So we tried to close this gap and think about things we can actually put into practice. What can this be and how can this be translated? We thought we can’t do this by ourselves. So we invited not only academic people, but also people from arts or from journalism to gather and think about how we can translate these theories into a practical thing? Which also then can be positive for our world or understanding of the world and of media and video games.
08:47 Gaming has become part of our understanding of publishing, or maybe more as a competitor of the traditional publishing field. So how would you place gaming in this media and publishing environment?
09:18 I would say video games are a very special medium because they especially need an active player or a person being active. If you have a movie, you can watch it passively, but of course, it can have active things it can do with you. However, when you play video games, you have to be part of the experience, you have to be part of playing. Playing itself for us is like a social experience, also a very historical one. So there were always people playing games and now of course we have these digital games in the capitalist environment. So play is not for itself anymore. So of course it can have rules, but you create the rules by yourself or they’re created by the playing participants. Now we have rules from a capitalist system intervening in what a game can or should be. So we have a very different product now and this is especially interesting to research because it is the biggest entertainment industry now. It has more income than film and music combined and I think also sports. So it’s very big industrial complex and this is why we have or thought we have to look closer at it.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
11:05 If you could speak a bit about your personal workflow when it comes to producing knowledge, the tools, operations and models that are at play here. The neoliberal model of gaming production probably influences it a lot. Also the distribution and promotion and how those operate.
11:53 It was clear to us that we needed to reflect the diversity of content at the editorial level. So the three of us connected, or we are like three generations and also three fields of work. So Holger Pötzsch is working in Norway, as I already said, and he’s the oldest among us. He has numerous publications in media studies. Şeyda Kurt is the author of these two books I mentioned. So she was coming in as someone writing in a very different style than academia would do it. I myself sit somewhere between the chairs of maybe writing academically and also organizing those panels, the let’s play critical panels. So 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 allowed them relative freedom, including the format of the text, resulting in both classic academic and essayistic texts in the final volume. Then we found a publisher, Transcript. It’s a German publisher from Bielefeld, willing to support the entire project and also finance it. 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, Transcript 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.
Besides that, we also had this thinking and acting thing, so 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. We somehow had to get money to fund them and this was also not part of transcripts funding, because they never thought about the idea to pay the authors. Very interesting. 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. So in this way, we could really pay all the people involved. Now, after the volume was published, we send out some copies and promote it through classic channels.
15:42 Have you ever been more closely involved with game houses, game publishers, people who produce gaming? Do you interact with them? Have they ever been interested in your work and maybe financing research relating to their games?
16:07 So I tried to reach out to them and wrote to a few game companies, especially some in Cologne and Berlin, because I live there. I thought that this could work. Some of them responded. I think one paid us 400 euros. But also we had to think about this so that this doesn’t look like we get financed by the industry we are criticizing. So this was very important, but we thought this is a small indie company. It’s not Electronic Arts, one of the biggest ones or Activision, which are highly problematic when it comes to production structures. So this was fine for us. Many of them didn’t respond, because I think it’s not fitting into their concept of things they are financing. So we didn’t rely very much on them. And also there’s a big gap between production and researching or working on a theoretical level with games. This gap is closed somehow in some areas where game design and game studies connect. But usually they go separate ways. So there was no big cooperation or anything like that.
17:33 On these more problematic aspects of production, how can you ensure that your work practice is sustainable financially? We’ve been talking to other people about the personal toll or personal involvement, ideas of caring for each other or helping each other. How does that play into your work?
18:05 Especially with the freelancers, we had a few problems to work out, because they are often underpaid or overworked. So we couldn’t make the deadlines or there were problems on the way to the final text. I think it is very important not to see them as production values, but as a person and also see that you have to do care work if you are publishing. I think this is very important, because you are dealing with individuals and you have to find individual ways to make it work. This also included talking on Zoom for some hours about different things in the text. This is what we think is important as a practice, along with paying them and not having crunch time. So this is a term coined by the game industry, where people are in four weeks in the room and just programming stuff when the deadline is coming. We try to avoid that with deadlines that are reasonable and also we have this, maybe a Spielraum, it’s called in German. So we could somehow give them more time and not have a very fixed date.
Who: Community of Publishing
19:48 In terms of collaborations and the professional network. The community and industry of gaming is quite different from that of traditional publishing, both in terms of audience and producers. So how does your work fit into that network and how do you create and maintain collaborators, allies?
20:24 I think this also applies to other areas. If you’re like a biologist of course you have an interest in biology and are talking to other people interested in that topic. This is also true for games, I’m a gamer myself so there’s this gaming community and I hesitate to call myself gamer because this can be a very toxic expression or toxic term for something the community can also be. So on the one side I’m part of it and on the other side I’m criticizing it, but this gives me a room to really see tendencies and to explore where the direction of the community goes and also they take me seriously. So I have talked to gamers and I reached out to them for panels, for example, to a store owner who sells these classic game consoles, and if they see me as not some academic person just trying to deal with the next hot topic then they’re much more likely to open up to you. Of course, it’s important for me to think about them when I publish something. I do not want to only write for an academic bubble. Community work was present on the panels but they are, as I tried to explain, part of our publishing. So this is like acting out what we are writing about. I would say this was the one community I was part of. For us it’s not only researchers, it’s also, as I said, other people writing text. So people who produce text in some way, we are the other community and we were also of course dealing with them, reaching out to them. A special thing for our anthology was that we were handpicking them: we had some topics we thought were important and reached out to experts to write about them. This was also very good because they all responded very positively to that.
23:02 I guess the gaming community is not necessarily well seen. I mean, there’s a lot of negative connotations, rightfully so, with some of its aspects. But the sort of collective experience of gaming and of becoming or being part of that is very interesting. I guess quite different from the more traditional formats of publishing. So how do you see bringing a vantage point? Or do you also see more positive aspects of speaking to that audience or working with that audience? Or what can that level of connection bring to your work?
23:58 I think there’s a very big transformational potential in it, because I can always see, and maybe you heard from Ljubljana from (Total Refusal) [https://totalrefusal.com/], how people react to some other people playing games in front of them. It’s very nice to see that it works every time. They’re very interested and can’t get enough of it. You can use this to tell something or leave a message and make an impression. Maybe it’s like this cathartic thing where you watch something and realize something else about how society works or how society is structured. I think there’s a big potential in that. So you rely on experiences nearly everyone has because we all play games in some way, even if it’s not digital, but also many people do play digital nowadays. So there’s a big potential to gather an audience from very different backgrounds. There are also some games that are diverse or dealing with topics from a different angle. You can spot them and of course show them to people who didn’t know about them before that. So I think there’s a potential to see what the medium can also be besides the mainstream titles and games you already know.
25:41 What do you make of this obsession with watching other people play? Does it bring entertainment value or a community connection? Are there any critical aspects in that? Because of course, gaming is big, but what seems to be even bigger is streaming. That’s evident and it’s one of the newest forms of publishing in a sense of knowledge and entertainment production.
26:26 Yeah, that’s interesting to see it as a way of publishing.
26:30 Very expanded idea of publishing here.
26:34 It’s cool to think about this, really. It’s like an interactive publishing somehow because you get instant feedback and you can also integrate this feedback in a live play. So I think Twitch is a very interesting format now because you are very close to the community and the community aspects are central to the experience on Twitch. So if you play a game and say something critical, another person can respond instantly in the chat and you can have a discussion around that topic. But also it’s not just because there’s a community, it doesn’t have to be progressive. Of course, there are also right-wing or other communities as well. Although, there’s a chance to use that as a publisher. With streaming, you can reach a different audience or bigger audience. I think what’s interesting for people is to maybe be a part of it, but also why is it interesting to watch? Maybe because it somehow works when you watch someone doing a social thing. Maybe this is another medium, it could be like a reality soap or something like that. So you have the feeling something real is going on and something which is authentic and also reliable. So you are having a close connection to the person doing something, in this case, playing a game. Maybe you also know the game, so it’s like you are thinking about what would I do or what would I say? And you ask about the critical aspects when doing this. I think there are two opportunities. You can play critical games and look at what they bring up, or you can play a mainstream game and criticize it, but you have to make this your focus. I think this focus is not often present in the moment when you look at what kind of people play Fortnite or something like that for fun, which is also fine, but if you ask about critical aspects, you have to bring those into your stream.
Discussion
29:30 I’m Lorenzo from Nero. I’m really intrigued by play critical. I participated in Total Refusal performance in Ljubljana and I was really astonished by that practice. I’m curious to know more about it, more about this practice, when did you start? Did the community exist already? How did you encounter this practice? Is it more like a theory that then transforms into a practice? I’m curious to understand the genealogy of it.
31:26 There are so many layers to it. I was also always interested in playing games and just playing for fun. At some time I discovered, I can also apply film study critique on the games I was playing. Of course, there were critical games I was playing too. So maybe it was my first epiphany when I saw that I can now dive into a realm where not many people were working.
Then I discovered a small community gathering around game studies and doing practical or theoretical things in this area. It all started with my PhD, I think. So I discovered there are some institutes now having room for dealing with games or researching games. Especially in Cologne, there’s like this big bubble of researchers. I think I wrote an introduction and also a paper for Benjamin Beil, and he’s one of the professors here at University of Cologne. I was looking at trauma, as I said. Yet now I would say that one has to go beyond that.
This also reflected how I saw games in a capitalist context. For me, it was important to see what other people are thinking about video games in that way. Soon I discovered it’s not only researchers, but also artists. There are many artists doing short movies and video games, the Machinimas. Maybe this was the next step, to discover Machinimas and their community.
Because I’m more used to taking photographs, I was then diving into virtual photography and photographing in game. There’s also a big community for that, especially in Italy. It’s very interesting. I was meeting Matteo Bittanti a few weeks ago in Lenzburg in Switzerland. He was doing an (exhibition there) [https://www.mattscape.com/2024/06/its-not-a-game-over-its-a-finissage-june-22-lenzburg-switzerland.html]. I reached out to different people. On the way, I discovered Total Refusal. They were here for a short film festival. And we instantly connected. And this was the step to do something more practical. They were part of the first two panels. I organized them with some other people, of course. This synergy was the starting point for many projects since then. So maybe it was really discovering peoples and areas and possibilities which are somehow not present in the mainstream till now. I hope this answers your question. I don’t know exactly if you meant that.
35:03 Yeah, I was curious thinking about Total Refusal, to understand this new way of playing a game looking for glitches, looking for alternative options that the mainstream scope of a video game proposed to you. I’m asking this because I was trying to see if this kind of practice is somehow the mainstream narrative part in a critical way, together with other people as we experienced with Total Refusal performance.
36:11 So, in classical publishing areas, where can you add the element of play? Can you have room for playful ideas? Somehow, I know, there’s always this capitalist structure, it’s very hard to do that. But can you somehow create a space where everyone can be creative. You can’t be creative if you are forced to have text ready in two weeks, or underpaid for that, or other areas, or you have to take care of your family, and so on. So we have to see where there could be a room for the people you’re working with. This would be one thing I would translate to other publishing methods or areas. I think sometimes we fall into the trap of writing something about people, but not working with them. This would be another thing you can maybe get from my experiences.
37:35 I had a question, building on this idea of gaming and streaming as forms of instant interactive publishing. Are there people, writers, artists, editors that you see doing this more playful and participatory, or using this participatory aspect of gaming in their practice? Or do you see that being a possible horizon of the “future” of publishing? Or is there something already happening in this direction? Of course, your work is in between and this more playful, critical aspect.
38:29 It’s hard to say, because of my special place in this whole structure. I’m not very experienced in dealing with other publishers, for example. So I was in contact with not only Transcript, but also some other publishers last time. What I always liked was when we met in person and or we came together for events. We had this thing in Vienna. There was the network of critical communication science. This was coming together not only because of the things we talked about, but also because of shared ideologies or views on the world. I think this is also important to maybe have a focus on the things which are important to you, and then to translate them into a product and not come up with an abstract idea, but to really think. I share with a community and then see how this community can work together. I know this is not very broad. I don’t have specific names I can mention, I think, but more often I discovered that there is not enough space to do these kinds of projects that we did. So often you just have typical ways of doing an anthology or something like that.
40:46 That’s interesting in itself, that there’s this sort of gap, because we’ve been seeing the expansion of the gaming industry for the last 10-15 years. So it’s interesting maybe that that space is not fully yet occupied by projects.
42:47 You have been in Ljubljana and you have assisted live to the Let’s Play, let’s call it like this, that was the format between Total Refusal and (Valentina Tanni) [https://www.valentinatanni.com/], where Valentina took the chance to present her book or at least some of the topics, the aesthetics that she’s discussing in her book that we did in collaboration with Aksioma and Nero. And we took that chance to kind of experiment a new format of delivering in front of an audience in a performative way, a book presentation, so to say. Now we are in the final phase of editing this material to then launch it again online, where people can really consume it as a Let’s Play, in a sense of watching the game and the protagonist talking like in the bottom right corner. So I have two questions: how would you define that format that you saw live? How would you define the objects in terms of publishing that we are going to upload on YouTube or whatever online?
44:08 And if you can imagine this material online, you as a gamer, perhaps you consume some Let’s Play or stuff like that. Who could be the audience who can consume a talk between Valentina Tanni about her book and Total Refusal on their big screen in their living room?
44:38 Even if you are trying to find the term fitting for what Total Refusal is doing there, we often discuss that it’s not that easy, because there is no term yet. So we thought about different expressions, like public gaming was one. I’m not a fan of that. It sounds like public viewing, which is also a German thing. I don’t know if it’s a thing in Italy, public viewing. I don’t know if it’s a coined term. Because I think in English-speaking areas, it’s for going to a funeral with a public viewing. So it’s very strange that we have this term. So public gaming also sounds like a football stadium. It’s not fitting for what we are doing there. So also, I think I called it live playing at some point. As a German expression of that, maybe this is more near that. But also, live playing could also be you just play Mario Kart. And it’s without this critical perspective, or even this Let’s Play aspect of it.
And this is why my panels are called [Let’s Play Critical] (https://thomspies.net/lets-play-critical/). This is what we are doing, maybe. But I don’t know if this term is good for being used in a broader field for a longer time. I don’t know if it’s fitting for all audiences. I’m so sorry, but I have no term for that, which is the fixed term we work with yet.
46:24 Can I interrupt you for a second? I guess there was no term. Maybe what I would like to know is you probably are more familiar with the format that Total Refusal are doing, and you even try to find the terminology for it, whatever. But if we change the perspective, and we look from the angle of a writer, or somebody who published a book, and then did that presentation in that format, when you were looking at it, what did actually open up, if anything happened in your head? Did you just perceive it as a promotional kind of thing? Or maybe as an attempt of, I don’t know, in a similar way as Total Refusal are using the game to vehiculate the critical discourse, did you perhaps perceive in this experiment an attempt of generating a new discourse? Did you see an attempt to expand the publishing? Or it was just, OK, they did a promo thing. Cool.
47:48
Of course, for me it was like, or it could be viewed as an in-game presentation of a book. And so I was watching it from that perspective. And also I saw the similarities between what Valentina’s writing and Total Refusal is doing. But I was interested in how they can bring these two fields together. Of course, they are writing about video game culture in the broadest sense of the term.
I think there’s a very good opportunity there to expand on the book you are presenting in the video game. But you have to be very specific about what you want to represent or present from the book and if it’s fitting to the game. It has not always been that they found this connection in the presentation. So there was like a small gap between what Total Refusal was showing in the game and Valentina’s comments. Of course, they tried to find those similarities. But for me, it was two worlds sometimes colliding, but not melting together as a whole. So this is maybe because you have to look at what your ideology of the book you are presenting is, and the ideology of the people playing the games. I think there were also some similarities, but also some differences. So for Valentina, it was to explain this nostalgic view on games and game culture, both memes and other limited spaces and other internet phenomenons. For Total Refusal, it’s always this political standing point where they try to have an anti-capitalist and even Marxist critique of society. Of course, Valentina is a person, I think, sharing this ideology, but not in her book especially. It was about other topics. So, for me, there maybe was a gap in presenting those two together. But as a format, there’s a big potential to have your book presented in a video game.
50:22 But I’m thinking that, like, maybe video games, especially multiplayer video games, could also be perceived as a new space for traditional narratives or discourses produced in books. For example, in that case in Ljubljana, I really perceived that environment as a new space to inhabit with certain discourses. I don’t know, Thomas, what do you think? Multiplayer games, especially multiplayer games, give you this common space to create new narratives and even to challenge the rules of the video game itself. So, I’m really intrigued by this aspect that it’s more difficult to find this in traditional publishing. When I mention traditional publishing, I refer to printed books. Of course, you can have book clubs in which you find other people, you can read collectively. For video games, it looks like an expanded version of that with a lot of people. Like Travis Scott’s concert in Fortnite, all these kinds of experiences are, like, quite disruptive in a way.
51:49 Yeah, totally. I want to ask if you know from the Fortnite concert, and also there are many exhibitions in multiplayer games in last times, especially in Fallout, for example, or in Roblox, this kids game, there were also demonstrations for Palestine and other topics where there’s big opportunity for society to really express something not maybe allowed in your society, or if you said just to reach another audience or broader audience. As for publishing books, it’s also super interesting because, as I know, no one has done it yet. But if you can imagine having a reading event in the game. So you have this area and maybe also make advertising for it in the game. So you can talk to other people in the game or just write a sign. In some games, you can be very creative about the aesthetics or the graphics. So maybe you can have an area where you point out that there will be an event later, and then you can have the author or someone else sitting there and reading from the book. Could be an event also for the people already knowing of the book or being readers themselves. So you can just have this as another version of a premiere of a book. But maybe there are some people randomly coming in and also gathering around, and you can reach out to people who not usually come to a library or something like that, but in a classic way, there’s, like, a book presentation. So I think this is a good idea. Yeah, good work.
53:41
I think what we have been discussing at the moment here with you, but also more in general, is trying to understand this concept of expanded publishing as coming from the traditional publishing, trying to understand that in all these years, a lot of tools have been developed to change the way in which books are produced, but also in changing the way in which books are read and consumed. To stretch this, then we decided, OK, let’s stretch it the old way and open up the possibility that a book is not only a paper book. But it’s, you know, when you have to deal with publishing, you deal with a set of media that can be very broad. In that sense, I think we were thinking with the experience of total refusal, I was not there, so I also have a partial understanding of that. There was a moment of writing, there was a moment of publishing, and there was a moment of reflection on the book.
But I’m thinking about examples that try to do the opposite, or try to conceive, for example, gaming as a form of book or reading. I am not much into gaming, but I recently started playing Kentucky Route Zero. I am playing it right now, actually. It’s more like a book than a game, it’s a game where you cannot lose or win. It’s interactive and a narrative that actually has a very long history from the first DOS system, etc. So I think I went all over the place. My question is, very sincerely, again, if a game can be a form of publishing? Is it something that makes sense to you? Of course, I understand, that producing a game and producing a book require completely different skills, but then how can these two very different words try to combine each other because multidisciplinarity is something that we cannot avoid at the moment?
57:16 There’s a game called Citizen Sleeper. And it’s, as I said, more a book than a game with very nice graphics, but not moving graphics. It’s like standing still all the time. It’s on only one view, you could say, and you see the characters that are talking. Other games did this as well, while thinking about how to present text in a modern way. So maybe there’s a connection. I think there were experiments in books, trying to look like Instagram or something like that, which doesn’t work very well most times, I think, but it’s more your expertise. Maybe you can think about if there’s a chance to somehow copy back games present text into the books, or the book cover or the marketing of the book. Also, if you have the resources to do a game around your book. But this could fail because people are used to good quality now. So even if you are doing a graphic novel, which is like this classic book where you can choose your own way. There’s a lot of expertise in the field and the presentation is very good and coming from people who know games. I think this is very important. If you want to publish in game or with games, you have to have people really knowing what the game is about or how games work. It’s like with school, everyone was in school and everyone thinks they can talk about school. But of course, you can talk about the game or have some opinions on that. Though if you want to appeal to the audience playing games, you have to have people experienced with games or assisting you in that, I think. Does this somehow answer your or is this your train of thoughts?
59:32 Yes, it does. But then, just to go even more direct, do you think it makes sense to open up publishing into this different context, or is it basically defining that everything is publishing?
59:53 I think if you, the format that Total Refusal does is very promising, in a way to think about how we can present a book in that way, and also invite people to a cinema to watch a book premiere. So like a transmedial presentation. The second one is going into games which are already there. This is also promising, that you find games, and people knowing these games, and finding ways to put your books somehow into them, or to present them at least. I think it’s not that promising, as I said, to make my own games or something like that. This is very difficult to do. I think this can’t be the first step. But think about how you can be in games or present games with your book. This is a good way to go.
What: Future of Publishing
1:00:45 So if you have any sort of ideas on urgent aspects of publishing, what are some things that already exist and that you see developing further or that you would like to be developed further? Maybe some that instead, which should reflect upon and abandon? And if you had a five year vision of the future, 10 year vision, what would you see?
1:01:48 Maybe firstly, I would discover the value in positions that are not present yet or mostly not present. What I also mean is to see whether there are new ways of thinking about things such as video games, for example, and expanding on those areas. When it comes to the publishing itself, find ways to get rid of the stand that there’s maybe like one person expert for a whole area, try to have a broader or a pool of people working on books, and to see if the books themselves, I know there’s always a problem, but how can you make them public for everyone? To have them online and in some way digitize them is very important, but maybe there would be a way to have this book presentations you can record for YouTube or something else. So people can have a summary of it and even an interactive one in some way. Or you can do an event where you have a chat function and people can react to parts of your books, maybe this could be before it is published. So maybe if you look at video game companies, they do this better testing where they have the mostly final version of the game, but it’s not finished yet. Then people can openly play it and you can see how they react to it and how they work with it, with your game. Of course what their opinions are. Maybe this could be something in publishing a book that not only the publisher gets the text beforehand, but also some people can read it and give their impressions about it would be another thing which comes to my mind. But I think the important part is get it published in some way that all people can have it for free in some way. I know this is very difficult to do with the financing system nowadays, I know.
Irene de Craen
3 July 2024, 10 AM
Introductions
00:00 Hi Irene, good morning. We are going into different aspects of publishing and its politics, and you can say a lot about this and Errant Journal. Let’s start with a one-liner introduction of you and your practice: what do you hope to achieve with it and why do you operate the way you do, what kind of politics, mission and goals go into guiding it?
00:45 At the time, I was reading Édouard Glissant, and he writes about sameness and difference in multiple ways, about how our Western culture can diminish difference and work towards sameness, which is very destructive. So, I stopped working as an artistic director. I’ve always liked publications. I also used to work as a journalist and made publications to accompany exhibitions. For me, this format is a way to combine more difference, and this is especially true with language. We will get into specific things I do with publishing later.
Why: Politics of Publishing
03:59 You already mentioned a few inspirations or references that guide your practice, namely Glissant and his “Poetics of Relation” and the idea of opacity. What other references, materials or theories inspire your publishing practice?
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 important.
05:53 Amazing, thank you for that. So, we are just moving on to our other part, which goes through threads on the “how” of the infrastructures of publishing. How does that process of seeing a publication as an exhibition space (and much more) look like to you? Do you also take time to refuse certain traditional workflows? And how is the idea for the themes born, developed and then published?
06:52 I think there’s a lot to your question. The way I set up Errant, structurally and organizationally, is also very important for the content. There is the editorial process and how I approach each contribution, and then there is an umbrella over the process of how I approach the object of the book and how I subvert that. So, there are different layers to it. To start with organizational aspects, I was the artistic director of a very large space before I started Errant. conditions of workIn my experience, the bigger the space, the more limiting it actually is. One of the things that constantly frustrated me was that when we didn't have any budget, we still needed to fill the space, which forced artists and others involved to practically work for nothing. This is the kind of situation that is causing burnouts, and I think it is ridiculous to have to perform for the funders in this way.
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 having 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?
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
11:00 Yes, I think it’s nice to know a bit more about the workflow that leads to the finished publication, but I think it’s also interesting to go into what kind of tools are important for you, material or collaboration-wise. Is there a specific guide or workflow structure that guides these collaborations, and how do you find collaborators and build up this process?
11:40 Having any tools or guidelines would be very anti-Glissantian! Each process is individual, although, of course, I learn certain things that work or do not work. I try to build very personal relations with everyone I work with, especially to give space to what I’ve just mentioned. For instance, there recently was someone who told me that they would not be able to write, the reason is a very private and personal story, which of course I will not go into, but I’m very happy that people are coming forward so it can be discussed and I can support a contributor in the best possible way. We ended up with an amazing contribution!
It’s a very important and delicate relationship. I used to be an editor for different magazines, and I’ve worked with people over email without realizing that they were much years older than I thought for example, or even that they were a different gender! And I think in the work that I do, that’s just not right. toolsWho someone is really informs the editing process, and every process is unique. So I have conversations with people in real life, if possible, but mostly over Zoom. This is still limited of course, but at least I get a bit of an idea who someone is. It also makes the process much more fun to be honest.
14:56 I remember last time we had a conversation, you talked a lot about the decolonial position that Errant Journal takes and the way you provide a platform to people from the Global South. How do you see those infrastructures that we can access in the Netherlands or Western Europe with building up this anti-white cube European-centric thinking within a publication that is based in the Netherlands?
15:34 I’m very much aware that my position is still that of a Western white academic, and to me this means I have to constantly challenge the way I think. co-publishingGlissant talks about how every exchange with another, changes the self. That is why it is important to talk to people so that I practice listening, which is a decolonial practice. You know, shut up for once and listen to what people have to say.Currently, I’m working with Ghiwa Sayegh from Kohl Journal, which is a Lebanese open-access publication by anarchist feminists focused on the MENA region. It’s fantastic because I’m learning a lot from how they are approaching the editing process.
Yesterday, I was looking at another magazine that I didn’t know yet. conditions of workThere are a lot of magazines out there that say that they're giving space to ‘other voices,’ but one of the problems that I see is that a lot of these publications don't pay people. They say they are open to everyone, but by not paying people, you're not open to everyone, you’re open to people who can afford to work for free, which is a very small segment of our society. It’s very important to me to pay people, and that’s one of the main focuses when trying to reach ‘other voices.’ Although I don’t think I am able to pay people the actual worth of their work, I try to do my best.
18:21 You’re right. I think that always ends up being omitted. As you said, it’s nice to say, “We open this space”, but then how open is it if it’s not paid work? You also mentioned the subscription model that you’re investigating to circumvent certain funding structures of the Netherlands that divide publications, art, and spaces in very tight borders. How do you keep the sustainability? How have you explored these different models to ensure that Errant Journal can continue?
19:01 That’s also funny — I find it strange that in the funding system of the Netherlands, even the smallest cultural organizations are supposed to have a business model. My business model is not a very traditional one. I always take it slow, one or two issues at a time, also depending on what else is going on in my life. I do look ahead, of course, but I didn’t set it up to think that things are going to be a certain way because it doesn’t work like that. This has been a reason why I’ve been rejected by funders as well, for not having the right business model. I find that very funny because, again, the way we work and the way we live are being pulled apart. I’ve been living like this (as a freelance cultural worker) for over twenty years: I can look ahead for a few months, but not more than that. So I started an organization, it has no overhead, no buildings, and no staff, and yet I’m expected to make a ten-year projection? business modelsI was told that Errant Journal wouldn't last because it doesn’t have a good business model. I found it very strange because the only reason Errant Journal would stop is if I don't feel like doing it anymore. Financially, I can keep going, especially with this model, because I haven't set myself up to produce a certain amount. A distinction is made between organizations and artistic practice, while for me, this doesn’t exist. This is my artistic practice, it’s just that because of how things are structured, I am required to have a board and a business plan etc.
When I registered myself as an artist/freelancer back in 2001, the guy at the tax office said artists are funny because they never go bankrupt. As long as you’re alive, you can keep going. Of course, you can file for bankruptcy as a freelancer as well, and some people do in some situations. But he’s right: as long as you are alive and you’re able to work, then you keep going.
21:56 I imagine that you can find other ways to sustain this practice by not having a very strict deadline.
22:11 Yes. I don’t know if you’re also a freelancer, but in my experience I could meet someone tomorrow who has an interesting idea for a collaboration for instance. This happens to me all the time, and I’ve been doing it long enough to know that, although it’s not a business model, it is sustainable because it has been sustaining me for twenty years!
Who: Community of Publishing
22:35 That’s interesting. I think you’ve mentioned your collaborations, your community and this network that enables Errant Journal to continue and also shape itself in different times and spaces. How has this sort of community of collaborators or readers been created? How do you relate to them?
23:17 Sometimes I get questions such as “How did you find this or that writer?” Well, there are several ways, but one of them is that I will remember something that I read fifteen years ago, and I will just go look for a person who can write about it. The example I often use is also from the second issue. I was looking for a title for the Journal, and one of the names that I considered was Tuvalu. Tuvalu is the second smallest island nation in the world (I suggest to Google it and look at some images!). The country consists of a group of atolls, and they are all sinking because of the rise of sea level due to climate change. I believe the total population of this country is around 11,000, and they’re on tiny strips of sand in the middle of nowhere while sinking.
Well, this just grabs my imagination: there is so much going on in that situation. I wanted to find a person from there to write about Tuvalu. You can imagine when a country is that small, it’s quite hard to find someone who is both willing to write and has at least some experience doing so. Certain activist groups are working in that part of the world on climate change, and I started writing to all of them because I had one name at some point, and he didn’t respond anymore. I also reached out to those organizations via Facebook Messenger, and at some point, I got an email from the same person that didn’t reply to me earlier. He said: “You must really want me to write because you’ve now emailed me through three different organizations” — it turned out he worked for all of them, and these are all very small organizations, so he was getting all the emails! So, co-publishingI guess one method is spamming the hell out of people (although it was completely unintentional to be this annoying!). Nowadays though, since the network has grown, it's also through referrals. And there’s the open call, although open calls are also very flawed, but I'm still using them.
26:17 Can you expand on the flaws of the open call?
26:29 The space I ran before was also a residency, and we had an open call. But when you’re looking for ‘other voices,’ business modelsan open call is not necessarily the best way. In my experience with the residency, 99% of applicants will be white artists from northern/western Europe, all making the same kind of art (and calling it experimental). I also see other organizations doing open calls, and spreading the call widely and then using the amount of people that respond as a sort of marketing tool or indicator of their popularity. “Look, we had 700 people reply.” But what’s the point of that? Again, why this performance for the funders? When Errant has an open call, I actually don’t promote it that much because I don’t want quantity, I want quality.
The process of open calls is also problematic because people can spend a lot of time on a proposal, only to be rejected. With Errant, I aimed to make the threshold very, very low: I just ask for a proposal of 300 words. There’s no form or format is has to be in, and I sometimes say it’s basically an email – which I actually also accept. It’s all about the idea, and I don’t care about anything else. I just need an email with your idea, that’s it. And a few references and a bio so I understand where the idea is coming from, how it is situated within someone’s practice and the world. For all the people who are constantly applying for things, the process is so tiring to get rejection after rejection, and I hope to make it honest in that sense. There are many people I’ve started a working relationship with after I’ve rejected them because then they come back for collaborations, and I’m always open for it, or they ask me to look at a text they wrote, so I try to do that.
29:19 I always think it’s also about balancing between the open calls and the invitations because inviting also keeps you within your frames of reference.
29:33 Well, I always also invite people directly. But I still do the open call, because that’s how I get people that I would otherwise never have found. It’s funny that you can also see how the call spreads and develops — for the previous open call, we had a very large amount of architects apply. There is a small fan base in Cairo and the Philippines. So it’s quite interesting to learn a little about how people find you.
30:14 You mentioned this idea of the editor and the traditional way of seeing it as someone who’s always right, but you were also trying to defy that. What are the ways that editors can be creators of community and art? Can they be or not?
30:50 Well, definitely, I think this is important. I’ve been told that sometimes people can be intimidated by me, which I find both sad and a bit funny because I don’t think I’m intimidating at all. I try to be very careful in creating a space where people feel that they can contradict me. Please do! If you think that I’m wrong, then for God’s sake, tell me!
As stated above, I’ve been working with Ghiwa from Kohl and they organize what they call ‘writing circles’ through which they make their journal collectively. I have always been a bit of a loner, but working collectively is something that I am definitely considering for Errant. I have to be honest, groups kind of freak me out. communityI think making publications is the world of introverts, but I also talk to people who do translations collectively and I think that is a very good way to think about publishing. I think the outcomes of that could be very valuable, so it’s worth a try.
32:53 That’s interesting: the idea of the publication, as you mentioned, is such a collective work, but then it’s also the work of the introvert somehow.
33:12 Before I started Errant, I realized I had to be part of book fairs. I hate fairs, they are horror situations for me, but I realized I needed to take part in them because they’re really important to get your name out there. At the very first book fair, I realized that book fairs are different from art fairs, because they’re all introverts, and only very few are chatty.
33:48 Folks just want to look at the publications, right? Book fairs end up being important to reach your readers. You talked about the way that you communicate with contributors of the magazine. Who are the people who read Errant?
33:50 That is nice about book fairs because although I’m a loner, I do meet people who say they’ve been reading the journal, and that is great, those are the kinds of conversations I’m happy to have.
33:52 Some positive reinforcement, too.
33:52 I do need it! Because otherwise, you go mental. My idea of the audience, from the start, was twofold, which is also reflected in who I am. On the one hand, it’s artists, people interested in the visuals and thoughts, and on the other, academics of all sorts of disciplines and I found that it works exactly like that, Errant Journal is very popular among art students and artists. From the sales, I often see orders from universities; then, occasionally, I look up to see who the person is and what their research is about. It’s fascinating because sometimes it’s the weirdest research! I’m very happy because it was exactly set up like that.
Discussion
41:34 Thank you. I’m now just going to ask the rest of the group to see if they want to say anything or have any questions.
41:36 Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Janez from Aksioma in Slovenia. I think it’s interesting that you said you were leading a gallery as an artistic director, and the limitation that you saw in such a format to create knowledge or to deliver it. In a way, it’s similar to the path I’m going through. We have a gallery space, but we do more and more publications so I totally understand what you want to say here. As for the publication, I have to admit that I did not know much about you, and I did some investigation before this meeting. I see that you do podcasts too. I’m wondering if, after so many years of experience as a publisher, you have perhaps found other kinds of limitations. Did you, after investigating so much, find a limit? Do you ask yourself in what ways can new technologies open different horizons and expand the concept of publishing?
41:56 Yeah, I totally get what you mean. I always say that at some point, I will come across the same kind of wall, but not yet. Obviously, there are some limitations that have been there from the start. Language is the main one currently. We are still communicating in English, which is a colonial language. Yet, for me, there are so many ways to play with it: the ways with which we can subvert this, do these things differently. There is plenty of room for looking into things. Maybe if I do all of these things in the next couple of years, I will be fed up with it. So, no, I do not see this as a real limitation. We’ve been able to find satisfactory solutions or experiments for each thing so far.
As for the second part of your question: traditional publishing practicesI am absolutely a book fetishist. The material and the paper are important to me. And I always try to play with that. We are the only magazine or book in the world that has a smell. Not all copies have a smell, and on some copies, they disappeared, but two of them still have their smell. For this I worked with Mediamatic in Amsterdam. To me, this is also about how we communicate language and a story. I have not advertised the smell because I kind of like how people get very confused. For example, the second issue smells of cucumber. It’s very light, but it’s there — if you had a book in your bag for a while, and you open the bag, that’s when you smell it. I’ve told some people this, and they said, “I was wondering where that salad smell came from all the time!” So, if we are talking about expanded publishing, this is a fun way for me.
44:12 Hi! I am thinking about what you said about your business model being precarious. On one side, there is a limit, of course, because it’s a fragile model that can probably not guarantee continuity. On the other side, there are also characteristics of independent publishing, so I was asking myself if you were fine with being not stuck in this situation that it can be a limit but also an opportunity. If you are interested in broadening your audience and communicating with the bigger community with your message and content, how is this possible with this kind of limitation?
44:43 I really want to reject the notion of Errant having a precarious or fragile business model. In fact, I was saying the opposite of this earlier. Sure, there’s not a ton of money, but this does not mean it is a precarious model. It’s my life’s work, and I will not stop unless I want to or unless I get hit by a bus.
If you really want to support Errant Journal, please subscribe. Errant only has 44 subscribers so far, which is not much at all, but from that small amount, there’s a monthly revenue that I can count on.
Of those 44 subscribers, 11 of them are universities, and they pay a lot more. I’ve also been surprised, actually, at how much revenue I can get from advertising. And then as Errant grows there are (big) organisations reaching out and saying they’d like to collaborate. I have to see how to handle that, because I want to remain independent. governance and ownershipBut I sometimes feel the ways of moving forward are endless. So, I don't think these models are fragile just because there’s little money or its irregular. We have been taught to think like this because that’s the neoliberal, capitalist way; always more and bigger. As you were talking, I was also thinking about how banks are not considered precarious or fragile at all, and yet governments have to save them by billions every couple of years. So, who’s the fragile one? Obviously, there are differences, I’m not a bank, but you know where I’m getting at: it is a perception of how you see precariousness or fragileness in business structures. So I resist that, as I do with many other things.
47:27 The idea of precariousness is also about scale. I think the biggest question when it comes to subscription models or, I guess, alternative business models is to what extent they can be scaled when you start having more employees and more collaborators. And how do you ensure that you can keep going, and what about older people? Can they keep going? This is a conversation that we’ve also been having with others about ideas of care and self-care or the so-called exploitative cultural industry that claims to be interested in the care but then expects their workers to just keep going. Of course, it’s different if you’re working on your own compared to working with others. So I guess when it comes to scaling these things, how can you maintain or how do you see this non-fragility or resilience that you do see in these smaller independent publishing?
Can they be scaled? Should they be scaled? Can you build from those more social and personal connections in a wider network? This is also what we’re sort of doing with the consortium, putting together resources and knowledge. I guess this may move into the final question about the future of publishing. What direction can these models take?
49:28 Well, there’s growth of course, the sales of Errant are going well. But I think we should be careful of using growth as a goal or a measure of success. I think that’s the road to possible exploitative structures. At the moment, it is just me and the designer and I will not hire anyone else until I know that I can offer them fair pay. I had an editorial assistant for four issues because we had a subsidy. So then, from the beginning, I just communicated that she was paid fully, she was paid more than I have ever paid for that kind of job for those four issues. governance and ownershipI will not work with interns even though I've had a few interns who came to me by themselves and sort of begged me. I find it very problematic because, so far, all interns and voluntary assistants who said they want to have experience in publishing have all been white. They're all people who, for one reason or another, can work for free. Sometimes I will agree to that, because they want to gain experience too, but I still find it problematic. I’d rather do all the work myself than exploit someone, that’s just the basics of it. Unfortunately, I see how many other organizations work with interns and it’s so exploitative. I come from a working-class background, I was never able to do an internship because I had to work to pay my rent. I always saw my fellow students do internships, and they all have very good jobs now at big museums. So, this is a very exploitative model that I refuse to engage in. Unless people sort of throw themselves at me, then it’s hard to say no, but still, I’m trying to be cautious.
52:38 Hi, I’m Tommaso from Network Cultures. Firstly, thank you so much for all the very thoughtful insights. I think the reason why we started thinking about expanded publishing is not really because we felt limited but also because we felt the need to expand through the authors who would come to us saying they have some limitations, especially when we work with artists or artistic research practitioners, paper publication sometimes can be limiting. So my question is, have your authors ever felt limited in terms of paper publishing? Also, let’s expand a bit on “The Subversive Publishing Guide.”
54:08 As for your first question, I’m used to working with artists because of my background. I’m trying to create a situation where people feel very free to just come with me with whatever, including artists wanting to expand on the publishing platform. You can leave it up to artists to come up with ideas. digital objectsI was very happy that during the last issue, we published a sound piece from someone who responded to an open call with the idea of a sound piece, which in a way is separate from the publication, but it's still part of the publication. So I thought that was nice and was happy to be able to give the space to this person to produce, and I was able to pay them for that. So, you can let the artist or the contributors lead. Sometimes, the limitation is cost. But overall, the people I work with are very happy to have their work appear in a physical paper publication.
Thank you for mentioning “Subversive Publishing.” That was a commission from Framer Framed to me as a person, but all the ideas in there come from Errant Journal. In it, I don’t talk of limitations, but rather of things that you come across when publishing that make you think about how to deal with them, especially with the background of politics and decolonial ways of thinking. For instance, when it comes to images I absolutely will refuse to pay for certain colonial archives or museums, like the British Museum. They steal artefacts from all over the world, and then when you want to use an image, you have to pay for that. F* them, no way. Redrawing an object or image is a very lovely way of circumventing this particular limitation.
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] (https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/). 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.
59:04 I read on Errant Journal that you’re building some sort of ecosystem of different media, you’re using podcasts, but also public events. Sometimes, public events are a way to support the publication. I was curious to know and to understand better the function of this ecosystem and how you build it, and how all these things collaborate.
1:03:11 Well, the podcast is very easy. I was working behind the scenes on Errant for over two years. I was due to publish the first issue in April or May of 2020 and then the pandemic happened. I had a complete meltdown because I had just quit my job, because the idea was that I would be travelling to book fairs and stuff like that, and then everything fell apart. That was also funny because I was talking to other publishers, and someone said, “Don’t worry, Irene, you don’t have a building to pay. You don’t have any revenue from last year to compare this disastrous year with.” So the podcast started because I felt I needed to have online content. Now, I use the podcast to have very helpful conversations, it’s great to talk to people. It’s more of a research method, and how the other things come to be.
As for the public events, like I said, I don’t really like doing public events. I just cancelled one actually. In my many years of doing public events, emotional labourI decided that I don't want to talk if I don't feel I have something to say. Sure, these moments are important for selling Errant and get more subscribers, but I didn’t feel I had anything to say that relates in a meaningful way to the world right now. The genocide in Gaza is the main thing that is on my mind these days, so honestly it felt wrong to organize an event to sell my magazine or talk about anything else, so I cancelled it.
1:03:35 That’s really important. It also reminds me of a quote from a Portuguese writer. He says, “I don’t want to write if I don’t have anything to say”. So it’s the same.
1:03:36 I think we should all do that. Again, this comes back to big burnouts when you’re planning an exhibition, and you don’t get the money, but you still have to do it. Somehow, we have to find ways to stop doing that and the same goes for publishing. We all know we love it so much, but it’s incredibly polluting. So, if you don’t have something good to say, please do not publish. Please do not cut trees.
1:04:01 The more you talk, the more I relate to what you are saying. I haven’t done a public presentation for over five years now, I am detoxing. So, I also lost my status as an artist with the Ministry of Culture in Slovenia and I’m happy I’m free. I’m not an artist anymore! We should meet.
There is one thing that actually struck me, a similarity between your way of doing and mine. And it’s not necessarily positive, at least from my own point of view and interpretation. When you talk about the organization of your work, it sounds a bit self-exploitative. In the sense that I will produce until I can, you do your website on your own. You start the podcast… Believe me, I did the same and I’m still doing the same. But yesterday evening, we were discussing informally here, and we were asking ourselves if when it comes the time, where do you see the border beyond which you don’t want to go? Let’s say, perhaps during a collaboration, an author is too invasive or too controlling. How much are you ready to let it go if, for example, the proofreading isn’t perfect? So what is the mechanism of self-defence in order not to be exploited by others besides the self-exploitation that you are ready to deploy?
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.
What: Future of Publishing
1:09:12 Thank you. I think it’s great that you mentioned this idea of tuning into our intuition when it comes to collaborations. Going into our final question, which concerns the so-called future of publishing or trying to define together what expanded publishing could be and is — this idea of the future is perhaps difficult to pin to, but if you’d like to formulate your own ideas of what that could be? What are the most urgent aspects that you think should be addressed in this future of publishing, if we can call it that, or the urgencies of publishing right now? Should we leave the future and concentrate on the present?
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.
1:12:54 Thank you very much. I think this was a very good answer, like refusing the future but with a focus on what we can do right now, collectively. I think these acts of publishing are resistance. This resonates with us very much.
Geoff Cox
3 July 2024, 12:00 PM
Introductions
02:45 My position is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University, as the name suggests, it’s in London, in the south of London. It’s a very particular kind of university. I suppose it would describe itself as a technical university. So it takes very particular kinds of students. It’s ex-polytechnic. So it’s quite vocationally oriented. Its student population is largely non-white, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. So it’s not Goldsmiths, or LSE, or Oxford, or Cambridge, it has a very particular character. There, I’m co-director of a small research center called Centre for the Study of the Networked Image. As the name suggests, it’s concerned with what constitutes a contemporary image, you know, not singular, networked, distributed, I even say a kind of social technical assemblage.
I’m also an adjunct at Aarhus University, where I collaborate on an ongoing workshop and series of publications. I’ll talk more about that later. I’m also a co-director of a MA programme called Curating Art and Public Programmes, which is a collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery. Then in terms of my research interests, I’m obviously interested in image politics. I’ve already said something about that. But I suppose I’m operating in a field of what you would describe as software studies. But then, of course, as much as that kind of leaks into discussions around AI currently, and I suppose my concern is more image-based AI literacy. Of course, I’m interested in publishing, the practice of publishing, publishing even as an artistic medium, as a broader sort of cultural practice.
Why: Politics of Publishing
05:14 Maybe building on that, if you could pinpoint to even a theory or syllabus, missions or references, ideals that guide your interest or are also connected to your work in university.
05:35 Obviously, the job of an academic is to publish and there are kind of metrics for this, so you’re sort of locked into these kinds of systems. So I’ve written a couple of books, but they tend to be highly collaborative. I’m interested in collaborative writing. So a couple of these books were published by MIT Press. So in a sense, they’re very conventional, even if MIT has attempted more recently to make its books open access, it’s the sort of conventional end of academic publishing. I write a little bit for journals, although I try to avoid it. It’s one of the things I suppose, in terms of my practice, I’m trying to operate outside of these circuits and networks to some extent.
06:28 How come, if I can ask?
06:30 traditional publishingWell, I'll go on to this as well, but because the processes are so painful, slow, and inefficient. They often have very small readership. If they make mistakes, they have very sort of weird procedures of how to correct mistakes, like adding addendums and things like this, rather than just actually going into an online portal and making a change. All these sort of outdated, outmoded 19th century practices, which they have inherited from print publications. I just don't think they're very good at what they do. Obviously they often operate with paywalls as well, they rely on academic institutions subsidizing, ostensibly this is a commercial practice. So I would oppose that as well. It’s a longer discussion, maybe we’ll come back to it. So what I’ve tried to do is operate within a realm more of self-publishing, so working currently on two book series, which, again, are collaborations. One, which is called The Contemporary Condition, is a book series with Sternberg Press, and another is called Data Browser, which is with Open Humanities Press. So there’s sort of a sense of more independence in those sorts of infrastructures through which they operate, Open Humanities Press, I suppose, being the best example of that. That book series was previously with Autonom Media. So it’s another example, I suppose, of relative autonomy over a publishing process. So I’m interested in those kinds of publishing houses, either Open Humanities Press, which is run by academics, or something like Autonomedia, which is an anarchist press.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
08:30 Yeah, actually, that touches upon the next theme, which is the how’s and the infrastructures of publishing. If you could tell us a bit about your experience in exiting academia and focusing more on these other forms of publishing, what’s the workflow? What models, tools are you using? How do you operate within that framework?
09:03 I wouldn’t say I’m exiting, but it’s more operating on the edges, sort of trying to dip in and dip out of academic conventions where possible. So a good example of that is the ongoing collaboration with Transmediale and Aarhus University. I used to work at Aarhus. As I said, I have this adjunct position, and we’ve been running for the last 12 years, a research workshop, which is derived from an open call. [[alternative practices | We select a group of researchers, often PhD students, but not necessarily, and they produce texts online and comment upon each other’s texts. Then we meet up in physical space, and we work on a sprint publication, which is expressed as a newspaper, but it’s not necessarily the kind of conventional form of a newspaper. We produce it very quickly. We write together in a collective space, and increasingly we’ve used experimental publishing techniques for this, such as web2print. Actually, a couple of times with Gijs, Open Source Publishing, but more recently with people from (Varia collective)[https://varia.zone/en/], especially Minetta Behrens and Simon Browne. So we are increasingly trying to bring the process of publishing and writing much closer together in dialogue, even in the same space.]]
I could also talk about software. Varia and other collectives are using toolsan adaptation of a MediaWiki that I also use. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. toolsThen I use page media, CSS, JavaScript library, page.js, and then being able to export to a PDF in a printable form, having all that as a transparent process in the same space as the writing and editing and reviewing, and then producing a print publication very quickly. alternative practicesThe last one at Transmediale was published by a newspaper press, so we sent it off one evening and got it back the next morning. Then we're able to distribute the publication back into the festival in a very quick way and not worry too much about the quality of the copy editing or even the writing for that matter just to have this as a very sort of quick process. If there are mistakes, not worry too much. So two years ago, we ran this to the theme of [[alternative practices | minor tech, and minor tech was a reference to (Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka Toward a Minor Literature)[https://iberian-connections.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Kafka-Toward-a-Minor-Literature-by-Gilles-Deleuze-Felix-Guattari-z-lib.org_.pdf], to think about this idea of a minoritarian practice. So to try and align this to a critique of big tech to think about what a minor tech might look like, what it might be like.]] Then the most recent iteration of this, we produced something on the theme of content form. So we tried to, as the name suggests, think about how the content is necessarily entangled with the form that the writing takes. For this workshop, we had Minetta and Simon in the same space as everyone writing their texts, but we also had some other collectives that we’d been working with, Systerserver and a group from London called Ingrid. alternative practicesWe were running a server on a Raspberry Pi in the same space so that everything, the whole sort of infrastructure of the production of the publication was materially present in the same space.
13:41 I was just wondering how this faster system of production and distribution works. What’s the sort of response that you’ve gotten? Because it seems very direct. Do you perceive that functioning well? Is it a mechanism that works?
14:06 It functions differently. It allows you to reflect, I think, more upon the dynamics, the interaction of the production of writing, but within a social context, within a social milieu, if you understand publishing as an organizational form, as something that sets up particular kinds of social relations. In that respect, it resonates politically as well. (The Open Book Futures)[https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/projects/open-book-futures] project, which comes out of Coventry University, is worked on with the publisher (Minor Compositions)[https://www.minorcompositions.info/]. If you come across that as an imprint of (Autonomedia)[https://autonomedia.org/], it’s run by Stevphen Shukaitis. On the one hand, we’re interested in his writing about organizational forms, and his publishing practice, because for him, publishing is not so much about the use of particular tools, or even distributing books. It’s about setting up certain kinds of social dynamics.
Who: Community of Publishing
15:24 There’s this quote that the role of the editor is not to publish books, but to create a community. I think we’ve discussed this idea of a community with other guests, and said that we also don’t fully understand what we mean when we say community. Because at the end, it is often still the work of the individual, but of course, it’s an individual within a network. So it’s interesting to see publishing as an organizational form. Maybe if you even have specific workflows or models for this organizational form, I mean, you’ve already mentioned some, but are there some ways that you ground this?
15:29 Well, I suppose first, I could talk about some references for this. For example, Stevphen Shukaitis is one. I mean, it’s a really excellent essay, I think, written in collaboration with Joanna Fiegel. It’s called (Publishing to Find Comrades)[https://csalateral.org/issue/8-2/publishing-comrades-temporality-solidarity-autonomous-print-cultures-shukaitis-figiel/]. Have you come across that essay? I think it’s really excellent. They draw upon, I suppose, this relationship between publishing politics and labor. They even reference people like (Ned Rossiter and logistical media)[https://nedrossiter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/08_Rossiter_LogisticalMediaTheory_2021.pdf]. This notion of logistics, I think, is quite important. Through Stephen, it’s hard not to make that connection to (The Undercommons)[https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf], Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, I think about that. So I suppose there’s that sort of intersection of ideas, I think, that we’ve tried to draw upon to this sort of management of pedagogy and the management of research, which is, in academic circles at least, tied to particular companies and to big techs, Google and other institutions of that kind. So that would be a further concern in answering the politics question about what’s happening to higher education currently as it becomes more and more attuned to neoliberal structures and the market. This is particularly apparent with a lot of restructuring going on. I think something similar is happening in the Netherlands, actually, and probably everywhere.
[00:18:26] I come from a background of media studies and theoretically, you’re very critical of the big tech, but in practice, oftentimes the graduates end up working there. So the idea of being critical of publishing, while oftentimes you end up participating again in that space.
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 guess 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)[https://archive.transmediale.de/content/phd-workshop] really, is 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)[https://aprja.net/], you know, it’s facilitated by the Royal Danish Library, but it follows the more typical conventions of double-blind review and lists of academic reviewers, with the right kind of credentials. So it allows you to operate, I think, both within and sort of outside to some extent of some of those structures.
20:20 How would you say this community looks like right now? Do you see that maybe there’s a movement in academia towards these things? Are your collaborators also operating on the margin or do you have to go outside of academia to find that? Or who is your network?
20:47 Yeah. Well, the network is both inside and outside. The current project is called Serve Pub. This is a collective of people both in universities. Myself, Winnie Soon, who I collaborate a lot with, who’s based at UCL, University College London. Christian Ulrich Anderson at Aarhus University, who I collaborate with on the Transmediale workshops as well. Then a group called Ingrid, which are an art tech collective based in London, but some of them work in universities, many of them on part-time contracts, but they also operate as a collective in their own right. Then Sister Server, as I mentioned, who are outside of academia, and then Simon and Mineta, of course, who also are outside academia, though Mineta teaches in the expub course in Rotterdam. So, an eclectic mix of people at different connections to formal academic work.
[00:22:12] What about your readers or your audience? Do you see your work resonating mainly or mostly within the university field? Do you think you’ve breached out? Or how do you think about your audience?
22:27 There are different kinds of audiences for the different kinds of projects, but the Transmediale workshop might be a good example of publishing in a way where, with the newspapers in particular, the distribution and the readers are the festival itself. That’s a mix of artists, hackers, activists, academics, students, the kind of people that go to that festival. So, in a way, it’s quite self-contained. The work with Open Humanities Press, I suppose that’s much more like a typical academic audience, people who, students and teachers and researchers who probably mainly download the PDFs, the free PDFs rather than buy the book. The Sternberg Press books, that’s a kind of art crowd more, has a very particular distribution through galleries and art bookshops. So, different kinds of audiences for different kinds of works.
23:56 Maybe actually just thinking about the free PDFs, if you could tell us a bit about open access and open tools and how you think, what can they offer that proprietary tools can’t, but also what can’t they offer? What are their challenges and limitations?
24:19 That’s a big question, isn’t it? I mean, obviously, a lot of these projects are based on the legacy of free open source software production and distribution, but also mixed with feminist pedagogy largely. I mean, you can see that from the collectives that we’ve tried to work with. I mean, open access and free and open source software is fraught with problems, of course, in terms of remuneration and sustainability, but I still think the ethics and the principles are crucially important. So, I suppose there we followed the discussions around federated approaches, the work of people, again, around the (xpub)[https://xpub.nl/] community at Rotterdam without trying to be evangelical about it at the same time.
Discussion
25:46 How would you define publishing? I know it’s a very broad question. I have a book in my mind, which is like the (Content Machine)[https://anthempress.com/the-content-machine-mbp] from Michael Busker. My understanding here is that he defined publishing somehow as an amplification machine, something that takes a message and amplifies it. I’m wondering what are the mutations of publishing in an era where everybody potentially theoretically can amplify a certain machine, a certain message? So what is the role of publishers? What is the role of the audience? And how is this both an opportunity and a challenge for established players?
26:36 I don’t know that particular reference. I like this sort of way of describing publishing as making public of things so in that way that phrase suggests making something public, putting something in the public realm, but also the sense in which it can produce a public, that discussion of what constitutes publicness. So I suppose that’s more the way I would see it. I talked about the reference to Stephen Shikatos’ work again, this idea of drawing attention to this connection of publishing to labor and politics, and that you’re producing kind of social relations in the act of publishing, which is between readers and writers, but also between all the sorts of other kind of collectives that are involved in the process of publishing. I mean, that’s a bit of a vague answer, but I think it’s a hard question. How do you think of publishing? I think it’s important to see it in that expanded sense, to use the phrase that you’re operating with.
[00:27:55] Let me make it a bit harder and insist a bit on my question. We are in a sort of moment where we experience a certain, “horizontal deployment of amplification”. To refer to my favorite article, (No One Buys Books)[https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books], about the catastrophic sales of two of the biggest publishers, like Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. While defending themselves on the trial, they said that they will sign influencers, because influencers come already with their audience. So what is the role of the publisher when they depend on influencers to fund the rest of the catalogue? Because what we learned through the article is that 90% of the books they publish, they don’t make money. A very big percentage don’t sell more than 1,000 copies. Even 5% of the books sell less than 12 copies. These are the biggest publishers in the world. This is a multi-billion merge between the two biggest publishers. So I’m wondering, if publishers need to count on influencers, I mean, major publishers, what is the future for smaller publishers? Like, if it’s so grim for big publishers, Nero or Topovoros or INC, without structural subsidies or public funding, how can they survive in such a competitive environment? Survival not only in terms of finances, but also in terms of moral and ethics. How can you wake up and find motivation in running a small business like that?
30:02 Yeah. I don’t feel particularly concerned about those big publishing houses to be honest. Why would I be concerned about the profit margins of these big companies that often produce books that aren’t worth publishing. I am concerned about the circulation of ideas and culture to more of the smaller presses that you’re describing. Also the future of books: I love books, of course, I have the physicality of a book, I like reading from paper rather than from screens. I suppose small companies need to develop very particular business models that respond to the conditions within which they’re operating. Sternberg Press would be a good example of that. The books we do with them, we are funding the production relatively cheaply. They’re small pamphlets, they only cost about 1,600 euros to produce. They’re printed in Lithuania, and this is where they’re printed quite cheaply. It’s again, the Sternberg model. We pay for it from research grants. So we try and build in a contingency in the research we’re doing to distribute the ideas that come from that research, but also make sure that it is distributed, it does get out there. It does reach the public. Then Sternberg makes money from those sales, and we’re perfectly happy for the money that comes from those sales to go back to them to be able to operate. So that’s a very particular business model, it’s quite straightforward in a way. That’s what a lot of places do, Open Humanities Press do something similar. Their books are produced very cheaply because they’re print on demand, but you as an academic come with the ability to be able to subsidize the operation and then rely on them for the distribution. Then the money that comes back from that goes back into the project.
32:39 You mentioned several cases in which the contents are produced through different mediums, and they’re also distributed through different tools or I would say even environments, online and offline. You talk about the limited advantages of open source contents and publishing, and I’m curious to know your opinion about this kind of hybridization of publishing. So why do we somehow turn to a traditional medium, like a printed book or paper book?
33:47 Yeah, it’s interesting the way we’re developing this conversation because of many of your questions. I’m curious about what you think as you’re asking the question. Maybe we can come back to that. I think it’s just a very different reading experience. You receive information in very different ways when you receive it for a particular medium. You read on screen in very particular ways, knowledge is constructed in very different ways depending on the way in which you experience it. So books, paper, allows you to digest that material in very different ways, even the kind of materiality of the medium has an effect on the way that your understanding of that material is processed. When you talk about temporality, you read a book in a very different way, you have it lying next to your bed, and you might just read a couple of pages before you go to sleep. All these things affect the way that you understand the material, the way you even take pleasure in the material.
35:02 I can give you my take since you were asking. This is a big question for us, but I think somehow, we turn back to traditional publishing, also for a pure question of economical sustainability. So in that case, you have a structure system in which you can have different revenues, and this is also the reason why there is a sort of resilience of the medium itself. A big publisher would also try to avoid fully digital for this reason, as you also mentioned briefly. So I think it’s a question of reading, but in that case, it’s more like habits - we can turn to reading digitally, if we only have that device available. But I think one of the reasons is that we are forced to stay in that model because we don’t have any alternative, economically speaking.
36:37 I mean, I can see these are concerns for you, as you’re running a publishing project. I’m not, I’m just involved in publishing in ad hoc ways. So the financial stability is less a concern, if we’re doing a book like in this data browser series, we might need to find 500 euros or something for someone to lay it out. If I don’t do it, someone else will. I would just try and find some money somewhere in the university to pay for it, make an argument for it. It’s relatively easy if you have a university position to find these little pots of money. You just operate very tactically and strategically in terms of the way you describe what’s taking place. I also run a research center, so I have a budget for that. I can always find something for some small amount of money. So I don’t really have that same economic anxiety, I suppose, although I’m always looking for money and there’s never enough, but things are possible.
[00:37:51] We also discussed this constant negotiations with institutions that is part of our business model, as you mentioned, Stenberg, also Nero. For our publishing, they’re super expensive books with colors, big formats and so on. Of course, we are served or forced to negotiate with institutions that can support us or apply for public funds and so on. So it’s also interesting to understand this frame and within this limitation of cost and negotiation with big institutions, what’s the future for independent publishing? How is it possible to be independent from institutions while publishing autonomously?
38:45 digital objectsMy interest in that is more conceptual, so this project (ServPub)[https://servpub.net/] digital objectsis an attempt to think through what autonomous publishing might look like. Our speculation following a book that Winnie and I did together called (Aesthetic Programming)[https://aesthetic-programming.net/], digital objectswhich was published by Open Humanities Press, we released all the materials, all the writing on GitHub with the invitation that you could do anything you wanted with the contents of this book. printed objectsYou could add a chapter, you could rewrite it, you could fork it essentially. Some people took up that invitation. We're really interested in that as a model of academic publishing, where you just produce an iteration of a book and someone can then make their own.
Then the further extension of that was to think not only about releasing the contents on Git and trying to think of a book as a computational object, as a sort of iterative form that can offer itself to different versions, but also to think about the technical infrastructure for that. To actually run everything on our own server, so to learn how to become a systems administrator to some extent as a way of exerting more autonomy over the technical processes through which publishing takes place. So not rely on outsourcing to other technologies, but to develop a server, run it, use it as a portable device that you can take into workshops, but also to think about the whole mechanics of publishing as a system within which you can exert more control over, as opposed to publishing with Springer or something like this, where control is almost completely removed from you. So that was the conceit, but it’s more like a conceptual experiment than thinking of it as a model for a particular publisher. But then the small amount of money we’ve got from Coventry University with this Open Book Futures project is to work with minor compositions. It is a publisher in print, even though practically it’s one person.
To speculate with them on future forms of their workflow, to think how they might use (Media Wiki)[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki], or they might have their own server, or to speculate with them about the organizational form that they might develop that would reflect more the nature of the political project that they think they’re engaged in. I don’t know if that was very clear, but I think that’s the worry of minor compositions, that what they’re doing as a project that broadly comes out of an anarchist and autonomous Marxist tradition, how they might think about their own kind of working practices and organizational structures that reflect more their sense of project.
42:19 Geoff, do you have any examples of federalizing structures of publishers? Minor composition is a great example. Many publishers in different countries publish in English, for better or for worse. We are wondering why we don’t have one single process of production. And then multiple distribution schemes, such as models combined together. This is something that was developed also by Geert in the INC, but more as an idea than practice. This might be a really great solution for some books: the model is to use the publishers as distributors, as institutions that have access with specific audiences, and then find a way, a super organism that will manage all the production process, distribution of the books. This concerns comics too. Just to give an illustration here, I’m based in Brussels, comics are a very important cultural product, there are lots of fans. When we do books, we know that we are very limited in distribution, so we take the money from Belgium, and we try to find other publishers in different European countries. So we see a book as sort of a shareholding thing, so they pre-buy 100, 200, 300 copies with a marginal cost that will never allow them to have a book like that in the catalog. It’s like a Robin Hood model, a bit of publishing, but I think it can be quite interesting to see more of this in the sense of a non-fiction and academic writing.
44:27 I’m really interested in this as well, I don’t think I have examples, but this was the promise of print-on-demand, wasn’t it? That you would be able to print locally to your distribution from a distribution center.
45:21 Yeah. Maybe this is an example of some of the problems, at least. With the aesthetic programming book, we wanted to translate it into Chinese. So, we decided to work with a collective, and we ended up working with a collective of people based in Taiwan. So, we were interested in translating into Chinese and all the problems of translation that are derived from working in a context like Taiwan, which has a particular colonial relationship to mainland China, also has lots of indigenous languages, and there are lots of debates about the use of classical Chinese. So, it gets really complicated immediately. We wanted that translation process to be something like thinking about forking: how do you fork into another, and how does that resonate with local politics? We immediately got into the suggestion that we would do this print on demand to make it cheap, to make some physical copies. Their print on demand hasn’t really developed, so they wanted to print offset. So then you’re immediately into a different set of economic difficulties of where to raise money and how to raise money. So this kind of cross-cultural translation, I think, is really interesting at the level of the content, but also at the level of the form that might take.
47:02 I think it’s very interesting that you use the word forking. If we can start thinking about books as a GitHub repository, obviously forking and branching are very interesting ways to see. There are some tools that allows us to think about a book with a new metaphor, because I think the way we have been conceptualizing mostly, to say it broadly, is still something that comes from an antiquated model: uniquely talented singular artists, writers, that have inspiration and they have the conviction to speak with a publisher. When we start thinking about forking and branching, and local varieties, as you said, about China, which are different from publishing in the UK, we can shift the metaphors of book and start thinking of models that allow us to work together, despite the different linguistic barriers or market leverages we still have, we each have.
48:16 printed objectsThis is exactly what we tried to do with the aesthetic programming book, to think of the book as a computational object and to think of it as one, when the printed form is one iteration of possible versions that could be produced by multiple people. alternative publishing practicesAlso the reason I tend to work collaboratively and write collaboratively, I want to remove myself from this as much as possible from these 19th century models and reputational economies that are so prevalent in publishing. You know, try and develop collective names, for instance, for these kinds of things. That's the idea of the ServPub collective as well.
[00:49:01] I don’t know if it’s a question or a reflection, but it’s more putting something on the table to continue the conversation. I want to bring back what Ilan was saying about the idea of federating. I think we are reflecting a lot on this from many different perspectives. You were referring more to the distribution. You’re also collaborating with Varia, with open source publishing, with different initiatives that create tools. Sometimes they’re very similar, because maybe they’re based on, Pages.js and they’re like forks of that tool in many different iterations. I feel that this is the whole idea of the politics of open source, that’s where we come from, but on the other side, sometimes it feels like reinventing the wheel every time. That’s maybe where I want to go about the sustainability of it in the long-term. I was talking with Lorenzo from Nero yesterday and he mentioned how it would be very nice to have a web-to-print tool that can print the zine that they are producing digitally and let them print home. For example, I thought about INC DevOps, like a tool that was exactly that four years ago. Then because of costs and issues, the project went down, the code is still there, but it’s not online anymore. Then I was like, there’s Pages.js, you should hire a developer and produce it yourself, but this can become very tiring after a while, especially for programmers. We’re going to talk with Gijs in a few, and I think that’s probably more a question for him.
But the question is, how can we federate this site? Is it even possible? Does it go against the idea of open source? I think that collaboration is still there, and this is to just stop there. But I think it also refers to the idea of a book as a computational object, right? At INC, we have been putting all our books on GitHub for the last 10 years, but if INC is going to close in a few years, who’s going to sustain all those books, who’s going to pay for the GitHub Pro account? Who is going to like an autonomous server? I’m just putting a lot of things there.
52:25 I mean, these are some of the problems we’ve had, even when working with the collaborators, like Manetta and Simon. We’ve employed them to work with us on the Transmediale collaboration, for instance, and it’s proved to be quite expensive. The amount of labor involved in producing something for a particular event, far outweighs what it would cost to quickly lay out an InDesign. But then that’s not the point, of course, it’s the process of doing that, which we want to expose and be able to engage with, but the sustainability of that becomes really difficult. We’re working on the latest issue of the online journal, which again, will be produced using the same set of tools. We’re paying Simon to run some workshops with myself and Christian, so that we can actually take on some of the work. There are all sorts of like economic challenges, but then at the same time, there’s a certain, despite people working with the ethics of free open source development, people are quite protective about the particular work that they’ve done on the development of a particular tool, so they need to protect their own income streams as well. They want to be accredited properly. We’ve run into quite a lot of difficulties over the way that people feel about ownership of tools, despite it being false.
I’m rambling a bit, but the potential of some kind of federated model where tools can be accessed and further developed by communities of people in different locations would be wonderful. I don’t know how to do that either. I suppose that’s what we’ve tried to, that’s why we’ve tried to operate with a collective of people based in London to try to replicate some of the work that OSP or Varia have been developing in London context so that we can have a much more hands-on workshop-based approach to the work that we’ve been trying to develop.
[00:55:17] Thanks. Probably as a provocation, but should we then maybe rethink the protocols or the whole idea of open source? I don’t mean some kind of political idea. I think that it’s very solid, but I mean in terms of protocols. This is more like a theoretical question. How can we put together this idea of showing the labor behind all of this?
56:09 These are the kinds of questions that (Aymeric Mansoux)[https://monoskop.org/Aymeric_Mansoux] has been trying to think through. From his experience of students coming out of the xpub course and setting up collectives like Varia and working with these sort of ethical principles, but then getting burnt out, getting kind of lost in the process, realizing that their future trajectory looks quite bleak in terms of being able to sustain themselves, sustain the energy levels and income streams. Some of them have moved to OSP on this basis as well, which sets itself up with a slightly different model. I’m not sure what a good model would look like, but certainly people are trying to rethink this and sort of struggling with structures that can sustain themselves.
57:16 Sorry, it’s a curiosity. I’m really not an expert of technology or these kinds of things, but I’m curious to know your very experience in technology and codes, if there are like some technical tools that can help in sharing the incomes, the revenue, the credits in a common collective production, if we face for a moment, that technical utopia where this kind of share would be possible. So I’m curious to know if you can give us some good practice or examples of this.
58:26 No, I mean, I turn to other people for this discussion as well. I mean, this is the interest in working with some of the groups that we’re operating with, like OSP, Varia, constantly developing their own license, of course, for the distribution of work. So absolutely. Other kinds of models like blockchain and DAOs. Yeah, I mean, I’m a bit more skeptical but I would also turn to other people for this discussion. I don’t think I would have anything to add that you don’t know already.
What: Future of Publishing
59:04 I think we’ve been touching upon the sort of the final question a lot, which is, I guess, the tough question of what’s the future of publishing? Kind of hard to answer, but I think we’ve been able to sort of pinpoint some interesting potential direction in which it could develop. More as a final comment on this aspect of the future of publishing, what do you see to be some directions you would like to see publishing going, and maybe some things that you think we should not focus on anymore that we can abandon in the past?
59:54 Well, definitely the question of the sharing of the development of these tools that was just mentioned. I mean, that’s a kind of major challenge, and it would be really sensible to try to network those practices and groups developing tools together in a more comprehensive way. My concern is more about working in a university, it is more the inner mechanics and the politics of academic publishing, and the way there’s still this bizarre reliance on these companies that have a very particular profit model, and to encourage academics and students to intervene in these processes, to realize that publishing isn’t something that just comes, you produce work, and then you just hand it over to someone to publish. But that is, the choices that you make at this point are part of the work, that they need to be folded into a reflection upon the way that the content is developed and the way the content is made public. So to be more concrete, to use publishers like Open Humanities Press, or set up a means of publishing as collectives for research groups to take responsibility for this as a very particular decision that they’re making about how works come into the world, how they reach people, and to see that as our responsibility to engage with these questions, especially in universities where you can draw upon funding. You can build this into research projects, you can think about the distribution of the work, the way the findings are made public of any research project, and take ethical decisions on that.
I’m sort of interested in your project in relation to other projects, really, like the work at Coventry. I mentioned this in the online meeting that I came to some months ago, your relationship to these other projects, like xpub as well. We have this model in the research center of collaborative PhDs with cultural institutions, but we just find that many of the students that we are employing for these projects come out of xpub. So I think we’ve had two or three now. They’re the kind of graduates that seem to be doing the kind of work in the way that we think is appropriate. It’s a really interesting dynamic collection of people and ideas, it seems to me. So where is your project, how does it connect with these other communities, I suppose, would be my question.
[01:03:54] Just to specify, I think the meeting you were referring, this is like an in-between project, in the sense of like the project that you were in contact with me previously this year still has to start, if it’s ever going to start, because we are waiting for the funding grant answer in August. So this is a European project that started September last year, so from the previous year. Topic is the same, and I think the whole idea behind is to really think about this network or network of knowledge. And I’m very glad we are mentioning the word federating, because at least this is personally and hopefully also in general, a very good direction, also because it’s still not very defined.
1:04:56 I’m also interested in this term. We’re a small research group in a university that doesn’t have an established reputation for research. So we see our strength in reaching out to other collaborators in the cultural sector, as I was describing, but also to other similar small research centers in other universities. A small group in Amsterdam through Annette Dekker that we collaborate with quite heavily, Aarhus, of course, a small group at the University of Southampton that are interested in image politics. So we also see these research structures as open to a federated model in a way. We’re not quite sure what that means, but we think it’s interesting to think with at least.
[01:05:52] Yeah, I think what we are in a very federated way, we are getting money from different institutions. I think it’s important to actually share between all these groups, because we are really aligning in many topics and terms. Just maybe something that I wanted to mention, because you just mentioned Amerik, and I was having a conversation with Amerik last week. This has to do more with this idea of expanded publishing, this idea of the book paper publishing as a starting point, trying to expand it in different forms as an algorithmic object, but also into a different medium. I think we are reflecting a lot in terms of audio as publishing, video as publishing, event as publishing. And then Amerik gave a lecture about permacomputing that I think is a concept that is very interesting. And my first question was, oh, how do I combine the video publishing with permacomputing, or like a live stream publishing with permacomputing? He first answered, you can’t, there’s no way you can do it. But actually, that was challenging. We were like, no, actually, maybe you can. But then, because I think it takes a lot of imagination as well, to rethink everything in terms of minor tech, and that’s what you were referring to your issue, and permacomputing as another term. So I don’t know, also trying to implement this idea could be interesting to really go in a different direction, and not to replicate big, but we should maybe go in the direction of small. This might be very abstract.
1:07:41 I’ve also been following this discussion, of course, you know, the one of our PhD students is Marlos Tafolk. She’s been writing extensively about this, and about scaling in particular, and referring to the work of Anna Tsing, of course, and non-scalability theory, and I think it’s a really interesting discussion. Following the development of this term, permacomputing, and the other alternative terms. I think this discussion is probably in their glossary. I’ve forgotten what it’s called now, the thing that refers to Stewart Brand, the online glossary. What’s it called again? Whole Earth Catalogue. But this has all those sorts of references, doesn’t it? And you can, and in Marlos’s PhD, you can follow the discussion of some of those alternative terms like small tech, and low tech, and, you know, and so on.
1:09:01 The whole idea is that, well, I don’t know if it’s the whole idea. So one of the ideas out of this discussion is also to publish sort of a repository of all these terms. We still don’t know the shape of this, but, yeah, also, you know, Then we should go to Marlos and to, and I might call this for sure. So that’s interesting how many of this actually there are, because we were talking with Silvio, and this is more in terms of publishing and Silvio PhD thesis, Silvio de Russo, is a post digital publishing, and it’s like a repository of all the reference about, you know, basic experimental publishing. But then there is also another repository that is looking very similar, it’s experimental publishing. So in that sense, I think it’s also, yeah, I don’t know, it’s a part of it.
1:09:51 It’s a really rich area, isn’t it? I think, you know, obviously expanded publishing, you know, the reference that most people think about is expanded cinema. And, you know, I can’t help think of how that’s used in the Hito Steyerl’s essay In defense of the Poor Image as well on poor images, you know, and think about what poor publishing would look like.
(01:10:00) That’s also interesting, because when we were talking with Irene, she had this provocation of stop publishing, or don’t publish, which we were having some trouble with, but maybe poor publishing and this more immediate, low frequency publishing is quite interesting.
(01:11:03) Thank you. I should update you on the book that we’re working on. The open book features as well, because that’s designed a bit, it’s going to be a kind of theoretical reflection, so a description of the process of producing the book in a very particular way. It’s this highly reflexive approach. So we talk through how to use the tools, but also the people developing those tools reflect upon the way that they think they operate in terms of setting up new social relations and opening up a particular sort of politics, et cetera. That’s the idea. Although we’re only at the early stages of that.
Gijs de Heij
3 July 2024, 3:30 PM
Introductions
00:00 Welcome to this call. I’m Marta. I’m from Nero Editions, and at this table, maybe you recognize some people, but it’s the .expub team, which is a consortium between Nero Editions based in Rome, the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam, Aksioma in Ljubljana and Echo Chamber in Brussels. We are doing a biennial of experiments on new publishing formats to bring light to knowledge and practices developed by members and our network in publishing. The idea is to create an operational model for this term Expanded Publishing. We will do a quick round of introductions.
00:52 I’m Lorenzo, part of Nero Editions with Marta. We are colleagues and Nero Editions is a publishing house and creative agency. We’re based in Italy and we’re mostly focused on art publishing, theory, and radical thinking in publishing. We have two different sectors: one is more devoted to contemporary art, it’s more experimental; the other one is traditional publishing based on printed books distributed in independent bookshops and sometimes in big chains.
01:54 Hi, my name is Janez and I talk on behalf of Aksioma. Marcela is here with me. I’m the artistic director of Aksioma, an institute for contemporary art based in Ljubljana. We produce and present artistic projects, mostly new media-related. Besides that, we do publications, discursive programs, conferences, talks, podcasts, and of course, sometimes streamings and stuff like that. Marcela is curating the program together with me, but also takes care of all the financial aspects of our non-profit organization.
03:00 Hi, my name is Ilan. I’m a researcher at the University of Liege in Belgium. I represent a small non-profit organization based in Brussels that is interested in conceptual comics, synthetic comics, and other forms of digital archiving in the medium.
03:35 Hi, I’m behind the scenes. I’m Tommaso and we know each other already.
03:54 We invited you for part of a series of 10 interviews with experts, artists, editors, or people working in the publishing industry to understand the whys, hows, and whats of expanded publishing. Despite the serious setup, it’s a very informal space for discussing ideas. So we would like you to be as free as you’d like to be with speculations, silences, and mistakes. We’ve also been talking to Clusterduck, Silvio Lorusso, Thomas Spies, Irene de Craen, Geoff Cox, Yancey Strickler, Kenneth Goldsmith, Dušan Barok, and Caroline Busta. We’re recording this with the plan of creating a hybrid report and eventually, a toolkit or publication. I will now pass the microphone to Carolina, who will handle the moderation of this meeting.
Why: Politics of Publishing
[00:05:14]- Thank you, it’s nice to see you — feel free to answer the questions in your own way. First, we wanted to focus on the “why” and although you are representing Open Source Publishing, feel free to come in with your personal experiences too. But starting on the “why” of publishing and in the politics of publishing, could you first introduce quickly OSP, particularly focusing on the mission and goals that guide your collective?
05:58 Open Source Publishing is a collective based in Brussels, we’re a collective with different backgrounds, but mostly graphic designers, and we make graphic design using only open source tools. We started with the question of whether it was possible to do graphic design using only open source tools, but for me, the question has sort of shifted over time towards: what’s the influence of using alternative tools on your design or the web, or on the work that you make? This, for me, is best explained through the sentence coined, I believe, originally by Femke Snelting: “Practice shapes tools shapes practice”. This speaks about the relationship between the tools that you use and the work that you make, but in a way, it also speaks about the relationship between the makers of tools and the users of tools. Open Source Publishing only uses Free/Libre, open source software. This is software that explicitly permits using software but also adapting it and then publishing it in an alternate form. It can be software, but it can also be publications or fonts that you make, because of those explicit permissions, it creates or opens up the possibility for different responsibilities or for taking on a different position as a user or a creator of the tools. So if you use these tools, you do not necessarily buy them, in the sense that if you use a closed, proprietary software, you have a sort of very singular license, and the responsibilities are quite clearly defined. I think with FLOSS software there is an invitation for more responsibility but also for more freedom. The practice of OSP is exploring this process of us being users of the tools, but also making the tools as designers and questioning what is possible, or harder to do, is also part of that position.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
09:16 I think you’re already going into a lot of useful discussions and threads that we want to touch on, particularly within this idea of the balance between more freedom and more responsibility with FLOSS software. I think that’s a really interesting idea, together with you working with a collective of people, not in a traditional graphic design practice, and thinking of these workflows and distribution of labour or roles. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on what this workflow, what a typical workflow would look like for OSP, for the projects that you’re handling and working on?
10:09 An example I can give is the work that we did on the Fair Kin Arts Almanac with the State of the Arts, which is a group of artists in Belgium and mostly Brussels that tries to discuss more fair art practices. Three years ago, we started the process of making a second version of an Almanac gathering contributions from members of SOTA, the organization initiating this publication. We were invited quite early on in the process, and we proposed a tool called Ethertoff that would facilitate a series of events that ran over a year where SOTA invited different groups of people to discuss questions around arts practices. What the tool specifically allowed for was to take notes in a collective editor called Etherpad and these notes were later used as material for the Almanac. So in that sense, the workflow is one of providing, thinking with the organization of the infrastructure that they are using, suggesting an alternative — an open source one — and using the tool from gathering material towards design and publishing it both in printed and online form.
12:25 I was going to say that we are using Etherport to make notes and to generate possible expanded reports on this. I forgot to mention it in the beginning, sorry, I wanted to say that! So that’s also really nice because Etherport is a sort of version or expansion on a tool that OSP had already developed before called Ethertoff. It’s interesting to think about the design process from the start and not in a traditional way where you would perhaps get everything delivered, the content decided, done, and written, and then you shape something around it, but starting from the start. Just to make it more clear and perhaps for others who might not know so much about the tools that you make, what are the main tools that you’re now using or are important for your practice at OSP?
13:44 So, at the moment, we mostly have, I think, a browser-based practice in the sense that we use HTML and CSS as layout tools. Then the output can be both online as a website, and can also be printed as a PDF. We also have tools that generate this HTML, so the more server-side tools can be Python, it’s mostly Python at the moment. When we go towards print, what we do is, essentially, print a website, so it generates a PDF, and then often this PDF needs to be transformed. So it’s a toolkit of PDF tools. So you have PDF2K, which allows you to take out pages, to combine PDFs. We use GoScript to manipulate the colour space, we also sometimes have new tools to manipulate, like crow boxes, but that’s very technical.
15:04 Expanding a bit on something you mentioned at the beginning of your introduction, these tools shape the design in a very unique way. You’re not dependent on interfaces that someone else has defined can make a design. So what do you think these FLOSS tools do that proprietary software doesn’t? And what are the challenges with working in such a way?
15:56 In the case of Etherport and Almanac, what these tools allow is to be reconfigured. They are often made with the assumption that people will use them together with other tools so you can export towards a file format that can be transformed further by other tools, that’s a possibility, or they may have an API that allows you to call the programs from other programs. These tools are native when it comes to publishing on the web. A lot of work has been done in weeding out all the problems there, a lot of money or funds available for developers to work on it, in the sense that the development of Firefox or Chrome is of course not free, but it’s financed in other ways. Ironically, also in the case of Firefox, often through Google. When you go towards print, this part is very well developed actually, what it can do is quite astonishing. At the same time, you also always run into problems, especially if you go towards complex print objects, for example, using Pantone colours. The tools to deal with those issues are simply not available. And within proprietary software, with tools that were designed for this type of work, a lot of funds and time have been spent on dealing with those issues. And if you work with a more experimental setup like we do, you run into those issues and limited abilities, you have to try to find a way to work around them or to fix them.
18:43 I guess the book as an object hasn’t made this connection, we’re still in an experimental space, while working on browser-based tools, like you said, for printing.
19:04 I realized I forgot to mention one tool, which is quite important actually, called paged.js, which uses JavaScript to extend the functionality of the browser and to emulate support for the paged media standard of the W3C. So the W3C is the governing body for the standards that drive the web, and there is a standard that describes how browsers should deal with output towards paged media. Paged media is not used as much for browsers, so for browser vendors, for the makers of browsers, it’s not interesting to work on this functionality. What the paged.js project does is emulate this functionality and make it possible to use browsers for these complex printed objects. Through this possibility, it shows that there is a need for this functionality within existing software.
20:34 I really enjoy learning more about this and with you, for instance in making the Screentime Facetime Airtime book. We have covered the tools and how you work with other organizations in terms of production and operations. We don’t have to call it a business model because it’s a non-profit, but what is the model of sustaining OSP? How do you maintain sustainable work for the collective and how is that balance between working on projects and creating your tools? I can imagine that, usually, commissioned projects are more interested in a final project than a tool.
21:36 That’s quite a challenge, to be honest, and completely transparent. I’m not sure that OSP currently is or has a sustainable business model for its members. What we try to do is to make the development of the tools part of the work, we do not separate the making of the tool and the making of the design, but we try to further the tool during the making of the design. We also have a document that we call the Collaboration Agreement. Through this, we try to explain our practice towards future collaborators. So the function of it is to, from the start, make clear that the work on the tool is part of the work on the design. So to come back through this “practice shapes tool shapes practice”, the idea is to extend the functionality, making something new possible, which in the case of the Almanac, means to go towards a printed object from multiple paths. This is as much part of designing the object as it is to think about the font or the layout of the book.
Who: Community of Publishing
23:40 I think that’s when your work becomes different and special, thank you for that, and for talking about OSP as a group and the challenges that come with it, so thanks for your transparency on that. Thinking of networks and collaborators, we often think of tools that are proprietary, like social media, when it comes to maintaining community or reaching out. How do FLOSS play a role in this, or is it something that you don’t think about at all in maintaining collaborations and a network and the role of community within this practice?
24:49 So, there is an interesting community that’s called “Pre-Pros Print” that tries to bring together practitioners of experimental publishing and experimental graphic design. They organise events where people with similar practices can exchange, that’s an important community meeting. There’s also the community behind the software and these tools, but at the same time, I don’t engage that much with the community of Ghostscript or Inkscape or GIMP even though I’m aware that they exist.
26:05 I think the tool itself becomes the space in which the community acts, even if you don’t have personal contact with them, the tools are being improved and reworked and expanded on. So, that’s an interesting thought, something we haven’t thought of. Okay, maybe I stop with my pre-written questions here and open up the discussion to our table.
Discussion
26:53 Thank you so much. I think I have a set of questions, but I’m going to start with one and then maybe do a round. I’m going to take a step back and go to the beginning of all of this. The idea of this consortium is to try to combine different approaches to publishing, we are a consortium from different countries and different contexts, and the whole idea of these three days is to bring together practitioners, distributors, and writers, to share knowledge and to try to build something upon it, maybe at a certain point also to come up with some sort of definition or understanding of what we mean by expanded publishing. I think what we are doing now here is very valuable, and it’s something that we have to work a lot in trying to translate knowledge from the very technical to the very theoretical. What are the challenges in translating this knowledge in a way that can be understood from a very broad spectrum? I follow your work, and we work together, and I understand many of the things, not everything, but then I’m sure that someone else at the table may have less understanding of this, and I think it is something that happens often. Have you ever thought about the means to share knowledge in a way that it has the complexity?
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 it was developed. The 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, write about 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.
37:32 I completely understand, I relate with the idea that when you finish a project, especially a big project, the idea of documenting and explaining every step is a project in itself. My second question is about the idea of sustainability connected to this. Thinking of multiplicity of tools — I think we already had a conversation about this topic —, we were talking yesterday with Nero, they have a new online magazine and they were thinking about producing zines or a printed copy of the magazine. So a web-to-print tool would be the best. They were asking whether we knew any tools that could do that and how could they implement that. I thought about Etherport and realised that INC developed a tool two years ago with another project that was exactly about web-to-print for online magazines, the code for which still exists. However, the server management put it down because they kept telling us that the code was not safe, they didn’t feel safe to keep it there. How do you sustain tools in the long term? And also, how do you deal with this multiplicity of tools? Some tools use Paged.js, but most of them are tailored to the specific project. A term that came up a lot in the conversation before is federation. How to federate a set of tools? Is it something that you’re thinking about?
40:28 I think there’s federation in two ways. I guess the first form of federation is not exactly federation, but it’s about a tool being used by other people or institutes; and its usage creates a demand but also creates the energy for this tool to be supported and maintained, to make sure that it keeps on working over time. Then I feel like open source is an answer to this tool — the code being distributed and allowing other people to download the new version of the code and use it. The idea of federation, where servers exchange or copy over material from each other, is a little bit out of reach for me. Software is extremely fragile, especially if you run server-side software because it means that somewhere there needs to be a computer that is continuously executing this code, it’s being maintained and it’s being kept safe. What I think is interesting about a tool like Paged.js is that it’s client-side, it’s written in JavaScript and is an extremely stable platform, with a lot of care of backwards compatibility, which in this case would mean that old JavaScript still work on contemporary browsers. The combination of HTML and JavaScript is quite stable, but also to us, sustainability, or maintainability, is important, and I think that there is a third element there which I would say is archivability. Archivability means, from the start of the project, thinking about in which states the project will be and what would this object look like in archived form, in the sense that it can mean that a certain part of it disappears. This means having a hybrid publication, or a publication that can have multiple forms, both a website and maybe a printed output. You could decide that you only keep the printed output and keep the PDF and keep that as a sort of file. That is sustainable. It can also be that you freeze your website in the sense that it doesn’t depend on server-side software anymore, but that it’s only HTML files that are rendered, and they’re only static files, then your website is much easier to archive in the sense that you can copy the HTML files. It includes the images, the scripts and the media files, and you can essentially put them on a zip drive or make a copy on a cloud somewhere or an existing backup service. So I think that’s the answer for me. Currently, the answer is to make it sustainable by accepting that the object in its software form is unstable, and you need to sort of think about how you can make archivable, relatively stable objects out of it.
44:34 We started this project on expanded publishing because obviously, when there’s a need to expand something, it comes out from frustration or a crisis or some sort of need. With expanded film by the expanded field of art, this happened because the new productions of the artist could not be contained through what was understood, either sculpture or installation, so they needed to find other ways. So my question is whether we saw expansion needs to be done because of a crisis: ethical, commercial, or financial. Is this a technical question? Do we need to develop new tools? I’m here obviously playing a bit of the devil’s advocate — do we need new tools to address this problem? Is this a technical question or is it that the role of publishing needs to be articulated more in a political sense? What are your feelings about this?
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. There’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.
49:34 I totally follow you on the joyful part because as an artist myself, I find joy in building systems to produce content, to generate stories and images. I think this is a question of choices. Do we need more tools to have more choices? I don’t think we lack choices in general, I think we have a lot of choices about getting a story out there or a message. Again, as a devil’s advocate, I am trying to think together with you right now and I don’t have any answers. I use a lot of Adobe, it’s cracked, I consider it free software. I don’t know if I’m limited by my software, I’m limited because, to be honest, nobody cares about what I do. I think this is the main barrier, it’s not so much about the tools I’m using, but it’s about relevance. Do people care about what I’m doing? If I change the tools I’m using, would it be more relevant? These are open questions and I don’t expect you to answer them. I just put them on the table as my own doubts. I’m also coming from Brussels, where everything is extremely well funded, we are products of a more generous cultural policy than other places have, where we are allowed to think speculatively, but the question is always there. What is interesting about what we are doing is how sustainable is it, not financially, necessarily, but in terms of ethics, interaction with people, responses, and community.
51:52 That’s why, if you speak about the tools that we use, we speak about Free/ Libre, open-source software, meaning that it’s not necessarily free as in freedom. So that’s why the Libre is there, and if you use the cracked version of the Creative Cloud, you don’t have to pay for it. So in that sense, it’s free, but otherwise, you are reaffirming an existing ecosystem that sets the Creative Cloud as the standard, synonymous with being a professional designer or being a professional publisher — that’s where our practice tries to install an alternative. Using that alternative doesn’t make our work all of a sudden more relevant, but I think that, in our practice, it generates new possibilities for collaboration. More importantly, it creates the potential for you as a publisher, or for us as designers to shape more elements of your whole publishing pipeline. With the Almanac, both the research and editing parts are done within the same tool, but it’s also done horizontally and collaboratively. Web-to-print allows last-minute text changes quite horizontally, so you can create a platform where editors or contributors can come in, and make text changes without having to ask the designer to do it within their existing tool. Finally, if a certain functionality is not there, users can create that functionality within the tool and of course, this is not easy, it takes energy. What’s important here — and this is not entirely true because it’s a little bit romantic — is the idea that the tool is never finished, but there’s a certain assumption within proprietary software that “this is it, this is what you can do with it”. Is this thought of? Well, it’s possible that it doesn’t work for you and then you can change it, so we might not know everything from the outset.
54:52 This conversation is sort of reminding me of something that came up today. To link different conversations, we were talking to Irene de Craen and she mentioned just stopping publishing, and then we talked to Geoff Cox, who was more along the lines of thinking about poor publishing and creating shorter connections between the elements of publishing that sometimes come with more mistakes. So I’m wondering if you feel like this type of work is also doing that; I don’t know if poor is the right term, because there is (at least in my head) the vision of these kinds of tools as quite functional and less messy, at least in the user side of things. How do you see this fitting into this idea of reducing the connections between publishing elements? Geoff mentioned several projects in which the work of the writer, the editor, and the designer are a bit more mixed and closed and they happen almost simultaneously and with less time or room for things being missed. So I don’t know, do you see your work being able to synthesise those processes more directly?
57:11 In our work, we create the structures that allow for those strategies but at the same time, the publishing that we do ourselves is limited and we respond to the practice of others. When we talk about printed objects as in offset-printed, then you still want to be very precise about what you publish. But if it’s online or if it’s something that is printed at home, then there are more opportunities to make multiple versions of the same objects. In my practice, I think more about the structure than about the outcome.
58:37 That makes sense. It’s also important that someone is thinking about structure, we can’t all be thinking about outcomes.
58:46 This reminds me also of the famous Mark Zuckerberg quote, “Move fast and break things”, which I don’t appreciate and I think it’s quite dangerous. So for me, it’s also about the fact that you’re still putting things out in the world, but I imagine that Geoff has a much stronger discourse.
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. Maybe 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, probably you would 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.
1:06:20 You used the word democratise and so I think I want to push back a little bit on saying that we do not want to democratise our tools. Well, I guess I want to push back because it sounds very elitist… Essentially what a piece of software does is encode a process or allow for certain things to be possible through a computer, and this is made easier by reducing the possibilities. So this means that you reduce the amount of different outcomes and make more assumptions about the kind of work that’s being done in the tools. I think we are not interested in this reduction within our practice, but there’s also an issue in understanding what the users of a tool want and then shaping the tool to fit the needs of the user. This is a lot of work because there is the development, but there’s also the testing, and asking whether our assumptions actually work. We measure our assumptions, implement and test the tools, and then do a feedback loop and our practice is too small to facilitate such a process. You also mentioned interoperability and the word ownership. Open-source has an interesting answer, which is perhaps not strictly within the realm of open-source software, but it’s open formats, which are formats that can be read by multiple tools. So you can take your information from one piece of software and bring it to the next, which can be information or data that you export in XML or JSON format, but can also be an SVG image from a browser to be modified in Inkscape, and be opened in a browser again. To reply to what you said about ownership: the longer I do this kind of work, the more I have to accept that it’s impossible to have full control. Software is often described as the stack, it’s layers of different pieces of software that are interacting, but they’re also all currents layered on top of each other, taking different directions. As an individual, you can neither control nor understand all of them.
1:10:16 I 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.
1:13:03 I guess it depends on what you mean by user-friendly. I think it’s important for a tool to be user-friendly, but this does not necessarily have to mean that a tool is 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. This 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.
1:16:13 Just to clarify, I didn’t mean that the tool itself has to be user-friendly in the interface, for the end user. I think what I meant by user-friendly is what you just said, in installing and supporting. Sometimes we take for granted that you can just download a plugin or download a software, install it, and it’s running. We should probably collaborate more with coders, create more collaboration and not take the coder or the designer for granted.
1:16:59 To come back to this “toolship” practice: if you say that practice is the designer and the tool is the programmer, you have those two distinct roles of being a designer and a programmer. In reality, those roles exist. What I think we try to do in our practice is to make those roles more blurry and to say, you can be both a programmer and a designer at the same time and the license sort of explicitly creates the legal infrastructure to do it, but at the same time, as a participant, you still have to put in the work. To come back to what Janez said, you need a certain type of skill. I want to be both positive about it and say there is a relevancy to it and also be realistic. It requires a certain skill that takes work to learn, it’s called a programming language and it is a language with all that comes with it — learning the language, vocabulary, learning new grammar. It’s also about learning a different culture, which can expand your thinking in interesting, surprising ways.
What: Future of Publishing
1:19:15 Thank you, Gijs, I think you’re already leading us to a conclusion. We’ve been thinking about what expanded publishing is and what it can mean for us here in this group, but also in a general sense, and what are we working towards. We are using new media tools and digital tools everywhere, and yet I think literacy has to improve a lot in the role of the designer, speaking from my own experience. What are your wishes for these urgencies that should be addressed when we think about expanded publishing? You mentioned a lot of things about sustainability and responsibility…
1:20:56 That’s a difficult question. One thing I’m thinking about is, once again, ambivalence, and it’s a conversation that I had with Sepp Eckenhaussen from INC. Looking at initiatives like OSP, Hackers & Designers, and Pre-Post Print, I recognise they are communities of designers and programmers who experiment with tools but don’t necessarily have the desire to create singular tools. There’s a certain desire to develop individual experiments that do not go towards a single solution, but foster these universes or fediverses of tools more than seeing one solution for everything. What’s tricky is that there are different desires — those experimental practices also answer to a desire for experimentation. This is not always applicable or relevant, but it would be very interesting to think about how the two needs can be combined, supporting both the individual experiment, yet being able to communicate in a way that supports something larger, a more stable tool or development, or that it creates a knowledge and a network of both users and creators of the tools for publishing, and one that is more engaged with the materiality of the technology that we’re dealing with. For me, both Pre-Post Print and paged.js are very interesting examples. Paged.js is a plug-in used by many in experimental workflows, but this tool is also nourished by those individual experiments, specifically through plugins or by maturing this tool that tries to generate and facilitate needs for generating or creating complex printed or page objects from a browser, while not necessarily wanting to fix the full pipeline, meaning that paged.js can be used in combination with WordPress as well as with a handwritten HTML file.
1:25:15 Interesting that you’re saying is that this type of experiment in publishing creates publics that are much more participatory in the process of publishing itself and in that way, is a mode of publishing that engages everyone in the process in a different way, beyond the passive reader, which I find a good take. I would like to also say thank you very much for your generosity and for sharing your thoughts and reflections on these processes, we will continue working on Etherport, which is going very well, we have new labels for everything. We’ll keep in touch with you about how this develops.
1:26:25 Thank you for the invitation, for taking the time and for the thoughtful questions.
Yancey Strickler
3 July 2024, 5:30 PM
Introductions
00:25 I’m a writer and an entrepreneur in that order. My first career was as a culture journalist, writing about music and film for Pitchfork, The Village Voice, different magazines in America. I started blogging daily online in the early 2000s and was always a part of online culture, many message boards. Then I co-founded Kickstarter, and so that pulled me away from editorial for a while.
At Kickstarter, I created a project called The Creative Independent, which is an ad-free resource of daily interviews with artists. It’s now been running for nine years and it may be the project I’m most proud of. That was a concept of an editorial space that would be treated as a public good and that would produce knowledge for the commons. Everything has a creative commons license.
I stepped down as CEO of Kickstarter in 2017. I started blogging again. I didn’t tell anyone about it for about five months. I just did it on a website no one knew, just so it was for me, which was great. Then began doing a TinyLetter and then was one of the first Substacks. At the time I was doing that, I also had a book deal with Viking, which is part of Penguin Random House. I was in the traditional publishing industry and I spent two years working on an economics and philosophy book that was published with them.
During that time, I also wrote a piece called The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, which became nerd viral. It has something like a million reads. It was originally in my TinyLetter newsletter to 300-500 people. All of that has culminated in this year with a couple of related projects. One is creating a physical book built around the Dark Forest Theory piece as well as eleven essays written by others that together make a kind of a canon that defines this concept. The idea was to self-anthologize, put out a book, create a label, and begin to publish more work by people like us too. That’s been a very successful experiment. We’ve sold 1,500 books in the past four months. We put out a call in a newsletter to our collectors to say, if anyone else has work in the same space as this, we’re open to it. From that has come another book project that we’ll be introducing in the new year.
Then the second piece that’s the main focus of my energy these days is a project called Metalabel, toolswhich is a space where a project like what I'm talking about of a group of authors collectively releasing a work becomes practically very possible because of a collaborative publishing and releasing tool that we've built. Our tool allows people to split money at the point of purchase. So once you buy a copy of our book, every one of us gets paid a percentage out of that money and it’s just automated. We’re trying to create a space dedicated to new forms of creative output, a new model for how creative people can release and have a home for their work outside of social media.
The last thing I will cite is a piece that I did as a part of the Dark Force Collective, but that’s a piece I spent five years on, called The Post-Individual. I thought a lot about how I wanted to release it. It was originally going to be a book. Then I had the idea to release it as a limited edition zip file where someone could pay $5 or whatever they wanted and they would get one of 250 editions that had this piece inside along with a video of me introducing it and audio recording and my research notes. All 250 of those editions sold out in a week, so I got paid $1,000 for that piece.
Why: Politics of Publishing
05:24 What are some tools that you use?
05:27 toolsI have had four different times in the past three years where instead of publicly publishing pieces, I just leave my Google Doc open with comments left on, sharing it privately with people and saying, you can share with friends, but don't share publicly. And those pieces were very widely read and engaged with. alternative publishing practicesThere's an interesting thing where if information feels like you are not meant to see it, or you have to work a little harder to see it, it becomes more interesting because effectively all information online today feels like an advertisement. So if there's something that's not trying to be seen, that's automatically a point of differentiation.I just keep finding a lot of success communicating that way. Some of my friends run a project called MSCHF, which does strange releases. They have a Google Doc that they title Friends and Family Discounts, and they share the Google Doc with direct links to purchase, and things will sell out from that even more than they will from a website. I think Substack is a great tool. I use Ghost for my personal website, just because I don’t want Substack to be my website because then it just looks like everything else.
I spent two and a half years deep in crypto. Metalabel preceded getting interested in crypto, but we got caught up in it like anybody. I think that crypto was born as a financial asset, and what things are born as is what they will always be. What I found was that the audience of people who engaged in crypto had zero interest in the world outside of it. Crypto is a very insular, internet-only game. We would launch work by people who we thought were very excellent, and we’d get people excited about the real world. No one in crypto cared. They cared about games that gave points and made the number go up.
There’s some tools there that are interesting, but as we discovered in building Metalabel, we could make something like a financial split using existing financial tools and not having to make people buy into a new currency to transact. I do think it’s possible that we will ultimately provide long-term storage of creative work on something like IPFS, like a blockchain, but the blockchains are so small you can’t even store a single image on one, so it’s kind of silly. But there are questions of long-term archival storage. It’s an extremely financialized world that only cares about that, and it’s hard for me to see how that changes after some time.
08:35 Going back to the dark forest and visibility, how the dark forest collective operates with leakiness, if you could go into that type of movement of how an idea starts and then gets published.
08:53 For any of the types of projects that we’re working on, you do want things to leak out because ultimately there is some desire for expression that exists. As someone who consumes a lot, I am sophisticated about how things are communicated, I want my own intentions to be clear and to be clearly expressed to an audience. I found in the past that when I’ve gotten trapped in the “oh, I have to do something every week, or I have to maintain some schedule to reach some growth target” the work sucks. People don’t like it.
alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there's a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audience and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It could be me. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we're almost always going to be disappointed and we're going to lose our voice. But instead flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.
Who: Community of Publishing
11:15 On this topic of internet audiences and community in our discussions, also pushing back on what even is a community, what does it mean to like, create work within a community? Do communities even exist? I think a meme in the dark forest anthology that’s editors don’t make magazines, they make audiences. How, how does community play in in publishing for you?
11:43 The book I wrote for Viking Penguin introduced a philosophy called Bentoism that created an actual community of people called the Bento Society. Couple thousand members. That was a group of people held together by a common interest that could be manifested through people meeting each other.
Nero is a publisher. You will put out work by 30 different authors and it’s not like they are all collaborating to be a part of Nero, but they all are a part of something. There is some space that your brand, your aesthetic, your taste that the author benefits from. That is not exactly a community, but it is a shared context. I also don’t mind the shorthand, you know, trying to find a way to encapsulate that energy that brings people together, even for a moment or a specific context, online. The piece that I released as a zip file, the post individual, is a frame of reference for how the notion of individualism is changed by the Internet. Before the Internet, to define yourself is to say who am I, and I think after the Internet, it is to say who all am I? Because the Internet allows us to create new individuals of ourselves all the time. Every account we create can be a new alt or a new specific interest, and it manifests these little private inner beings. Our subselves are making a new society together on the Internet. The nature of the world is going to be reset by this changing notion of what it is to be an individual.
I ended up mapping this to the history of the emergence of individualism itself, which is around 1000 AD in Italy and southern France where the Catholic Church wanted to break the powers of clans, families being held together. The way they did it was they banned cousin marriage. You can no longer marry your cousin because that’s a way the families were maintaining family power. So instead, children have to marry outside the family. Within a generation, these small trading posts became cities because there needed to be places where people could meet. Once people no longer were just in the confines of the clan, they were individuals for the first time. They had to find ways to work, ways to educate, ways to do everything. This is where modern society was made. I think that the same thing is happening to us online, that the internet has liberated us from our clans. It has liberated us from what we look like, or where we’re born, or our physical being. It’s allowed us to create all these individuals within us. On the internet, we are making a new society based on this new understanding that we are just learning of what it means to be a person that’s just changed by all these digital experiences. It might end up being that the future of community is something defined by the internet and the things that we say now.
[00:16:12] There’s the classic meme in media studies, which is: [“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog), which was a NYT cartoon. In the field of new media studies, there’s a lot of thoughts about what it means to be online, what it does to your personality, because of course, while you can have multiple accounts, at the end, there is still the individual behind it. Thinking about some of Dean Kissick’s articles of the experimentations in abandoning the individual self as the main pillar on the internet and pop culture. But I think we’re still really much attached to that. And when it comes to publishing, we talked about this in the context of open source tools and how developers want to receive recognition for their individual work, even though it’s operating with this ethos of sharing and non individualism. Also, maybe in this room, we’re not operating as one single entity, because we also come from different contexts of, for example, North and Southern Europe.
17:05 We are not just collective, we are not just individuals, we are both. We are learning how to be both. We’ve had a mode, especially in the West, of the past who knows how long, sixty years, of thinking there’s one way. We’ve been individual-maxing. We hit the apex, and it was kind of lonely and not that interesting. So now, people react to their conditions. There’s the K-Hole quote I always go to. community“Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are individuals and have to find their communities.” That is the person online today. That's how the world is being remade. It used to be one person, one vote. On the internet, it's one identity, one vote. The notion of personhood or what something with rights is, has changed. And I think all of society will, over time, be remade in that notion of what a person is.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
18:15 You mentioned Metalabel, and you say that it’s based on a very simple, traditional financial model to split the share. And I’m curious to know precisely the technicality behind the split. The second question is, one day you will open Metalabel to a wider audience. With open submissions and so on. How do you see this kind of growth in that platform? And how do you think you will be able to still control the brand and the attitude that Metalabel has right now that is super high quality? It represents something culturally.
18:59 The site has a lot of interesting ways that it’s architected. I’ll just first start with one. We wanted to make something that had an open data structure. toolsWe felt like the world was lacking a tool for creating a catalog as an artist or a creative person, a good data structure of my work with entries properly sorted by metadata and work and notions of work that could be portable around the web. So we use an underlying architecture called a decentralized identifier, which is an open protocol that Blue Sky uses, ActivityPub uses, but some of these new federated media use, and allows every piece of content to be referenced and embedded in other worlds just through using an open phone book basically. So that is what we started with instead of a blockchain, which achieves the same outcomes of universally accessible data.
We always loved the splits part of crypto. Last year, myself and our head of engineering, our architect, spent some time researching this question and of how you could do splits in a traditional context. Could you do splits with regular money? And I learned that there were pipes that existed for Walmart and Target and Amazon, the biggest e-commerce players, that allowed them to split money between a shipper and a third-party seller and a platform at a point of transaction. That ability existed for these big players.
We dug in and discovered a way that we could build a system like that using Stripe. And so the way we have made it is that business modelsfor every release on Metalabel, there is a record agreement where anyone who's listed as having credit on a release can be added from a drop-down and you set a percentage of money that will be directed to them. You can also choose the treasury of your group, which is just a pool of money that will just sit there and like not go anywhere. Every transaction from that release goes into a private account for just that release where the money sits on top and it has all the logic of the split underneath. You can also add in hard costs to be recouped. So in the case of my Dark Forest book, the first $8,000 first would go to one account to pay back my printer and my shipper and then only after that $8,000 was crossed would the split happen. But the money builds up in that transaction.
It will soon be that there is a moment when the release admin will lock the split. Once the split is locked, then the money gets pushed through the split and all the money populates to every member’s earnings account. If you’re a creator on the platform, you have an earnings page in your personal profile where you see from every release you’re a part of, here is your percentage of the split and here’s the money waiting for you. And then you click withdraw and it just shoots out to your Stripe account.
We opened our doors in March. So it’s been like a hundred some days. We’ve been following this model of just two or three things a week because that whole split system we’ve been manually running on every project to make sure it works. But it works. Right now our heavy curation is mostly just covering up our flaws. Sucking in our gut and trying to look good. As of September we’re going to have a moment of being more public about this project. We’re going to show people what you can do with it. We’re going to explain it for the first time. The application process right now hits you with a big wall that says we’re going to reject you. Don’t even try basically. Instead it will be a very friendly process where people can share something they want to do. The desire is to with one-on-one outreach continue to develop really excellent high-profile great releases and projects and there are a lot of those coming. I also want to have weird internet things.
Discussion
25:00 We can see on the internet there’s a big turn towards compensating attention. People are paid not by producing work, but by giving their attention to things. Would you ever think of expanding the micro-payment model of Metalabel to also readers, and not just writers and contributors?
25:21 I like the idea of making anything collectible. And the idea of making a piece of digital work something that can stand on its own as a single thing to engage with and interact with. I think the hardest thing most creative people and writers of all types struggle with is distribution and being seen. And I don’t think these are good dynamics. I think these dynamics are often problematic. alternative publishing practicesBut it's very easy to imagine a world in which a release could offer to add referrals to the split. And you could say 10% of the split from this release will be distributed among everyone who refers a sale. And all we would need to do as a platform is to provide unique share codes when someone copied a URL. And it would just incentivize people to share. It would also incentivize spam. But I think that there are interesting ways to think about opening up the split or opening up contribution.
There’s a project in the final stages of build of a musician whose release has his cover art as a placeholder. And on the release says, whoever makes the cover will get 20% of the split of this release. Submit your cover idea here. Those are things that you could publicly publish as a way of creating a different sort of participation potentially. I think if it’s cheap enough, I think if it feels like the artists themselves put it up, I think people are down for that. I think that’s interesting.
26:50 How open is Metalabel to different forms of media?
26:54 It’s a broad set of creative categories. Most so far has been zines, art, music, several games, multiple performances, a lot of things in downtown New York where we’re based, concerts. I’m embracing the term new media again. I feel like new media can be made new again.
digital objectsIf I think about the future of Metalabel, I believe physical books and physical magazines and physical media of all kinds are important. And I celebrate them. But I don't think that that's an audience that can grow hugely from collectors. But I think digital can be a huge space of growth with formats. Creating digital formats that feel legit and make an artist feel legit and that make a consumer feel willing to pay for this. And that’s where I think there’s white space and opportunity. And any creation of viable formats there is a net win for the entire creative community because it’s just a new vehicle for all of us to express work.
digital objectsThis is where we have this concept of a record. Think of a vinyl album‚ a record of work that has a cover, there's a package, and inside it contains a number of pieces. And those pieces can include a digital work, a physical work, a talk, an invitation. And that's exactly what Metalabel is. printed objectsThe Dark Forest book, you got the PDF, a physical edition, and you got to join a Zoom call with the authors all spoke together. That was $45. It's allowing you to think beyond the boundaries that the market has created for us and to redefine them.
What: Future of Publishing
28:55 Where can you imagine publishing expand in the next few years? If you could have a say in the future of publishing, what would you say?
29:04 There’s like never been more words published a day in history. It’s a content bonanza and an economic catastrophe at the same time. I think the future of publishing is incredibly bright. It just requires us thinking of it not just books and physical magazines or even ad-supported magazines. I [[community | think if we think of the individual writer or the small band of writers, we’ve gone from a world dominated by empires to shrinking down to nations, to shrinking down to I think the 20th century was about corporations largely shaping the world. I think the 21st century is about small groups of people shaping the world. It keeps getting smaller, what you can punch out of. We’re still in this mindset to be legit in publishing. You need to be one of the big four, a big magazine with an office in midtown Manhattan. That’s just not it. Fitzcarraldo, it’s like 10 people. Other Internet, 12 nerds. That’s who shapes culture. That’s where it’s going. People are doing amazing work. The impact of their words is huge.]] The economics of it are probably pretty good altogether, but it’s so diffused. It’s so not what we’re used to.
politicsThose of us who are operating under the previous set of conditions, how do we resize, right size? How are we re-relevant or what is still relevant, 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 did great. It’s hard. It’s competitive. It’s noisy. There’s so much. That sucks. But it’s also great.
Discussion
31:36 This metaphor that you use, like the album cover, when you open the album, you have several items inside. This is very interesting, but it’s basically the different iteration of the same object. You have any good example of other practices where formats are combining in a weird way, keeping in mind the attention spam of the average reader, the influence that the mobile phone in our pocket has towards consuming, publishing objects that are not only things that you read, but things that you listen, things that you watch at, and a combination of those things together.
32:13 If you wish to participate in culture, conjugating your work into visual forms of storytelling is a must. Making it quicker to me is just making visual forms of expression. This is where memes are really great. There’s an internet artist named Molly Soda, who has a very big following. She made a physical folder of 100 photographs from the internet, and then made a zip file that corresponds to those same 100 images, and made an edition of 25 of these releases. The two you get together, that’s interesting. Selling that is like a $500 art piece.
When people do this for lower price amounts, people experiment. These are things that none of us would have been monetizing. They would just be like attachments to emails or something or a newsletter. HARD ART is a group in London that started with Metalabel. That’s led by Brian Eno, Es Devlin, Jeremy Deller, the founders of extinction rebellion, and they’ve been releasing work with us every month. They’re gonna begin releasing zip files. Brian Eno will also publish a new book with us, a physical book. Collectors like it.
35:02 It feels different going to open source publishing using tools that are not connected to a big platform. Jeff Cox was mentioning we should go small, like small publishing, small tech, minor tech compared to big tech. Have you had this sort of approach also in the tools you use for the production? We are referring a lot to the distribution part, but then I think there is a lot of work before how to produce a publication, because producing a book or text has the very different expertise and producing a video, an audio piece, performance, etc. Have you considered the idea of what does it mean to do open source in the back end? And- and maybe this can also be a very technical question- how do you have a server? Are you hosted somewhere?
Certainly we rely on a lot of open source libraries and what we do. We first just have to get enough business that we’re default alive to really lean into this fully. We will have an open API that people can build on and extend the product. A lot of our data model is something built to be made open source or built to be published as a resource for others, trying to integrate our thinking into how other people are cataloging their work or mapping how their group operates. In the crypto world there was a lot of discussion around how the primitives of groups moving around the web doesn’t exist yet, and that’s a new thing we can create.
It’s a bit harder to do this — the Web2 world. For us, the hard part is making a two-sided marketplace and platform. You have to attract a critical mass of people on both sides for it to be worth belonging. Once you begin to do that, then you can grow. Augment that. Maybe there are certain features that are required to make that spark grow enough to where you can survive. We spent the first couple years thinking a lot about those long-term questions. That’s what that’s all crypto is, and in the past year we’re just been more about getting it out there, simplifying it, don’t bore people, with all of our reasons, just how to make it feel simple and useful.
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. 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. You know react and various things that they’ve contributed that came out of their engineering team and you know we’re part of their practice. That comes from big tech and it is something that we all rely on. Engineers, any, 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.
38:55 As an academic, we have the [[tools | DOI]], Digital Object Identifier, which is for articles. This has been only delegated to big academic journals. So you are not able to have a digital object identifier for any other type of text or research or text-based research without any academic publisher. And now the CERN released a very democratic DOI called [[tools | Zenodo]], which allows you to give a DOI to anything, to a photo, to your license plates, to a ceramic. What kind of media ecosystem do you imagine when everything, every sort of media instantiation would have its own identifier? So an identifier means that it will be totally decentralized. It will be not one single organism or a set of academic publishing that will manage this, but everybody would have access to all kinds of media, photos, a bit like the interplanetary file system, but in a much easier way to operate with.
39:59 There was an interesting case last week of exactly this, where I wished it was there yet, where we had an artist, Shantell Martin, release a font, an open source font as a metal label release. So like a library you could download, install. And a musician last week made a zip file of three songs. And within the zip file, he made his liner notes and he made the liner notes using her font. And he credited her. And he wrote in to say, hey, can I tag her work? How do I reference this?
It’s always what system wins out and what models work, but even us having this architecture of a folder structure, of a label that has a catalog and inside, there’s a lot of transposing of some other structural information models onto this. So all data is architected that way. Even if another system came up and blockchain proved to be it won, we’re all being paid on crypto tomorrow. We would be ready for that world. Replacing on-chain identity with a DID is something that we could very easily do.
We wanna plug into something more structural on the internet other than just like traffic coming our way. A world of AI driven Google search results should be terrifying to every independent media producer because it’s not gonna give you search results. It’s gonna be a verbal answer of scraped data from the most referenced website. And a user might not even get shown any of our pages as an option. How do we make our work and data more a part of the web and not just relying on “I hope someone goes to my server today”.
Kenneth Goldsmith
4 July 2024, 10:00 AM
Introductions
14:27 If you could give us a brief introduction and maybe already go into directly the first part of our discussion, our interests, which is the why, the politics of publishing. If you could tell us why you operate the way you operate, if you have mission ideals, goals, or even references that guide your own practice.
15:14 I’m Kenneth. I started (UbuWeb) [https://ubu.com/] in 1996 and things have changed a lot since then. Sometimes I find myself speaking like it’s 1998. I’m not comfortable with the developments that have happened in digital publishing or let’s just call it the digital world. social mediaI kind of feel like Instagram ate my utopia. I've kind of dropped out of radical publishing because I've become extraordinarily disillusioned with the turn that the web has taken since the advent of social media, truly the advent of Donald Trump, who ate social media as well.
Then everything got spoiled. So I’m not so sure that I’m the best person to talk to about what’s happening now or the future because alternative publishing practicesI've actually withdrawn from circulating works publicly. I've tried to maintain a practice of private publishing now, of unique publishing, of making one-of-a-kind things that, although informed entirely by the digital, are mostly analog in their production because they cannot be usurped, hijacked, or detorned in the worst ways possible that really just ended up happening to everything on the web that I loved. So I’m trying to just make a protected space for myself because I’ve been doing this for so long. We’re coming up on 30 years of UbuWeb, which still functions, but I’ve lost my passion for the digital pioneering that I was so invested in. I feel sad. I feel lost.
Why: Politics of Publishing
17:42 Well, yeah, that’s a very interesting position to take, and I think the space of retreat is actually important to understand for our own research because this kind of meeting, as Ilan said before, in our consortium starts from a place of a panic attack or like an understanding that there’s something going wrong. Also understanding the symptoms and how we got to this point I think is very valuable to our work. What would say went wrong, or at what point did you feel like this might be a moment to retreat? What was the breaking point for you?
18:51 It was gradual, there were so many breaking points, but I really would pin it to Trump’s rise on social media, specifically, which at first was intriguing to see the way he misused the media. At that time, I was on Twitter, and the way he misused Twitter really was modernist inflected. Completely unconscious, Joyce-ian even. I mean, this guy’s never read Joyce, but he was doing something that was sort of brilliant. It was everything I’d always hoped that social media could be, even in its perversity. Then I just realized it was the complete opposite of my utopia, obviously politically. Then it got really confused and surveilled: social mediathe space of social media became a space of surveillance, not only by the tech companies, but more disturbingly by my neighbors and my fellow citizens. You can't make a move on social media without being surveilled. I also really do think that (Zuboff’s book)[https://profilebooks.com/work/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/] really opened my eyes to my naivety. I just realized at a certain point that I got everything wrong. So much of my theorizing was just completely wrong. I missed so much. I was so enthusiastic and, in the 90s, the web was just such a beautiful utopia. It was the world as I really wanted it to be, and it came crashing down. It was crash right around probably 2013, 2014, you know, during Trump’s rise.
21:06 I mean, I think some people have defined for better or for worse Donald Trump as the greatest poster of our generation in a sense. Maybe not knowingly he fully understood how to game the system of social media.
21:33 He was really good at it. I mean, I don’t know if he still is because I would never even look at truth social. In those early days, I mean, it was really frightening to recognize some of my ideas in the worst monster possible. Then it made me feel like Marinetti or Mussolini. I was like, wait a minute. I got to back off of this. So that was the beginning, the beginning of the end for me.
22:12 How did you see that affecting a bit more the legacy media publishing? I mean, not only the election of Donald Trump, but in general, the environment and the focus on content that social media brought?
[[00:22:32]] social mediaWell, social media just ate everything. I don't think anybody goes to UbuWeb anymore. They don't leave Instagram. Everybody's corralled on an app. Apps are just corralling devices that keep you within the confines of where they want you. My sense is that most people really don't use the Web anymore. They feel that they have everything they need on social media. Streaming companies, media companies, social media companies have entrapped people. So the notion of the open Web, it still exists. Nobody’s stopping me. And all these notions of an undemocratic Web never actually really came to fruition because actually everybody just stopped using the Web. And they managed to just control and capitalize and tame the Web the way that they always wanted to.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
23:44 There’s an incredible lack of knowledge of what the internet is in my generation, and all we know is platforms. That’s quite different from a lot of the early uses of it. We’ve grown quite blind to the possibilities beyond the platformized web.
24:10 Yeah, there’s this term that came up and I really hate it. It’s called Creator, because creators create for a platform, specifically catering to that, to monetize or to capitalize. It’s concordant with whatever oppressive system happens to be in place that they are playing to. They’re playing to a system completely uncritically, because they call themselves a creator. Whereas I had to really think about the difference between a creator and an artist. You could say that many artists are creators for the art world. Many poets are creators for the poetry industry, but that was never interesting to me. The interesting idea of an artist was somebody who went against whatever prevailing system there was as an act of resistance, as an act of real uncreativity or slash creativity. My critique on creativity was always that creativity was concordant in the way the creator is concordant. If I was to go back to uncreativity today, I would have something really equally stupid to say about creators as I did about creativity to write “creator”, “creativity”. These are terms I can’t stand. social mediaHow do we get out of this sort of "create", "creative", "creator" space? It's useless because it's monetized. Most artistic production isn't monetized. So, it's stupid and it's usurped. It's taken all of the energy out of radical forms of publishing, practice, and thinking. So it’s just not interesting to me. I get it, but it’s actually sucked all the air out of the room.
26:45 What I hear is that utopias are not made only by nice ideas. Utopias are made also by huge drives of negativity and critique, and I’m thinking if it’s not the moment to make negativity nice again, make negativity a force with energizing potential, we live in a country where people around us are toxically positive. When you are critiquing something or you’re being negative, say something constructive, or something productive. They’re always there to try to redeem or take your negativity and try to construct something out of it that then they can use for monterization. We should find a way to make negativity a powerful driving force in order to think of new formats, new media, new audiences, new content. I’m wondering if there is a space for that. My experience in ex-Yugoslavia is that there is a space to express this, whereas in the United States, you might be extremely marginalized or isolated to feel such discomfort with social media or with creativity.
28:39 Yeah, I just wanted to say, there is plenty of critique and “productive negativity”. Look at the Gaza protests, that was really energizing, also the George Floyd protests that we had. There is critique, there is negativity, and there is pushback in America. Just to make a short tangent, my sense of the Gaza protests, let’s say the student protests recently in the U.S., is that we’re really, it’s a displaced anxiety on the second coming of Trump. We’re going to need active, angry, negative, critiquing people for the coming regime of Donald Trump, number two, and there’s so much anxiety in America about it, as you’re saying, that cannot be articulated, because of the culture of positivity. There’s this giant repressive force, and I think social media also has a role in this, that’s pushing down any type of domestic critique in America. So then it’s getting displaced onto an international stage, the citizens of Gaza. In a way, though, I actually think it’s really about the citizens of America, but you’re just not allowed to be negative in that way, I suppose. So there’s plenty of negativity in America, and plenty of unproductive negativity in America, you know, from the right, also, we have plenty of that shit in America. But that’s another space, right? And I don’t think it’s really what you’re referring to. I think you’re referring to a cultural space of artistic production and the distribution of production of cultural artifacts. There’s just a lot of contradictory forces at work in America right now. I’m encouraged by some of them, and I’m discouraged by much of them as well.
This year has been an escape, I think, from so much turmoil. The stuff that I was talking about goes back to the rise of Trump. My university was the center of the beginning of much of the Gaza conflict in America that was playing out on campus in very confusing and very chaotic ways. I left in December, and I won’t go back until next January.
So, this sort of retreat to a place, I’m also offline. This is the only thing I’m doing all year, I haven’t looked at my email since December. I will not look again until January, though. I’m loving this so much. I’m feeling like maybe I should just kill my email. So, now I’m somewhere where I’m mute on the language. I’m in the countryside. There’s nothing happening here culturally. There’s never anything happening here. I’m working on things on paper. I figured this is really the best way just to break from the year I’ve had, and it’s been really nice.
I have to also just say, and I don’t know how informed you all are of this, but UbuWeb(https://www.ubu.com/)is sort of done. After nearly 30 years, it’s not growing anymore. I can talk about the reasons for that, if that’s interesting to this group. 30 years of coding and moving information and reposting and sharing and really being in the center of some kind of exchange digitally, I’m not doing that anymore. That’s also a huge change for me. I would code UbuWeb five, six hours a night for 30 years, and I’m not doing that anymore. So yeah, here I am. I have six more blissful months. I love this and I feel like the hippies in the 60s that left the city and went to live in communes, and grow their own food. I mean, I get that now. I never thought I’m the most urban person in the world, but I understand why they did that now. I love this.
[[author: Ilan] 35:10 Yesterday we were talking with another guest, Irene De Craen about subversive publishing. She proposed a new strategy, a new tactic to be subversive, that is - do not publish. We were discussing a lot about this fact, because we are living in a sort of environment in which you are somehow forced to publish, to produce contents, to share contents. Now you’re describing a sort of status or situation in which you’re abandoning as a sort of tactic or strategy to react to the situation. I’m curious to know your point of view about not publishing anymore, or like mute yourself as a tactic. I’m also wondering if, in the back of your mind, this is a sort of temporary moment, or if you are considering the abandoning thing as a longer strategy, as Bifo also proposed.
36:22 Wow, I like that idea of not publishing, but then I’m 63 years old. I’ve published 35 books. I publish so much. I published UbuWeb, which is hundreds of thousands of things. I think it’s very different for younger people. Most people are younger than I am at this point. I can withdraw, right? I’ve done enough. It doesn’t matter to me if I publish a 36th or a 37th or a 38th book. I mean, it really doesn’t matter. Younger people have to publish. I think that’s the imperative of publishing. To get your tenure, even for your own status, even for your own sort of self-worth, your trajectory. We all leave a beautiful cultural trail behind us of our cultural production. That’s beautiful, that’s the most beautiful narrative I think in my life is the trail of cultural production. But I’ve had 40 years to make that trail.
I remember the first time I published a book, I think it was 1991 or something like that. I remember saying to Cheryl, my wife, if I never do anything else, I got this fucking book. This is amazing, right? I remember that feeling and traditional publishing practicesI think publishing is, to me, a trace. It's a sense of permanence, right? Particularly when I was really in the digital flow, I began to question, why publish? There's a flow, but if you don't publish, then it's just all flow and it just flows and it's meaningless. I always thought of them in the height of digital publishing around 2010. I thought, why should I still publish books? But then by publishing a book, I felt it was a way of stopping the flow, like putting a rock in the middle of a stream. Making a statement. It somehow made sense of that chaos. It was a dialectical constellation. That’s where I found Benjamin to be useful. A dialectical constellation that came together, even if to temporarily stop the flow and to try to make sense around it. I always thought that was the reason to continue to publish books.
I remember somebody had asked John Cage what’s gonna happen to his reputation after he would die? And Cage, who was really publishing very traditionally, said, well, there’s so much of me around that it’ll really be hard to get rid of me. printed objectsYou think about the lifespan of physical books. I mean, they don't get thrown out. I mean, maybe they get burned once in a while, but they get circulated. They have these like really, really long pun intended shelf life. So if I stopped, if I withdrew now, there’s so fucking much of me out there that I really don’t have to worry about legacy in that way. Even in a small press, (Hillary Clinton emails book) [https://www.neroeditions.com/product/hillary/] that I did with Nero. We didn’t do too many of them, but I guarantee you, all of them that we did probably are still in existence somewhere. They’re beautiful, they’re substantial, they’re interesting, and they might have some kind of resale value in the world anyway. So that’s never gonna disappear.
So if I just continue to keep publishing, then it’s just ego-driven, right? I’m hoping for my bestseller now. I’m hoping I’m going to win the Man Booker Prize, this kind of shit. I mean, that would be the only reason. I do think it’s very pathetic. I see friends of mine that are older than me, let’s say, language poets who are 10-15 years older than me, and they’re frantically publishing, and nobody’s going to read them, and they’re never going to win those prizes. I just see that as real acts of desperation. They’re good, they did important work. They’re still making good work. It might not be as relevant. And you do have to think about relevancy as well. So, I struggle with that. You know, as an artist, I have a healthy ego, right? Like all artists do. But, you know, it’s sort of diminishing returns for me at this point.
Discussion
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.
42:36 Yeah, yeah, it’s true, and, you know, I’ve never seen the giant, giant, big, world’s biggest book that you published with (JBE) [https://www.jbe-books.com/products/onepiece-by-ilan-manouach]. I have never seen it, but I’m so impacted by the thinkership of that work. Your books are propulsive in thinking, but they’re also extraordinary in their physical presence. printed objects[[digital objects | So that was the kind of thing that we were thinking around 2010 was that we could stop publishing physical objects, but that never really happened. I noticed also around 2010, when everybody was talking about digital publishing, that actual publishing got so much more beautiful.]] Magazines, which were just shitty ones, became books, and they also got really expensive because nobody was buying them. Right, these are all regular magazines. They still make them. If you go into a magazine store in New York now, particularly fashion magazines, they’re not like Vogue or Elle. Then now they’re like [FUORI!!!] (https://www.neroeditions.com/product/fuori/). What you guys did with the Francesco Urbano Ragazzi’s- every fucking fashion magazine looks like FUORI!!! now, which I have sitting on my table, as, again like it’s just sitting here because Francesco Urbano Ragazzi brought me a copy and it’s just the most beautiful object. It’s the most beautiful thing. Oh, you can say, I republished every issue of the 70s gay magazine from Italy. I was just with those guys in Venice and they showed me those incredible sleek, (sequined jackets with the cover of FUORI!!!) [https://www.gucci.com/ch/it/st/stories/article/gucci-twinsburg-fashion-show-details]. There’s this sort of funny play I think that Ilan is getting at between the thinkership and the physical object. I would not want to live, Ilan, without your physical objects, even though they are extraordinarily propulsive.
Who: Community of Publishing
50:12 Something that I would be interested in hearing from you and also from your space of retreat, do you, first of all, see yourself still part of a community of writers, thinkers? And do you see, if so, the people around you, your peers, engaging in similar practices of retreat, of refusal? How do you feel in your environment?
50:57 With the rise of populism, it really does feel like the 1930s again, and so many of the people that were proponents of radical ideas of publishing, literature, and web have been banished and de-platformed. The avant-garde, sometime around the twenties, became villainized. Again, it’s just a repeat of what happened in America in the 1930s, in a time where fascism rose and economies collapsed, that art had to have an element of utility to it. So you’ve got social realism in America, and anybody that was affiliated in the 1920s with what was called ultramodernism, I’m thinking particularly of a group of composers, found themselves banished, de-platformed out of work, right? It’s the same thing now. communitySo I find my community marginalized, de-platformed, it doesn't have a voice. What felt really cohesive back in around 2010 really feels completely shattered now. All the people are doing great work. We continue to do our work, but it has very little receptivity.
53:05 What about the community of readers then? The rise of populism or social media, how has that affected readership and the extent to which you can connect to it maybe in a more direct way?
53:26 It goes back to that sort of community surveillance, Stasi mentality. So people become very afraid to speak. There’s so much fear out there because it’s violent, and there’s so much violence. People are afraid to say the wrong thing. I kind of feel like the retreat has also been sort of a space of protection for a lot of people. I mean, getting off social media because there’s no winning against the tide of populism. So people don’t speak anymore because what is the point? You can never win. These ideas that we’re working with of the avant garde, of experimental things are marginal to begin with, right? There was a community at some point that felt cohesive enough before it was drowned out by people just saying, this is weird, this is wrong. So I think there’s a tremendous amount of fear, a sort of fear of doxing, fear of physical violence. I mean, I’ve certainly had death threats because of my work on me. Everybody has death threats. Everybody’s been canceled, you know? But that’s not fun. We didn’t go into making radical publishing, radical ideas to receive hate, but I’m learning that avant garde or radical ideas are really truly hated. But that’s the way it’s been. That’s the way it’s always been, and there are certain windows that open up by speaking about fear in this and silencing and people being afraid to voice radical ideas because they’re considered wrong now.
56:05 Yeah, there’s this interesting tension between a lot of the movement connected to George Floyd, Black Lives Matter. There was the idea that silence is violence. If you would not speak up, then you would be considered to engage in a sort of violence, but then, of course, too much noise, and then you would be blocking out the important information. Either way, you were still participating in this media frenzy. So, I mean, there’s also the metaphor of the dark forest coming from the Liu Cixin trilogy that is sort of saying, that maybe the retreat, the silence is a tactic for survival. I think this is also something that Geert Lovink also talks about in some of (his work) [https://networkcultures.org/geert/2022/05/05/just-out-stuck-on-the-platform-reclaiming-the-internet-by-geert-lovink/] of these practices of hiding and how maybe that’s where the new radical forms of activism can lay, but of course, you can start to think if everyone is silent, then what do you do?
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?
I’m questioning that. I didn’t question it for a long time. I really loved being public. I’m a New Yorker. We’re kind of public people, and we’re loud. In terms of politeness and non-negativity, like there’s a certain moment in America where people became extraordinarily polite and non-confrontational because they were afraid of getting shot because of the gun violence in that country. Then also, retreat has the sense of right-wing lunatics that retreat to Idaho and create white supremacist states of protectionism. It’s the other side, again, of that hippie commune. So all of these things are so loaded and so problematic. I say, I want to retreat. I used to grow a very big beard, and then I realized that was co-opted maybe by right-wing also. Like January 6, all these guys had like giant crazy beards, and what do you do? How do you move? How do you survive? What move is the right move to do? Ethically, morally, and also for your own sanity. It’s so hard. I’m so glad I’m not 30 years old right now, because I can imagine how hard that path is for people. It’s insane.
Discussion
[[author: Ilan] 1:01:00 You are the person with which we should talk about writing. I would maybe turn the thing and talk about reading. Maybe it’s the moment in which instead of publishing, and writing, even in a creative way, is the moment in which we should rethink about reading. Maybe we are not able to read anymore. So I’m curious to know your point of view about reading, how reading changed in the last decades, and how this new way of reading is also our way of sharing, publishing, producing contents?
1:01:45 My book called Wasting Time on the Internet was a reaction to everybody saying how horrible the internet was. I was like, no, and again, I got this so wrong. I framed it as something being really good. One of the things that I said was that we’re actually reading and writing much more than we ever have. I think that’s still true. People spending all day on their phones, they’re looking at images on Instagram, but they’re also reading comments, and they’re also writing comments, and that sort of short form is a form of reading, and it is a form of writing. I’m not sure it’s any better or any worse than long forms of writing. I think in that book, I traced this trajectory of the compression of language that begins with the telegraph and goes through the newspaper headline and the Times Square zip, and this sort of forms of compression down to 256 characters, or maybe it was 140 characters originally, was 140 characters on Twitter, which was the ultimate sort of form of compression, which turned language into sort of a desktop icon, something quick and readable. This is also where I brought back into the idea the notion of visual poetry as compressed icons that could be read instantly so that you didn’t need a sonata or something like that, a stanza, let’s say. You just needed a visual word that was done well, which is something advertising has already done, where it all dovetailed with pop and iconicity. I still believe all those things to be true. I do think that people are reading and writing, and then that’s my sense. It’s OK. I think it’s going to survive. You never see an image unaccompanied by, without text around it. Maybe if you’re watching a movie without subtitles you’ll sort of get some pure image. But even if you go to a museum, there’s always a wall label next to it. There’s always text. In the newspaper or on the newspaper, there’s a caption. There’s a photograph. There’s a caption. And so I kind of feel like language as a vehicle itself is pretty safe.
I remember in the 80s, and I’ve maybe talked about this in Uncreative Writing, there was a show that was held at the Whitney that was called Image World [https://archive.org/details/imageworldartmed0000unse/page/n1/mode/2up]. It was at the time of television, which just looked like it was going to eat static images. It was going to eat print culture completely and be moving. You had an artistic movement in New York that was called the Pictures Generation. It really addressed that moment in which we became an image world rather than a textual world, but what that didn’t take into account was just around the corner was computing, which is all linguistically based. For example, again, we’ve all received a JPEG in the email that didn’t render as an image but just rendered as miles and miles of code, and that code is just all alphanumeric language. So really, all of our digital world is comprised entirely of language. So we’re good for language. I think we’re OK on language.
Now, the second part of that is maybe my retreat. I’ve just been spending this year reading like mad because I’m offline. I always read a lot, but this year, I’ve actually had the time and the space to dig and to read extraordinarily deeply. I read on a Kobo because I can’t, in Croatia, I’m not going to get too many English books. I like the Kobo. I love the Kobo, and (Marcell Mars) [https://monoskop.org/Marcell_Mars] runs references(Memory of the World) [https://memoryoftheworld.org/] and LibGen and everything’s available. So that’s fun. I’m doing a lot of reading this year.
1:06:29 I remember when you were in Athens, you spoke about this kind of snowfall of text. You said that most of the text is made for machines or for systems to be read by systems. I consider you still like one of the first quantitative writers, one of the writers that said early on that all text is about quantity. The new capacity of artists and writers is to have to find the tools to navigate this kind of overload of information or abundance of information and find the tools to do this. I’m wondering now, what is your take on this? Because now we have the tools to do that. Now we can parse 30 petabytes of comics and understand what humanity thinks about speed throughout the 20th century and on and in different localities and geographies. Now we have the tools to do this. Do you imagine new artistic practices coming out of it? Would you like to be involved in these kind of things? Or are you like, OK, I got the principle of it, and I’m not so curious about the forms this will produce or something.
1:08:01 Well, I see so little good stuff. I think my experiences with AI have been really bad. To me, AI has ended up reifying whatever it is we know. I learned this a long time ago when I had a meeting with some pioneering AI people, and they were trying to make a machine write poetry, and they were making this incredible neural network produce things that looked like Tennyson. They were making early 19th century poetry using this machine. Why can’t you make it do something perverse and something strange? They were trying to wrangle, to squeeze money out of it. The only way that money could be made from some kind of poetry is if it actually looked like poetry. Then people would want to buy that machine because it was capable of writing poetry. I said, well, what are you feeding it? The neural network was being fed only really classic literature, which I actually happen to love. I like Tennyson, don’t have any problems with it, but they weren’t feeding it Gertrude Stein, or Cantos.
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.
I did work with my students once on Mid Journey and we asked it to render just a regular pencil, a yellow, number two pencil, so the most basic pencil, and Midjourney could not do it. It kept putting like a finger on the end of the eraser. It couldn’t make a pencil, which is OK, it’s cute, but it’s already cliche. The surrealism of the broken, the hands on AI. If I have to go into a gallery and see another hand with six fingers on it, I can’t. To me, it was just a sort of failure. But if I asked it to make an image of an orangutan on the moon playing golf, it was really perfect at that. So it couldn’t be so stupid as to make something normal, but it could be so stupid as to make something magical or surreal or incredible. So, I’m interested in the banality, and to me, all of this shit is incapable of doing what I’m interested in. I also think that uncreativity or perversity of any kind of avant garde or revolutionary ideas artistically are not being programmed into those machines. So they’re just reifying what else is there, not to mention racial and sexual prejudices that are already built in. So it’s just a reifying machine. I’m not so happy about it.
What: Future of Publishing
1:13:14 What is the future of publishing? It’s a question that we’ve also not been maybe so happy with or that we’ve had our pushbacks on. I guess if you could have a say in where publishing goes, what would you say? Or do you see a future in publishing? What are your thoughts?
1:13:56 Publishing will continue. Look, it’s important to make these markers. You’re sitting behind a shelf full of books, those are not going away, right? But your Instagram posts are all going away. So, that kind of thing, even in a symbolic way, is really important. There’s something durational about these artifacts that we’re creating in paper artifacts. So I think it’s important to keep going, particularly the kind of work that Nero and our fellow types of publishers, alternative publishers like Nero are doing. Everybody’s writing books on these incredible machines that are constantly crashing and glitching, and yet when you go to the airport and try to buy a book, there’s no evidence of that digital trace in any of those books there. There’s no books that contain an actual glitch, right? So to me, that’s really false. Everybody’s pretending.
There was a beautiful essay, and I’m sure many of you have read it, that was published on a listserv million years ago by a guy called Matthew Fuller. The title is (“It looks like you’re writing a letter: Microsoft Word”) [https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html]. When you’re actually on Microsoft Word, you’re not writing a letter. You’re enacting so much, but there’s so much denial that we’re actually not writing on a typewriter. There’s no acknowledgement in mainstream publishing at all of the technology behind it. To me, this is this great motion of sense of denial.
So, I’m not publishing UbuWeb anymore. That’s done. It’s useless, really. I think it’s dumb. Although I just have to say one other thing. There was a moment in which I thought, why am I continuing to do UbuWeb when we have YouTube, right? Because a lot of stuff from UbuWeb was just being taken and thrown up on YouTube. I was seeing nice stuff on YouTube. Now, with everything else, I realize that I hate YouTube because all it is is ads now. I hate it. I won’t use it. UbuWeb doesn’t serve ads. You can actually watch a situationist film uninterrupted, so now I’m really realizing how precious that kind of thing is. So I keep reacting over the years to different technological changes.
Sometimes it feels like I’m really wrong, and why am I doing this? Then the culture and the environment changes, and I’m like, oh, yeah, I was right. Then something else will happen where that changes again. So I just think that a vision like Nero is so beautiful. I just think that the vision of, I’m just going to specifically say Nero because I know Nero and you’re there, but I mean it for anything else. Follow your vision. Your vision is right. Your vision is good. It’s always been good. It’s always been right. Keep doing what you’re doing. It’s so important that you do what you do. There are going to be times when it looks like, what the fuck, why are we still doing this? And having been publishing for 30 years on the digital platform through the beginning of the internet to what it is now, I’m really glad I stuck exactly with what I started doing. It was right. My impulse was right. It was good. It’s been a journey and the journey is not over. At the end of the day, you have to just keep doing what you’re doing, and don’t even question it. Because if you question it, it’s going to end. That’s what they really want, and they win. Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing beautiful, beautiful vision.
1:19:26 I actually want to just comment on what you just said. We started with a lot of negativity and we are concluding with a lot of positivity. I also feel sad when you say Ubuweb stopped. I can also understand where it comes from. So maybe the question is, why?
It has to do with alternative social media. Something from 2010s and on, but then developed to (Mastodon) [https://mastodon.social/explore]. It is based on a technology that is called Federated Network. Basically, you can install the server on your own computer and run an instance. Then what you publish in that instance is shared with all the other instances around the world. So, it’s an internet within the internet. It’s like a recursive internet. But then in case of Mastodon and other platforms, they use a specific protocol that is called ActivityPub. It’s an open-source protocol that is actually working very well, to the extent that Zuckerberg decided to use it for Threads. I think the concept of Threadverse, apart from the specific technological object, it’s something that can also be taken as a theoretical object. We could try to think about how to shape the internet from a big tech to a minor tech. Our own computer or small computer at home can be a server, a place where we archive, but at the same time we share with others. I have the feeling that UbuWeb is an immensely valuable archive for people who don’t want to go on Youtube. I think there is a lot of value in creating islands, not isolated, but interconnected ones.
1:22:27 I remember I went to Cuba 15 years ago. There was a sneaker network, where I brought a hard drive full of things from UbuWeb, and they copied it. There were several thousand films, it was copied and then passed around, because they had absolutely no resources there. Then Marcel Mars is working on what he’s calling Ubu in a Cave. So, Ubu’s not that big, it’s got 5,000, 6,000 films on it, but it’s all compressed media. The whole site is probably two terabytes at most, the whole site. So Marcel’s going to make it so that you can download this and have all of UbuWeb with all its functionality just on a hard drive. I think what you’re talking about is kind of the next step. People are actually becoming islands and kind of getting off of centrally controlled networks and becoming their own servers.
UbuWeb, by the way, I want to say it’s never going away. Believe me. People like Marcel Mars and Dušan and all of our friends out there, Peter Sund and all of these people are making sure that UbuWeb never disappears. It’s just, right now, it can’t be added to, but that was a price we had to pay for independence and longevity. I had to choose between sort of continuing to update, continuing to expand. At this point, again, there’s more shit on UbuWeb than anybody can ever watch in the next 10 lifetimes. Do you know the Criterion channel? You know what this is, Criterion Films? They have, at any given time, about 2,500 films. UbuWeb has over 6,000 films, it’s so enormous that it’s OK.
It could get bigger, but it doesn’t actually, it’s kind of the same way I’m just feeling about my own publishing. It’s pretty good. I did a lot. Do I really need to do another few books? Do I really need to put up another 1,000 films on UbuWeb? I mean, why, at this point? So anyway, I do love this idea of federation. Wish it had been around in 1996.
Dušan Barok
4 July 2024, 12 PM
Introductions
02:09 You are participating in an Expert Sprint, which may be a fancy term but this is an informal space for discussion. You can talk freely about your practice and ideas, and while our focus is on the idea of expanded publishing, we’re interested in your specific expertise so you can nerd out as much as you’d like. We are recording this with plans of creating a hybrid report, eventually a toolkit or publication.
03:24 Hi everyone, I’m Lorenzo and I’m part of Nero Editions, an independent publishing house and creative agency based in Rome. We are mostly focused on art and experimental publishing, theory and radical thinking. We move across different formats, from a traditional book to online platforms, digital magazines, social media and structured events such as festivals or talks. We are working very organically on expanded publishing, we’re crossing different media and different contexts through our activity.
04:32 Hello, I’m Marcela, producer and co-founder of Aksioma together with Janez.
04:38 I’m Ilan, and bring graphic narratives and comics to the consortium as part of my postdoctoral research. I founded a non-profit organisation in Brussels in 2017, working on researching synthetic, computational, and conceptual comics, all parts of weird comics in general.
05:46 Hi, I am Tommaso. I am a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures, together with Carolina. We are based at the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam and do research within digital culture, but we also focus on experimental and digital publishing through theory and practice. We landed on this idea of trying to conceive publishing as something behind traditional books, but also more broad. I’m looking forward to this conversation.
Why: Politics of Publishing
06:55 Hi, nice meeting you. I’m Carolina. If you could perhaps quickly introduce yourself, and your work in a way you see fit for this context of publishing – feel free to go deeper into what are the core ideas and goals of thinking through the politics of publishing. What guides your practice and your work?
07:40 Hello everyone, it’s a big pleasure to be part of this. To briefly introduce my background: I studied Information Technologies back in Slovakia where I grew up. Parallel to my studies, I was involved in the local culture scene, mostly between art and technology, as part of the non-profit sector. printed objectsIn the late 90s, I started a small culture magazine, but then we lost the funding for printing. A friend introduced me to HTML and I realised that it could be a better solution than paper because, at that time, people already had access to the web. So it became quite exciting, and that’s how I discovered web publishing. We would redesign the first website, called referencesKoridor, every few months. digital objectsIt was so exciting to discover the ways websites could be organised and designed. We would use the word “portal” at the time. I was still living in Bratislava when I was part of this collective. The idea of setting up a new website that would document our work emerged, which then became Monoskop, two or three years after Wikipedia entered the market. toolsSuddenly, there was this exciting software where people could put stuff online without understanding programming, FTP and all the kind of nerdy things only accessible to a few. This was before content management systems, and already parallel to blogging. At the time, people still struggled to publish online, so we got quite excited. This MediaWiki installation is still there and operating.
In the early 2010s, I did my Master’s in Rotterdam at the Piet Zwart Institute, a program which is now called XPUB but at the time was called Networked Media. It was an eye-opener, especially in terms of using free software and an interventionist way of working with technology, and tools that built things. It involved writing HTML files in the text editor and not using any kind of pre-made systems, using Terminal and doing prototyping, which was very influential for my future and current work. I did my PhD in the Netherlands and I’m defending the thesis later this year. However, this was a different world — I entered the world of contemporary art museums and matters of conservation of mostly media installations, which have different needs compared to the classical art forms like painting, sculpture, drawing or even photography. With this kind of media installations, there’s always something different, such as a screen, different kinds of software, or different video formats. It’s always about adapting to the situation. Yet from the conservation perspective, you always need to follow the artist’s intent and stand for the truth of what the work is.
I was part of a larger research group, looking into how to support this process with documentation. I spent some time in museums, such as SFMOMA, Tate and other places for a few weeks, where I found out that they indeed set up Media Labs inside museums to care for this kind of art because there’s more and more of it. This expertise needs tools and frameworks where these works are being taken care of. It was interesting to find out that they would use Wikis, for example, SFMOMA would use MediaWiki to document media installations. They’re very easy, quite modular tools, they are flat so you don’t follow timelines like blogs. Instead, you have a list of things with a lot of links to go deeper and you can structure the content very differently compared to timeline-based publishing platforms. So this was maybe my contribution to the field of art conservation, as my thesis rotates around documentation practices behind museum walls. toolsInstitutions document these installations using their means, but when they started to use this content publishing — CMS content management systems, such as Media Wiki, WordPress or others — they are moving towards what others do with these publishing systems and often end up publishing documentation that represents or even presents works online. There are more and more examples of this, for instance, what Rhizome did with Net Art Anthology or LiMA in Amsterdam did with their digital canon.
17:08 Thank you. I also wanted to think through the idea of a living archive. We tend to see archives as something frozen or stopped in time, things that are stored in a dark room to be looked at and touched with gloves. How do you see new advancements and new publishing ways of fostering living archives?
18:24 In a way, digital objectsprint is archiving of the digital, so the digital is changing all the time. Oftentimes it disappears and it kind of lives in the web archive. However, even with live websites, things are being reformatted, designs, content and embedded media are changing, and so on. So with digital publishing, you never really have a final version, unlike the print. So at least in my practice, I see the print as a kind of archiving of digital publishing. This is also how any print publishing operates, working with the PDF as an intermediary between content production and the print.
Being in it for many years, of course, one can see how the environment and navigation changed — I would say that in the 2010s, people lived through the era of social media, which was more and more sucking attention. social mediaPeople would eventually stop clicking on those links and basically, we would just end up scrolling. This kind of silos would even prevent people from exiting it. It essentially shrinks the experience of the web to five or so websites, everything else being just invisible or sucked into these social media platforms. Today, it’s getting even worse with AI and how AI tools are transforming the logic of the search. In the past, we would use search engines by entering a few keywords, pushing enter and then getting results. Now we are pushed towards writing queries with a question mark at the end, this idea of a chatbot or talking to an entity and getting answers. To answer questions, AI vacuums the web and cuts the sources, without really pointing to the source of information.
I would say the question for digital publishing or web publishing is how to operate in this context, which I would say is very different to what the web was like 10 years ago. The experimental artistic approach would be, for example, to develop our own chatbots, train our own AI tools and just figure out how to work with AI, in a sustainable way that doesn’t burn the planet and credit the sources. Not in a general knowledge AI, but a focused, topical AI. If artists build these tools, they will treat what they do as a data set for training bots. In classical pre-publishing, this would be the type of thinking in making anthologies or where we collect different sources and bring them together under a thematic umbrella. alternative publishing practicesMaybe it will be interesting to think about publishing today as creating and producing content-based datasets that can train AI to serve different purposes and different audiences while being aware of what's happening with this Silicon Valley approach, and how to do publishing sustainably.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
25:43 It’s interesting that you mentioned this because, for instance, where I live in the Netherlands, there are already some museums that are using AI to make archives more accessible, passing a little bit of that threshold of archival knowledge where you have to know how to search from a specific archival studies perspective. Then you can just ask the archive the way you’d ask a chatbot. In that way, it’s interesting to think of these technologies serving a more cultural purpose and within the fields that this consortium serves. How do you see these infrastructures also related to linked open data and how can we create stronger networks in between each of these repositories of data?
26:50 I was never good with linked open data, to be honest, for better or worse. Now, when people are looking at so-called shadow libraries, such as Monoskop, and Library Genesis, they say that really good work has been done to make these things available. On the other side, we end up feeding ChatGPT and all the Silicon Valley companies that generate a huge 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 anything being published online and to see what we can do about it. With Monoskop in particular, there are a lot of pages and files but this metadata is not as standardised as Wikidata is. There is a classical digital library, and there is always some kind of metadata, but it’s meant for a full-text search, I never thought it would grow this big. At the size where it is now, one can find anything with a full-text search, but the dataset produced by Monoskop is useless for training bots because there’s no structured data, it’s more of a collage of different texts, images and PDFs. Of course, on the other hand, this might have been a lazy approach but at the moment it looks counterproductive to what’s happening on the web, how this content is being sucked by these AI vacuum cleaners. But then, I’m also saying that we should build data sets. So I would say, yes, there’s a way to think about this without a grand-scale vision that it has to be an all-knowing machine.
I will just give you an example of one little project, which was done as part of Monoskop: an [anthology] (www.monoskop.org/reader/index.php) of articles about shadow libraries. This is a data set example that can be thought of as something to be developed into a chatbot. So on the Monoskop Wiki, there are sections of shadow libraries, and lots of article mentions. So I would take all these articles, I would convert them in Markdown, and put them in one directory. Then I would run this TF-IDF algorithm. This is quite an interesting algorithm for finding words or expressions that are specific to each text. So if you search for Infrapolitics, it gives you Nanna Thylstrup’s text.
34:30 It’s interesting because, at the moment, we are taking notes and making a hybrid report that produces a digital and a print publication using a tool developed in collaboration with Open Source Publishing in Brussels and it has that function as well. So, we are thinking through the same things.
35:04 For text or a corpus analysis, it’s of course, one of the basic algorithms, but I think it’s very powerful. You can twist or tweak the algorithm in whatever way you find interesting. It worked for this anthology, but it’s a corpus analysis tool as its main interface. If I would do this now, I would probably end up with some kind of chatbot.
Who: Community of Publishing
35:44 I enjoy thinking about these new structures, and also new ways of reading. Tagging, and nonlinear readings, are ways that we can put publishing within new readerships and acknowledge this through communities, to see that these wikis are very dependent on collective labour. How do you see the sustainability of these practices in the longer term? How does one even maintain something like Monoskop in a longer term within a group of people and keep it as a sustainable space for publishing?
36:43 It was possible to sustain Monoskop for this long because we run and operate our own infrastructure. We have our own computer server, which was first installed in 2008. We don’t even have a rack. It’s not a virtual machine, it’s a real piece of metal, sitting in Prague in a small server house. It’s not just Monoskop but almost 100 different kinds of domains, platforms, and websites that run from the server, and we are two admins. I’m not good with server administration, but I’ve been learning this for many years, and I know how to set up an email account and a domain. sustainability of workflowsWe operate the server and we have control over the hardware and software environment that makes these websites possible to serve the public audience. The server itself is operated by two of us, but we are part of the NGO which has been running a festival for many years, so there is a legal body attached to the server. Partially, it used to operate from grants when we do events. Now it’s mostly donations, and we have one or two websites for larger cultural initiatives that give us some fees. We’ve been able to run it for 15-16 years. business modelsIf Monoskop were sitting on a commercial provider, I think they would cut us off sooner or later. In terms of the traffic and security we've had some attacks, and it requires work from our side, so I would say it's not easy to run a server but it's possible: there are so many servers and some of them are [operated by artists]((www.monoskop.org/Community_servers). communityThere are lots of different communities that have their own infrastructure and I mention this because this is often overlooked, invisible and considered “too geeky”. It's crucial to work with the web on a long-term basis and experiment with it.
Discussion
42:30 Thank you so much. I saw an interview with Femke Snelting, she was talking about how we only see infrastructure when it’s broken or when there’s a problem because we think of it as something so seamless and eventually invisible. This might be a good time to pass on the mic to the rest of the table. Does anyone have any questions?
42:57 I would like to know more about the editorial process. Of course, the platform is open to everyone, but I’m curious to know how you collaborate with collaborators, and how the editorial stream is conceived and processed. How do you or your collaborators select content? I’m also curious to know more about the workflow.
43:33 We never had a clear definition of what we were doing. So it’s not clear if it’s a publishing project, documentation, or artwork. No one knows what Monoskop is. I would say it was very much socially determined from the start, it started in a physical space, a media lab called Burundi in Bratislava 2004 and the first users were members of this place. When somebody would make an account on this Wiki, members would very likely contribute something because it’s relevant to what’s already there. This contribution could be changing information in an article adding some contextual information, a file that was missing or creating new articles. It’s always been relatively organic, I look at the recent changes almost every day to see what’s happening and very rarely need to delete stuff or talk to users who I don’t know in real life. If something goes off, then I edit the article and the authors accept it. Sometimes I email authors but normally they contribute to Monoskop mostly through social links. I almost always work with a few people who know the subject much better. For the sound art section, I worked with two people from the start. There is a section about federated networks. I talked to people who use them from the start and asked what should be there, so mine is mostly an editorial role. I have also worked with Ilan on the conceptual comics section and it was a technical help, mostly, although he can do almost everything by himself.
49:11 I started an archive of comics and I discovered Anna’s Archive which you probably know very well. Anna’s Archive is a huge repository containing 5% of the books that have been printed in Humanity. There are so many resources out there: LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Anna’s Archive — I don’t want to exaggerate — but as a researcher, it’s quicker for me to go get the books in Sci-Hub or papers in Sci-Hub and books in LibGen than go through my university’s library access, which is antiquated. I need to ask for permission and then the book comes two weeks later. Piracy works better than everything that is around. If Monoskop Log started now in 2024 and you were 25 years old, and because the generational question has come up, how would you make it? I have a feeling that it will not be enough to just put media online, we need to find other ways to deal with distribution and dissemination of knowledge. So what is the next step now? How do you distil all this knowledge in ways that are both democratic and with the same ethical principles that Monoskop started with?
49:21 Yes, it’s true that especially Monoskop started with discovering Russian shadow libraries, where suddenly you’d find lots of media theory books that we heard about, but never really had access to. This was in the late 2000s. There was a lot of excitement about putting things public. In 2008-2009, Gigapedia had hundreds of thousands of books, and it made sense to copy some of those files into something more thematic, the same goes for other large websites and the entire web. The majority of what is in Monoskop was always copied from somewhere, but it was credited where it came from. It was always the act of creating our context from what’s out there. So in a way, we’re still doing the same thing. The web has always been huge, and we are bringing very small parts of what’s out there, together in one page. I think this kind of filtering, selecting, highlighting and re-contextualising these things makes a difference. I would say it’s still relevant if it’s a data set or training AI, like what you do with conceptual comics. There are so many comic productions out there, but you came up with a specific idea of looking at comics through this lens of conceptualism. Then this created a separate library, which became a reference point for so many people.
54:08 I’m curious to know about your relationship with publishers. What’s your take on hosting books or PDFs of other publishers? Do you have a collaboration, silent communication with them or legal problems?
54:49 That’s a big question! For example, there is a multimedia institute — MaMa — in Zagreb that has been around for many years. They do amazing stuff with the public. Hardt and Negri published a theory book with them in Croatian in 2003. They find books that are in English and a few months later, translate them. In the 2010s, I visited MaMa and found out they really like Monoskop, so they decided that they would share all their publications with us. Each time there was something new, they would send me a PDF and it became like a huge MaMa library. printed objectsThey also promoted this in their own media, that one can always buy the book or download it from Monoskop. They never really went into selling PDFs, they stick to the print. It's been working out very well. This is one really good example of how free digital distribution supports print sales because the more people read it, the more it's discussed.
If you’re a researcher and you want to reference or find something, then you need a PDF. But if you want to read the book cover to cover, you just prefer print. That’s how it will probably always be. Of course, there have been some cases of copyleft publishing, yet in terms of copyrighted books that appear on Monoskop, as a general rule, writers are happy that more people can access their stuff. As for the publishers it depends, some don’t like a certain book to be there, and we delete the PDF. Sometimes we have a longer discussion, but sometimes it’s very short, and I delete it, but of course, these books are in other libraries — maybe they don’t know about it or maybe they do, it’s also not like everyone just searches for a book online before they buy it. People look for books online because they’re mostly researchers and they need to quickly find something. In that sense, I think that selling ePUBs doesn’t help so much.
1:00:13 I think you already answered my question and you showed a very good example of a collaboration with publishers. But my question is also about bad collaborations. I don’t know if you saw the news, but Internet Archive was forced to remove half a million books from their archive because of a lawsuit in the US: the big publisher corporation asked for all the books to be removed. I think this is a tragedy in this context. Have you ever encountered these kinds of issues and if you did, how did you deal with them? You said something about removing some books, and your context is slightly different, but maybe I can expand on what Lorenzo was saying before for example, some of the shadow libraries in Italy are banned. One cannot access Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. You can access them with a VPN, of course, but it’s becoming more difficult. I live in the Netherlands and the same is happening here. How do you position yourself in this? Have you ever encountered issues like that? How do you counteract?
1:02:34 Publishing is a very broad term, also if you look at books. Monoskop is not the website where you would find blockbuster books that were made as consumer products in the first place. You can probably find those on the Internet Archive, which might be why it triggered these publishers so much because maybe they were thinking in terms of pure commerce. So this is just one side of the story, that Monoskop is very kind of niche in terms of big publishing — we don’t have big publishing because it’s not relevant for this project. There’s still a difference between academic publishing, which is mostly publicly funded, and other types of publishing, which is funded by publishers not connected to university or academia. Sci-Hub mostly consists of publicly funded content coming from researchers at universities. governance and ownershipI think it's ethically wrong in general to see what happened to the whole academic publishing field, that it ended up with five large publishers that own all journals. These university libraries, of course, need to cut down access to a lot of these journals or whole packages of journals because they just can't afford it. What Sci-Hub does is almost a necessity today for researchers worldwide to survive, otherwise, the life of an academic is very limited, even with access to university libraries. But with other publishers who are not blockbusters and who are not academic, it’s mostly about the revenue. As I said, I think it’s a case-by-case thing. If the book is good, the free digital distribution does help the sales. There are examples such as books by Alessandro Ludovico that are openly accessible. I think his first book, “Post-Digital Print”, went through three or four editions and the book was launched on the Monoskop Log. On the day of the book launch, they gave me a USB stick, I put it on Monoskop Log and that was the first day the book was published. He did the same with these new books with MIT Press, it’s open access, and I think it does help the sales. So if the book is not good and it appears online, people might see that it’s just not good and they will not buy it, but it’s really hard to talk in general. I would say that I totally support all publishers and I don’t do it to distort them, I do this to support them and to give visibility and access to their work because maybe they can’t do it, even if they would want to, which was also a case I heard many times.
1:08:04 It looks like if you’re on Monoskop or a shadow library, it means that the book deserves attention, so it can be a way to give value to a publication.
1:08:18 Yes, especially on the Monoskop Log, sometimes people go, “bingo!” if they find their books published there. I think there is some truth to it, that the more it gets known, the more it helps the sales.
1:08:53 Dušan, you brought up open-access publishing. As an academic, I see there’s a new ideology evolving around it. We tried to publish a book with De Gruyter, which is an important academic publisher, and they asked for 10,000 euros for open-access. It’s a new business. Why do I have to fundraise as a researcher?
1:09:25 They can’t afford to tell you these kind of numbers. If you work with a normal, small-scale, semi-scale publisher, they would say “We can talk about open access”, but they would never ask you for 10,000 euros.
1:09:49 Exactly. I would like to contrast open access and piracy again. What is the new term for piracy? I thought it was an interesting way to remain in the system, but I’m more interested in things outside of the system with unsolicited networks of distribution. It doesn’t have to be a professional quest or something you have to pay, ask your university to find money to open access and I’m not accessing anything. I use proprietary things and then I put it on piracy. I send links to everyone. I provide access to SCDB, I just give it to every researcher who asks for it. I’m wondering if you see this tension also in Monoskop. It can be co-opted by saying it’s very important. For me, my ethics are: no, you should refuse interpretation. To say that you are involved in piracy, you are not involved with open access. Whatever they put away, you’ll take whatever you find interesting and put it on your website without any open access.
1:11:18 There is a language that developed around open access, with colours: golden, yellow and green. For example, my experiences with publishing in the Netherlands: I was at the university there and then we managed to publish two articles in journals which are not open-access. But the Netherlands already at the time — this was five, six years ago — had a program where it was relatively easy to tell the journal that I’m from a Dutch University and they connect to it and charge them, so I didn’t need to do much. Maybe they had only a limited amount of papers they could support every year, a few thousand. I don’t know how is it now, but this was the case at the time in the Netherlands. I’m not an expert with open access, it’s probably better if you talk to someone else, Janneke Adema or Gary Hall, who spent a lot of years researching this. Open access is like a really broad field within which you have kind of different modalities and different economies and I don’t know how they exactly operate.
What: Future of Publishing
1:13:45 We talked a little bit about the future of publishing, like you said, in the beginning, which is usually something we bring up at the end of these conversations. Could you share one final short thought on the future? Where do you see publishing going, and where you would like to see it go?
1:14:23 In terms of digital publishing, the websites have, in general, a three-year lifespan which is very short, due to many reasons. Sooner or later, we will need to look at archiving platforms digitally. There is a project, called Art Doc Web that I worked on recently in Berlin. It was a prototype, the idea was to create a web archive of artist websites based in Berlin, and we approached 20 of them. I collaborated with one other person, we were responsible for developing web archives and ideas around web archiving of platforms or websites. I was surprised to see that the tools are already out there that are relatively easy to use. They’re open source. We only get permissions from the artists, - they didn’t send us anything: we would just go to the website, run this tool, and it would, for example, scrape, or make an archive of somebody’s Instagram account. Each of these web archives is just one file, when I click on it, a a wacz file is loaded, opened and rendered in a browser in a way that it feels like it’s a live website, but it’s not live. Then you can search for images and text within this archive website, so it has functionality. I would emphasise the importance of thinking about these platforms, that we want them to be live, to have things added to them. At the same time, we also want to keep them — so this can go in parallel. This is a small bit about web archiving and how exciting this field is.
1:17:47 Absolutely. I think this is relevant as a lot of artists use social media to catalogue, to show their work. Silvio, who we talked to this week, is using Instagram stories to do a lot of design critique. These places are also incredibly fragile, so then it’s also the role of cultural work and publishing to preserve them. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, your projects and your thoughts on this. We will keep in touch with you about the future of this project. We’re using these conversations as research material so we can keep developing a model for expanded publishing and we’ll keep in touch with you.
1:18:45 Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
Caroline Busta
4 July 2024, 3:30 PM
Introductions
00:00 I’m Caroline Busta. I have been working in some form of publishing since the 90s. My dream was to work in magazines and I interned at Condé Nast in the 90s. I then worked as an editor at Artforum for six years and then I worked as the editor-in-chief of Texte Zur Kunst in Berlin for three years. That was during this pivotal 20 teens time when the nature of media really fundamentally changed.
Media is always in motion or always in different forms. There was something that was just really irreversible that happened during the 2010s where physical objectsit seemed like the print magazine alone was no longer a viable container for circulating information.
I realized I was more interested in thinking about that question. I left the magazine and I started something with my partner Little Internet called New Models. We thought of it as like a signal-to-noise reducer machine. Can we just make the signal better and the noise less? What would that kind of container look like on a shoestring budget?
That then begot a podcast, which begot a community, a discord community, which happened during COVID times. That community was incredibly generative, and that was a real teaching moment for us where we learned that one doesn’t produce a magazine, they produce an audience. This idea was shared by Busta and Lil Internet in the Dark Forest Collective Anthology, and the quote came up several times during the interviews as a way to envision the current role of the editor in the context of community creation. That’s really how we started thinking about it. From there, we’ve continued to think about how media is changing. Now we’re starting to deal with these questions of AI and what large language models mean for media.
Recently, we had the theorist artist, Kay Alato McDowell on the podcast who thinks about neural media as broadcast media. Then you have network media, then you have neural media as like the way media works in the time of AI and machine learning, generative cybernetic systems. That’s where our head is right now. It’s a bit in AI, but we’re not AI experts at all. We’re thinking about it through media.
Why: Politics of Publishing
02:01 What are some references or missions in your work, in your practice, in publishing? In the context of your article [[references | “The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram”]] and its invite to “betray the platform”, do you see yourself as someone who has betrayed legacy media, legacy publishing? And if so, how, and do you recommend it?
02:22 I wrote that article to try to make sense of something myself. It was around the time of the Black Square protest online, and it was very frustrating to see how real world injustice was being translated to some kind of action online. I realized that there was a disjuncture. I am of the mind that media ultimately is us. We should think about our speech, we should think about communicating in a more effective way.
I definitely felt like I was betraying legacy media when I left Texte Zur Kunst and was gonna make a website that aggregates all of our favorite writing in one place, because the most important thing is to filter. There’s so much information, the idea is to filter. And I think that around 2016, 17, 18, legacy media, linear media, media that is organized in books where there’s an editorial board and there’s contributors, and you go back and forth with your editors to come up with a really clear idea that has been circulated in a careful way.
That whole system became subservient to the flows of network media, of social media. It didn’t matter how brilliant your piece was. Its role in the age of Web 2.0, social media, was to create a circulating pulse, I have Kay Alato McDowell in my head. social media ?I find this taxonomy so useful, that in network media, the role is no longer of delivering information. It's simply to create an energy pulse through the network. So it doesn't really matter what the content of that content is, so long as that content creates an emotional response, something that compels you to push like, or to post in dissent, or to do some other action, to further the content circulation through the network. I feel like all sense of loyalty is kind of off the table at this point.
The only thing that you could be loyal to are like other people. The idea of being loyal to a medium is maybe just absurd. Although it was useful, I think I needed that separation at the time.
How: Infrastructures of Publishing
(00:04:42) This touches on the infrastructures of publishing. The workflows that we currently have are influenced so deeply by the distribution or promotion and this frenzy of posting or reposting anger. Can we separate ourselves from that? How do you get messages across in this chaos?
I’m gonna use an example I’m thinking about in real time. I’m obsessed with Lana Del Rey’s Coachella [performance]. It’s the most iconic pop media moment of 2024 so far . She’s riding on the back of a suburban daddy motorcycle. She’s wearing a cheerleading kind of outfit. That is an absolutely incredible image. She knows how to capture attention. She’s been so good at cultivating an audience. Pretty much anything she was going to do, she would have already had an audience that was ready to interpret it, to read meaning into it, to accept it. She’s understood how to tap into a zeitgeist, like a frequency of a certain audience.
In her case, it’s a mass audience. It doesn’t need to be, but she’s learned how to tap into a frequency that because that wiring is there, pretty much anything she sends into the system is going to be valued and her audience is going to build up the world around it. And I think there’s something really contemporary about that way of thinking about the circulation of media. She’s come from a family of great advertising and she must have at least, by that association, learned something about sending an image into the world, but it seems like it’s non-conscious.
On the other side, somebody like Charli XCX is such an emanation of millennial online culture. Her new album, Brat, is doing really well. It’s so great to have a cool female pop star, but there is something that feels forced at this time about the way that she’s doing her album rollout. There’s something that feels sad about it. She’s trying so hard to pull all the tricks, the green cover is really memetic. She’s really trying to prove the point that she’s a pop star, and she’s performing it. And that feels really old and not contemporary to me.
The idea that you can, I guess force meme is the word, the idea that you can architect a rollout to reach an audience, I don’t think that works anymore. communityI think there has to be some kind of vibes level tuning or calibrating with an audience that you first cultivate. And then once you have it there, you know who you're speaking to. If it's decent, if it resonates, it will organically circulate through that network. I think that's just the reality of media circulation today.
Who: Community of Publishing
(00:07:58) Dark Forest space has understood vibe tuning, creating, fostering, understanding and communicating to an audience. This regards the publishing side of things, the leakiness of Dark Forests, and the high concentration of subcultural knowledge happening in those spaces. Not everything is rendered visible, but then when it is, it has a bigger impact, maybe because it’s capillary. We were talking to Yancey about MetaLabel, this idea of co-releasing, co-production, co-writing, but co-releasing seems a bit different, starting with a bit like Dark Forest leakiness in terms of publishing and how this more direct and partially hidden technique might work.
(00:09:06) The Dark Forest was this useful term during COVID because it really felt that way. Everyone really did feel online and there wasn’t as much physical material meeting. The nature of Dark Forest spaces has changed a bit over the past four or five years. Co-releasing similar to collaboration. One thing we’ve learned from fashion is that collaboration is the way that you signal boost. You cloutbomb, you collaborate, and you bring everybody with a social media profile together to signal.
Dark Forest spaces definitely continue to be useful. I wish there was another term besides Dark Forest. I say that as somebody who’s participating in the discourse of Dark Forest, because I just feel like it’s not as dark as it had been before.
The entire internet to me does feel increasingly fragmented. You can essentially at this point have a Dark Forest space on X or on Facebook or especially these kinds of platforms because they’ve been degraded so much. We’ve all become a bit more sober to the idea that things we say can be taken out of context and we can’t be held accountable for a line excerpted from a podcast which sounds bad but in context is not.
We’re a lot more forgiving about that kind of stuff. But whether your Dark Forest space is on Discord or whether it’s just a DM group or whether it is like some weird Facebook group, it is very good for a fast language production and coming up with a set of terms.
That language production within a Dark Forest, the kinds of things you search, is going to manifest for you as a certain kind of search world and object world. Whether it is the key terms that you’re putting into Amazon or whether it’s the way you’re searching for an article or the names that you have in the back of your head. That is going to render or bring forward a certain kind of world for you in the digital space that’s different from the person next door who has a different set of key terms that they’re using.
[[printed objects | I’m still a believer of physical, printed objects and when I visited, I appreciated Aksioma. I loved going to this gallery and then being able to buy a book and feel like I could walk away with something which was still going to be there in 50 years, if I don’t pour water on it or lose it in a box. I really appreciate the printed form as a way of our language at a particular moment in time with a particular set of people.]]
With a Dark Forest and Yancey’s MetaLabel, it’s much easier to aggregate funds in order to get those things produced. printed objectsWith print-on-demand you can do a run of two or three hundred and then have an object. That’s how we produce our archive, not by Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever, but by printing moments, de-virtualizing, precipitating moments of thought. I think it's so important.
I don’t think huge runs of these books are important, but I do think Dark Forest communities, if we’re still using that term, should do that regularly, because that’s how you can have memory. [[digital objects | These platforms degrade and devices break. It’s important to have these books.
When it comes to the digital side, just as a layperson who uses a lot of these channels, I do feel like the internet is starting to disintegrate in various ways. I also think that there is a lot of promise in communities, and that could be my mom’s flower club. It doesn’t have to be an Urbit planet, or the idea of making your own splinter net.]]
It is interesting when you think about communities using mainstream platforms in common ways so that they effectively end up creating a digital layer that reflects them, that corresponds to what things they are thinking about, that shares their sensitivities. I don’t know the shape of it, but I feel like, because of the way large language models work and the way the reinforcement learning works, that that’s going to happen.
Discussion
(00:14:30) One of the problems we face here epistemically is we understand that the expanded forms of publishing need somehow to go beyond the dichotomy between the content and the container. We need to find new ways of packaging and distributing and disseminating knowledge. What is the tension you imagine between different forms of container, different forms of content? Is this something that you see as a purely formal, technical, political, or social question?
A container need not just be a physical object. digital objectsTo use the example of New Models, we have this podcast, and people may not listen to it, but it has this wider cloud of language and people that are associated with it, and that gives it context.I know this gets back to Frankfurt School Theory, the human voice, I think, is a very important part. It’s a frequency. I don’t know if container is the right word, but a frequency that definitely helps transmit language or transmit ideas in a more dimensional way. One could think of a container also in terms of all these other forms practically.
There’s of course the classic symposium. I think that what helps even more so than what’s transmitted during the lectures is who ends up showing up and having the informal corridor talk. alternative publishing practicesHow can one rethink the container beyond just the modes that we all know? What are some of the threads that you all are interested in, or I'm curious if there's anything that feels like the hot topic there?
(00:16:49) It can all be resumed out of the category of exiting. What I find interesting about the container and your very nice description of the book, is that the book is designed like that in order to be resilient. We chose this paper, we bound it like that so that it can survive the violence of distribution, dissemination, logistics, careless book source, acute capitalism.
[[printed objects | These books [pointing to Aksioma’s books] are great because I can take them on a train, I can put them in my bag, I can store lots of them on my shelf. This is like the ideal pocket book size. And I think that’s very thoughtful of the reader. Something I absolutely hate in publishing, especially when it comes to culture adjacent theory or art, are these books that are strange sizes. I want to just be able to practically read it. I don’t want design objects. I don’t have a big house. I don’t want to have to have a special bookcase to store it. ]] There’s a place for that, of course. Every artist is entitled to do their monograph however they want it. But this is a very thoughtful container. And on not publishing too much, don’t underestimate the power of just a good book. Choose when to push the print button, whatever that thing people used to put in their signatures, “think before you print”, but do print because sometimes it’s necessary.
(00:18:06) Talking about podcasts and containers, shifting from paper to digital, but then at the same time also trying to go from digital to physical, how would you consider podcasting as a publishing object? Considering when you expand publishing into audio, the editorial process of a book is very different from the editorial process of video or a podcast.
(00:18:41) digital objectsOne thing we really liked about podcasts is that it's like fast theory. I’m still so old school that I really like a well-edited text. And I realize that’s not the case, especially working with so many publications these days. It’s rare to have a real exchange on editing, but I do like well-edited text and podcasts. We also edit a lot. I respect the listeners’ time, although I know that’s not everyone’s style. Some people appreciate the parasocial aspect of just, hitting play and letting that go. For things that are more theoretical, I think it’s really helpful to try to cut something clearer together.
digital objectsPodcasts are maybe two days of editing, whereas putting together an essay and a book is going to be a lot longer for the text production and the editing. People are busy and sometimes, getting the freshest thoughts in circulation, there's a value to that. That's what Twitter before X was so valuable for, is like journalists would just get their idea out so they didn't give it away, get scooped. The pace of the thinking was moving much faster than publishing. So podcasting is somewhere between just posting on social media and publishing a book. It's also obviously way less expensive and logistically way simpler. You just need an RSS and a computer. So that’s a big value. Video is interesting though. Julian and I think a lot about that. We think about just how popular YouTube is and how the way that most people are taking information now is multiple channels at once. And video is an important node in that.
So, especially with theory, I think it’s an interesting medium, but there is the question of how to package it. Giving just like a straight lecture isn’t great. Slides are really helpful. I think it’s combining the meme form with the voice, with the idea. I think it’s pretty effective, but there’s still also the question of how to drive people to it. Why would people be interested to click? So then you have to have some teaser or some context that propels them to click on the video.
[[physical objects | Another form, you probably won’t like this, are also like commercial objects, whether that’s merch or whether that’s different kinds of gimmicky collabs or something. But it does make people think about things in different ways. Above me, there’s this Supreme Bernadette Corporation basketball. It’s obviously a hype object, but it becomes a critical object because of the context of Supreme and Bernadette Corporation and the 90s and New York. And so maybe also objects, there’s a place for them in this. ]]
(00:21:48) Yesterday, we were having a conversation in terms of collectibles, the very traditional fetish of the object and the book. The question is, how do you touch a podcast? How do you put the podcast on your shelf? Is really the difference between a physical book and a podcast in terms of a physical difference?
I started a podcast a few years ago, but decided to go for something slightly different, Twitch. Do you have any experience with live streaming? So, immediate publishing, no editorial process, just something that becomes an event, basically in itself.
(00:22:25) [Joshua Citarella] (http://joshuacitarella.com/), his work really leaned into that, in part because that was the kind of work he was also studying, so he wanted to be one with it. It’s very demanding and takes a certain kind of personality to be able to hold that up over a long duration. I personally don’t think I’m cut out for it. It does limit your demographic to somebody mostly without children who probably has a flexible work schedule, which is a lot of people, but still it limits it. It also was more useful when we were all at home during the lockdown. It was a very particular moment for it.
Another job that Julian and I do on the side is help at a techno label with their social media. We’re always seeing that these live streams, something like Boiler Room, get a ton of people. Even something like that that is just so supposedly parasocial. I don’t think Boiler Room’s struggling, but also because they have the live event. I would say that’s really demographic contingent and for the general person.
digital objects[[community | And who goes back and watches a live stream? I participated in live streams before. I guess there's a little bit of kismet to it. Are people on? Is it hitting at the right moment? What just happened politically at that time? I just keep thinking that all these forms of media are still contingent on the audience. With the rapport with the audiences and how connected they are to the subject matter.]] I personally hate giving video lectures to students. I’d much rather be in the room live. But that’s logistically more complicated and more expensive for everybody.
(00:23:58) The question is very simple and it’s about your business model, this combination of Patreon and different channels. How do you create this kind of ecosystem to make your activity sustainable?** **
[[business models | Channel is super interesting. I still have hope for something in that general structure to work. We sold a bundled subscription to New Models, Joshua Citarella and Interdependence, which is the podcast of Matt Dreyer and Holly Herndon. It was one NFT, and it was an unlimited subscription to the podcast content for this NFT. The NFT was a token that unlocks a private RSS. ]] co-publishingI think there is something really promising in being able to co-publish with other entities, to not be dependent on Patreon or any of these larger platforms. There's been a proliferation of different platforms in the time since we first started thinking about Channel. It need not be dependent on a large platform, but the problem is that they often don't help with discovery. In theory, they could. So if there's some way to reconcile those two things, you have a really interesting podcast publishing model on your hands.
alternative publishing practicesI would love to just be able to subscribe to a channel that would switch out. Maybe Matt and Holly are busy working on a Serpentine show (https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/holly-herndon-mat-dryhurst-the-call/), so they're publishing less and maybe we'd have somebody else who would come into that orbit and then would be able to supply to the same channel. I think there's a lot of potential there. I think Web3 is gnarly and the incentives of it were tuned towards speculative accumulation of value and did not support the social intellectual goals as well as they could have. For our part with Channel, that tool is going to be open-sourced. Hopefully somebody will build with it, or maybe it’s something that we’ll pick up again if we build out some kind of splinternet so that others in our community can also publish to it.
Back to just general support, like how to fund yourself, that is just such a good question. I feel like every year we’re like “how is this still working”, and it somehow is. I don’t have a long-term plan.
I don’t have a really good answer there, other than the older institutions do not seem well calibrated to the conversations that we’re continuing to have, and it’s been that way now for six years or longer.
** **(00:27:34) I find a lot of things in common, for example, somehow we are forced to conduct two different parts in terms of activity. One is more like publishing, editorial things. On the other side, you have this kind of necessity to do consultancies all the time, to negotiate with private companies on one side, or public institutions. I think at the moment it’s the only way to survive. I’m curious to know if the subscription patterns, paywalls, really found your own activity or not. We find a good way to make our publishing activities sustainable, a very traditional way. Selling our books, it’s okay, functional somehow. The traditional book format is in a big crisis, we are looking all the time for new solutions.
(00:28:48) When you see numbers in the tech world of how large AI models are funded, or you think about the way that capital circulates, or just America’s debt, you just start thinking about whether there are simple ways to just match. I’m enough of an optimist that I do believe a lot of people in the tech sphere want to have high-level intellectual conversations about media, about the products they’re building. They want their products to be the best. They know that thinking about this can fortify them.
I’m just not sure how to make those inroads exactly, because there’s so much capital there. What 100K could do, not just one, but a constellation of small publishers, that’s significant. I just wonder how to match that money. Money still, at least in America, it still seems to operate in this very strange way. The traditional circles where we apply for funding, you have to contort your project into this very particular kind of mission. business modelsHow can we better match the money and the thinking, that's always been the negotiation of the art world. How do you find somebody with funding and somebody with ideas and find some kind of Venn diagram space where they need each other? So maybe there's some social engineering to do. Is it a cultural question? For sure it's not technical.
There’s also this bit of a purity question, who you take money from. It’s bad to take money from certain places and that’s kind of true, but also then who ends up winning and who then ends up getting to publish. business modelsI don't think there's some magic formula of like 30% books and 20% live streams and 10% podcasts. And I think it's using all those available resources and also calibrating in a different way to the social, both in terms of the audience and those who may be interested in funding those audiences. We’ve seen kind of a dark pattern in the world of praxis and like Thiel bucks. I don’t know if that’s necessarily repeatable with more savory figures.
What: Future of Publishing
(00:30:43) If you could have a say in the future of publishing, what would you want to see happening? What are some of the urgencies in the present moments that you think should be addressed? What do you think we can abandon if there’s something we can abandon in publishing?
(00:31:12) alternative publishing practicesThe model that comes to mind as the most viable is if we think of fashion and we think of art, we see that those with the most muscle end up being really good aggregators. So if you think of Virgil, or if you think of Kanye, or if you think of Demna, or if you think of Anna Imhoff, or if you think of even someone who's been around for a while, like Olafur Eliasson, or like someone like Trevor Paglen, or you think of these entities that have these studios or have these practices, which then are just very good at tapping lots of different people in their world. And they build their worlds through other experts. It's more horizontal.You still have these names at the top of it, but these artists are usually quite transparent about “this wouldn’t have happened without the help of X, Y, and Z people. Now go listen to their music” Or “go read their books”.
You would have security in the fact that your work would get published. Finding the money for it would be easier. You would have access to really good teams and you’d be really stimulated, a kind of multipolar publishing world operating under the aegis of various cultural producers across the arts, fashion, music spectrum. I don’t want to diminish, though, academic publishing, theory publishing, because I think there’s also a place for that. But just in my own trajectory, I could see that being a not uninteresting place to exist for a little while.
(00:33:32) I think that’s the main model of commercial publishing. Even the very big publishers rely entirely on influencers and celebrities to sell books. And they publish the rest of the books just to fill up the catalog. It’s a caricature obviously, but I’m wondering if you ever personally get feelings of vanity in publishing. Do you ever feel that somehow this is something you need to battle with or you need to accept it?
(00:34:12) I don’t think about it as competition. And so I kind of don’t care. Sometimes there’s vanity stuff which is weird and kind of glad that it exists. The test of time just means it will probably fall away unless there’s such a cult of personality around the person who’s doing it. Why are these magazines, especially when you walk into a bookshop, taking up real estate? There’s so much good stuff out there. Why is this what I’m offered? I think in the digital space, they care less in a physical space or like an art bookshop, a museum bookshop. And you’re like, why did they buy it? Why did they take the bait? Like, why is this there?
(00:34:50) We started the day with Kenny Goldsmith, who decided to totally retreat from the publishing world. He says, what’s the point of publishing another 35th book or something? We see that the older generation start to lose faith or start to imagine a post-publishing future for them. As writers, as researchers, I probably feel sometimes, do we need another paper? Do we need another comic book? Do we need another translated essay? It’s something that is measured always with impact. When you publish something, you expect something to bounce back. It’s not always evident that things are bouncing back. Sometimes you just say something and it doesn’t resonate anywhere.
(00:35:30) communityThe channels are essentially broken. The most frustrating thing is you can have something that's very interesting and it doesn't catch on because people aren't paying attention to it. And people do judge the book by its cover and it's more important than ever because they have no time to open it up. Something I appreciated about Ljubljana is that I don’t speak Slovenian. When I saw books in English, I was like “oh, I’m really going to spend some time and see what’s in every single one of these books”.
communityThe paths of circulation don't function anymore. I'm stating the obvious, but publishing does matter when the community is defined, when that is there and they're expecting it. We’re actually inspired by our trip to Ljubljana and the print culture that does seem to be there. But also in Slovenia, there’s a big print theory culture, which is incredible. We were thinking we’d put together some kind of little handbook of essays by guests or excerpts of guests that we’ve had on the pod, along with an updated glossary and circulate that and just have it be print on demand. And anybody in the community who wants it can have it as a record of the past year or two. It’s also interesting to them as a record. You just need to be really selective about when you push print, but also who you’re pushing print for. It’s probably difficult to have a business model that relies on the regular circulation of a high volume of books, because that’s probably no longer so sustainable.
** (00:36:43) We finished all the interview’s discussion with this question about the future of publishing. If you can give us your take about the future of reading, how reading is changing nowadays and what your feelings are on the evolution of our habits in reading? **
(00:37:03) I guess it depends on what kind of reading. Fiction will remain, because books are a form of entertainment that will remain. People do have Kindle. I don’t know if it’ll be print or digital, but that will remain. And narrative is still important to making sense of our world.
alternative publishing practicesWhen it comes to theory, I'm really of the mind that people scan and sense as opposed to read. So fast theory, I think, will continue to be helpful. Schumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist and their series (The Age of Earthquakes, The Extreme Self), this obviously doesn’t have depth, but it did a very good job at gathering the zeitgeist of that moment. I can imagine this format continuing to be successful for the time being, at least. Perfect pocketbook size, something that you can flip through and get a sense of. You can take away a couple of one-liners.
printed objectsI think there will always also be a place for very good longer form theory. I think the best longer form theory just needs to be in text because that's how we can take in information that's complex and there should still be a place for it. The books that transport themselves through you, they circulate themselves through you. You can very quickly pull out a line and in a conversation, they're kind of currency. That’s the way philosophy has always worked in a certain sense. It’s a kind of currency. It sort of infects you. It’s this idea that infects you. I do think that we’re going to be reading the very quick way. So ways to reduce and refine ideas, as sort of toxic as that sounds, is actually important for people to read deeper. alternative publishing practicesWe should consider making books that are non-linear, that pull out big ideas so that people and their attention can be secured, and they'll be enticed to read deeper.
I’m working on a catalog right now and I keep reinforcing that we should not force the reader to start at page one and end at page 300 because they’re not. There’s going to be five people who will do that and one is going to be the artist’s mother. People are going to pick it up in a museum bookstore. They’re going to scan through it and you need to have a few ideas. If they scan through it and they find two or three things that just work, then they’re going to take it on the train with them and they are going to read deeper.
I think we have to be really respectful of people’s time and be respectful of the fact that people have all these choices of media. printed objects[[digital objects | What way can a book, a print form, best support the way that our brains are being reorganized now, as opposed to trying to battle it? How can we integrate with this kind of vision? Can books be an AR layer to the way that we are experiencing the world? Could you imagine reading while also something else is happening? I know that's probably not the ideal form, but that seems to be the real form. That's what I imagine for the future of reading.]]
Colophon
Conversations on Expanded Publishing
This publication and toolkit is the outcome of a research project on expanded publishing initiated by the Institute of Network Cultures, Aksioma, Nero Editions and Echo Chamber. The conversations documented took place at Nero Editions in Rome, between July 2nd and 4th, 2024, in which the consortium members interviewed Clusterduck, Silvio Lorusso, Irene de Craen, Geoff Cox, Gijs de Heij, Dušan Barok, Caroline Busta, Kenneth Goldsmith, Thomas Spies, Yancey Strickler. We thank them for their time and generosity in sharing their thoughts and ideas.
Moderators: Carolina Valente Pinto and Marta Ceccarelli
Recording: Tommaso Campagna
Publication concept and editing: Carolina Valente Pinto and Marta Ceccarelli
Editorial Assistance: Salome Berdzenishvili and Tommaso Campagna
Proofreading: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Development of publication tool Etherport: Gijs de Heij (Open Source Publishing).
Design: Alix Stria
Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in January 2025.
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission through the Creative Europe Program.