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2 July 2024, 3:30 PM

Introductions

Carolina (00:01:33) - Hi, Silvio, nice to see you. We will go through a series of questions that explore your relationship to publishing and your practice. Based on these expert sessions, we will develop an outcome that reports and documents them. Would you like to introduce yourself in a sentence or two?

Silvio (00:02:06) - First of all, thanks so much for having me. It’s nice to try to reflect a bit on many years of involvement in publishing. My name is Silvio Lorusso, I’m a designer by training, an artist, and more and more, an author. My involvement in publishing and experimental publishing has several branches, I started at the INC with an interest in researching business modelsprint-on-demand, which at the time was a new thing — you can imagine how many years ago we are speaking of. This led to a certain interest in the platformization of publishing, such as Amazon, Kindle, and systems of rights management. Then I did my PhD thesis in Venice on experimental publishing, which was focused on the artistic experiments around platformization and enclosure.

(00:03:40) - The main byproduct of that is still online, called references"Post-Digital Publishing Archive". I recently changed the code, so it doesn’t look like a shady website. I was also involved for a couple of years in an initiative called the referencesPublishing Lab, which was a series of collaborations with real-world partners in terms of creating publishing outputs.

Why: Politics of Publishing

Carolina (00:04:19) - It’s nice that you’ve mentioned your PhD project because our first question relates to that. In thinking of how you archive these post-digital publishing practices, looking back on it, what would you change now, what was missing, and what didn’t materialize in this archive, or in the way you built it?

Silvio (00:04:43) - That’s a really interesting question. It’s a very material question in the sense that it’s a question of time, because when you are doing a PhD, if you’re lucky, you have all the time in the world, meaning that you can dedicate a lot of time to the metadata. The part which I find very precious about the archive is the fact that it has a lot of detail in every project. fragility and stabilityThis is something that required a lot of time, a time that after the PhD, I couldn't afford anymore. This is something that in experimental publishing, in new modes of publishing, is always forgotten. You have to, somehow, bounce against a reality that is made of scarcity, scarcity of resources. expub The question of struggling comes at the same time with abandoning and exit. Is leaving the creative, publishing and artistic world a form of resistance, as it has been similarly framed in contemporay art with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Bas Jan Ader etc?

(00:05:49) - sustainability of workflowsOne mistake that is often made — I experienced it myself with other projects — is to reinvent the wheel, in imagining giant systems that would last forever.You can make a comparison with another archive that, from this point of view, was way more lean and in this sense, successful, which was the references"Library of the Printed Web", Paul Soullelis' work. You would buy the publication, since it was print-on-demand, take a couple of pictures and write just a little description. The archive was physical, and there were financial resources there, it was way easier to give a sense of coherence. workflowsAnother thing I would have done is connect it to a platform or a stable service, that exists beyond yourself. The perfect example would have been the referencesInternet Archive, and some archives are taking that strategy, for example, an Italian archive of radical publishing, which is called the referencesGrafton 9. The work is to upload it to a collection in the Internet Archive because you know that it will be safe, even if you don’t have the time or the resources to pay for the domain and so on.

Carolina (00:07:32) - Speaking of scarcity of resources: ahead of this conversation, we were also talking about the “Entreprecariat” book. We noticed how perhaps the scene, the labour and platforms have also changed since then. How do you see the role of small publishers like some of us here within this landscape?

Silvio (00:08:07) - I see it as crucial. traditional publishingThe point in which "Entreprecariat" and small independent publishing intersect is in the fact that making a book in the traditional sense, in a way that lasts, is distributed, has an ISBN, et cetera, is very difficult. The actors that are active in making this happen are very minimal. Especially for the kind of literature that I’m interested in both reading and writing, the options are small and they are becoming smaller. Currently, that’s my primary concern. I’m sorry if I take too long, but I think it’s a crucial point to articulate my understanding of expanded publishing. alternative practicesIn the past I've been mostly interested in the weird experimental EPUBs or booking a JPEG, booking a floppy disk, a super long form that is interactive and so on… Nowadays, it’s a bit of a disappointment that many of physical objectsthese experiments, after about 10 years, are completely forgotten unless there is someone who, again, converts them into the traditional book — by the way, that’s what happening, for example, with the book by Annette Gilbert that is coming out now for Spector Books, references"Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism".

So if that kind of publishing has a value — of course, it’s beautiful, it’s interesting, it shapes things — but at the same time, it has a degree of volatility, that is still a problem. So the point is, how to make a lasting publication? When I say lasting, I don’t mean necessarily something printed and solid, but unfortunately, it seems to me that that kind of authoritativeness that the printed distributed book, meaning physical objectsthe book that you find in a shop with an ISBN, is still something that people take seriously, more seriously than the long-form. I know it by experience. I wrote many long-form essays and blog posts that were mostly ignored and now, that they are bound in a printed book, they are taken seriously. So the experimental part nowadays for me, from my point of view as an author and someone who wants to read good stuff and write good stuff, is the question of sustainability. That is the part where that requires more experimentation, more than coming up with a new file format. In a way, I think the file format derives more from the sustainability issue.

Carolina (00:12:15) - Do you mean financial sustainability in this case?

Silvio (00:12:21) - Yes, and more. I mean, the way I see writing happening — writing, publishing, solidifying, crystallizing a series of ideas — is not just a matter of money. It’s a matter of other resources as well. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all about money, but you have to consider the aspect of creating time. Resources of time and access to books are always in negotiation with bigger institutions. workflowsThe triangle I see is: the author/practitioner/cultural producer; the small publisher/small institution, and then the big institution that somehow explicitly or implicitly, creates the space, even when it doesn't want to, to make the writing, the publishing, the magic happen.

How: Infrastructures of Publishing

Carolina (00:13:38) - You’re already kind of answering other questions that I had prepared, so you’re doing everything yourself, great! [laughs]. Do you see yourself operating within this triangle? And if so, do you have a specific workflow where you use the space of the blog to have that testing ground, let’s put it like that, to then go into the more “legitimizing” spaces?

Silvio (00:14:14) - It’s a matter of opportunities, in the sense that sometimes you think you need the timeliness of publishing it tomorrow. And of course, if you want that, you have to have this intermediation process where you publish on the blog. workflowsMy workflow, in a way, is based on this idea, a programming concept which is "release early, release often”.My idea of publishing as an author is never based on the final, definitive, monumental publication. I see everything as a sort of Polaroid of a publication to come, so there are various iterations of the same text, as a blog, as a journal paper, as a zine, as a book. And even as a book, it’s just a single artefact, just a snapshot in time of a constant thinking and researching process.

Carolina (00:15:52) - Just going back a little bit to the Infrastructures of Publishing that you find yourself in, how do you ensure or work towards a sustainable practice, whatever that might mean?

Silvio (00:16:17) - That’s the hard part. Broadly speaking, I think that event engagements are better paid than writing engagements. If everything is good, you are paid 500 euros for a 45-minute talk, and if it all goes well, you are paid the same amount to write an essay of many pages. So this doesn’t make any sense, right? This means that if you care about something other than the event, as a cultural organizer, as someone who has the chance to invite other people, you have to see that event, that thing that you organize, not just as a service that the speaker does, it’s not about the person coming to the stage. conditions of workYou're sustaining the practitioner's writing for other days. So how, as a cultural organizer, how can you facilitate this? Not creating burdens for the author, in the sense that you don't ask necessarily something new. You don't insist too much on the format of the slides. You don't ask too many meetings in advance. I have a text about this. I can send it to you. I have like a list with this.

Carolina (00:19:41) - We were talking about how, within this project, we’re also dealing with different realities, even being a European Union Funded project, Creative Europe, but we don’t experience a uniform Europe in the sense of the realities of small publishers and experimental publishing. You see a different reality in the Netherlands than you see in Italy or Greece, and I’m just pointing out the countries of this consortium. How have you experienced this as someone who has worked across these countries?

Silvio (00:20:25) - I’ve been involved mostly in the Netherlands, in Italy and now in Portugal. I have to say politicsI'm concerned because I think that somehow, even though I'm a bit critical of the way the funding structure is dealt with (especially when it comes to publishing in the Netherlands), the new political climate is not good.We have seen what’s happening to BAK and other institutions in the Netherlands, that’s not a good sign. That kind of limitation of funding will have repercussions throughout the continent. Nowadays I think that sustainability should be a sort of “international coming together” to defend the funding of the centre, of the core, because the core also affects, somehow and in a small way, the margin and the periphery. And this is interesting because in the past years, “the periphery”, so to speak, the margins, have rightly so developed a sort of pride in saying “we are autonomous, in terms of language, we don’t want to depend on and replicate the agendas of the rich European countries”. While makes sense, there is a worrying situation that is not just about single countries, but about Europe.

Who: Community of Publishing

Carolina (00:22:49) - Thank you. We’ve covered a little bit of the why you do what you do; how, within infrastructures of publishing, and just touching a bit more on the who, so the community or networks that you surround yourself with. I think Marta had a good example question: do you want to elaborate?

Marta (00:23:18) - Sure! It’s about the way one operates within a network of other publishers, authors, and designers, and if you see yourself being part of “a scene”, and if you participate in that, how that influences you or how you are critical of it. There’s an idea of the “post-individual” that’s developed by one of the speakers we’ll be talking to later, Yancey Strickler, and about moving away from the “genius” into the “scenius” and the value of community which can, on one side, influence the work positively, but sometimes it might be constricting. What’s your experience with this?

Silvio (00:24:17) - I have some ideas. I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to express them in the way I would like, but I will try. I will try to put it as bluntly as I can. Scenes exist, groups exist, conformation and other-than-individuals exist, but, at the end of the day, who is the actor that pays rent, that has to pay the bills, is an individual. In most cases, especially when it comes to writing, most people write as individuals. We shouldn’t forget the individual from a practical existence point of view. governance and ownershipI'm all for the idea of nourishing communities, but this shouldn't become a sort of romantic veil in front that hides the fact that, after all, this sustainability question is about individuals.This is even more clear nowadays if you consider that many of the association forms of the so-called “scene” — I would say that I belong to various groups of people — are very weak. communityCollectives are formed and destroyed in a couple of years. So, what is more substantial? I think that the individual wins, not because I like individuals or “the genius” idea, but simply because of a realist understanding of how practices work in this sense.

Discussion

Ilan (00:26:56) - Hi Silvio, thank you for joining us. I think that the question of struggling comes at the same time with considerations of abandoning and exiting both the creative world, the publishing industries, and all these ideas about communities. And I’m wondering if you see this abandonment as a form of resistance, as it has sometimes been framed in contemporary art. We know many examples of artists that decided to leave the art world and they are known as artists and their “finale furioso” somehow was abandoning the art world. I’m wondering if we could imagine a future like that, as a form of expanded publishing, a form of exiting the publishing world.

Silvio (00:27:45) - Wonderful reflection. I’m very much in this line of thought in the sense that I appreciate a lot of people who have taken on this kind of idea of abandonment, jumping ship not only from the art world but also from academia. governance and ownershipOne positive side of this is that many people have lost reverence towards institutions. They realize that in most ways they don't work. They don't work for them.Academia, for example, and I speak again from my experience, if you want to put down ideas, is the worst place. I’m not the first to say it. conditions of workSusan Sontag already said back in the day that the best writers of her generation were destroyed by academia.What’s the concrete reality of abandonment?

The people I’ve seen manage to cut ties with traditional institutions, when they manage, it’s an exceptional and somewhat uncertain path. I’m talking about people starting Patreon. But if you want to have a sustainable life with Patreon, you need to have an extremely huge user and fan base. And that also limits your output in the sense that the fan base, the people that will pay the five dollars every month, expect from you the same thing that you did the month before. So I think the most convincing negotiation between abandonment and staying, I found it in a book, which probably you all know, called references"The Undercommons". This idea that you stay in the institution because, to a certain extent, you cannot escape it completely, unless you are a superstar. conditions of workAnd you steal from the institution: you steal the tape, for instance. Of course, it's metaphorical, but you create spaces within the institution without reverence to the institution to pursue your goal. And why don't you feel guilty? You don't feel guilty because, after all, what you are doing is what you are paid for, to do research, to write, not to not to embark on managerial jobs.These are necessary things, but if they take 100% of your time, then better go to corporate, no?

Marta (00:30:59) - I had a question relating to what you mentioned earlier, about this sort of list of things not to burden the author. You were saying it’s a fictional piece? Can you tell us just a bit more about that? What we’re trying to learn about from the people we’re talking to are tools — as a very general term, not only software but also good practices in the world of publishing. So maybe seeing that as a tool, if you want to talk just a bit more about it?

Silvio (00:32:18) - It was a commission to do a book of fictional memos, the ones you have internally in a company. For example, Zuckerberg sending them to Meta. And my idea was to imagine a giant company that was called Culture Industry. I wanted to say, “Okay, from now on, we behave like this when we invite a guest”. So, for example, the first thing that I say is: “Let’s begin with the basics. From now on, you will relinquish the nasty habit of withholding the fee amount in the very first interaction with guests. Especially when the fee is symbolic. You won’t make them feel uncomfortable by asking at the bottom of the reply.” It’s not something that changes the world, this series of guidelines. emotional labourBut in the micro-economy of small gigs, this changes a lot. For example, when you have to chase payments, that takes hours in most of the production of what is published. And all that time, it's time stolen from content, from research, from ideas, from works.I hope this helps explain it better.

Ilan (00:34:23) - I think that’s a great practice. Fine-tuning the system so that you cut the corners of transactional friction by trying to reduce the moments where you have to respond to track payments, as you said. But I’m wondering, can we imagine something like really large strokes that would have an effect, a considerable impact for most cultural workers? I was wondering with your book, “Entreprecariat”, we feel that we are not only victims but also responsible for expanding and entertaining an abusive and exploitative system. Everybody probably has inflicted other people with abusive labor through assistance, through interns. So I’m wondering, is criticality enough? Being critical, is it enough? Or do we need a large stroke change in the way we relate with each other?

Silvio (00:35:34) - First of all, I thank you for having this reading of the book, which is not a common reading. What you say is true, it’s in the book. emotional labourAnd what I say in the book is that we are not just victims, we didn't just internalize the toxic activity. We need to consider ourselves partly responsible, otherwise, we don't believe in any kind of free will, in any kind of autonomy. This kind of take also derives from a consideration, based on direct and semi-direct experience, that small and medium artists/designers are worse actors than companies in terms of bad practices, and exploitation, and that’s scary. Criticality is not enough because criticality is not a tool of change. This is also explained in the book “The Undercommons”, criticality is a form of professionalization of institutional critique.

governance and ownershipInstitutional critique, to a certain extent, is paying homage to the institution, believing in its power and its value.And we go back to the fact that people don’t even take the time to write the institutional critique, because they don’t believe in its relevance anymore. I’m going to say something a bit controversial: I think that, to a certain extent, things that change, that have an effect, are based on something that traditionally has always been powerful — and that’s culpability. Generally, when you make the critical statement, you don’t mention names, you speak of the institution, you speak of the system, while a lot of examples of what you would call “call-out culture” ostracize the toxic actor. I can give you examples, such as the Excel sheets with terrible internship situations within the design world. And then the studio, even if it’s small, has to take action and say, “Hey, I’m going to change this and that”. communityShame is a powerful source of change, it acknowledges the partial autonomy of one of the actors. It's a dangerous path, but I think it could be useful in certain instances.

What: Future of Publishing

Carolina (00:38:56) - Thank you for that. I was hoping you would bring up some of those controversial statements you make. We are compiling these conversations as research into what experimental expanded publishing is now and what it can be in the future. We ask ourselves, can we ask about the future? What is the future? Can we imagine one or not? And some guests can answer it or not. But if you could define or expand on expanded publishing, what are the main urgencies that you see within publishing as an industry and its future?

Silvio (00:40:21) - I’m gonna try to say a few disclaimers which I think are important to point out. What I call publishing is not an industry, it’s a set of people who do other jobs for a living, put in a lot of effort and end up in a lucky position and manage to publish things. sustainability of workflowsI need to define what I'm talking about when I'm talking about publishing. You cannot call that an industry, you call it some like-minded, willing people. My clear concern is to have these people keep doing what they do without burning out. So that’s the mission for you, that’s very practical for me. For example, I read a paper or even an Instagram post by someone who I consider says something original that deserves development: how can I make that post happen in terms of budget, in terms of putting this person in contact with someone who has the structure to publish?

Not even to suggest the very idea of saying “This is more than a blog post, this is more than an Instagram post”. Facilitating, supporting. The problem is that language is consumed, and exhausted. The language that we have at our disposal to express this all goes under the umbrella of “care”. Care was like a tragic disease for the art world in the sense that it removed all the power from the notions of “helping out”. communityJust helping out, for example, is way better than caring for at this point given that the language has lost that power. The mission becomes helping out, helping yourself, being helped out and helping out. Now, the future. As I did with the industry, I need to make like a little parenthesis on the word future. The future is like care, it’s been manipulated too much. My view of the future is this: somehow, what we call the future futures, preferable futures, in our design field is a bit of an obsession. It’s a trap because it’s yet another way of calling the present. So, I wouldn’t spend too much time defining the future. I think that this urgency to think of the future is fabricated by extrinsic needs. It’s not our urgency to think of the future. Everywhere we look around, we are pushed to think of the future, we go to the cinema and we think of the future. You can call it future, helping out, wanting to call, wanting to have that small post into at least an essay, into something published. I don’t know. Call it the future. Call it present. I don’t care. Nowadays, future-orientedness wastes energy.

Carolina (00:45:19) - We’re trying to relate the idea of the future with urgency, while thinking of the future pushes away the actual urgency perhaps, or the needs that we have right now — for instance about people being able to do what they’re doing without burning out is something that we need right now. And it’s happening as we speak. Thank you for that.

Lorenzo (00:45:54) - I was intrigued by your observation about individuals and communities. And I somehow interpret my work (as a publisher) as a constant effort to build up a community. And of course, I agree with you when you say that a community is built up of several individuals. But I think at the end of the day, publishing is community-based, especially right now. Even the resilience of the traditional book is based on that. When you talk about the triangle of negotiations between the author or cultural producer, small institution, or big institution, is also based on that. So big institutions guarantee a community somehow. It’s not a question, it’s more about understanding if small institutions are independent, in the way they’re able to produce their own communities without negotiating with a bigger institution. I think that is crucial and is crucial for creating a consensus, but also to creating a sort of sustainability around the project. So I don’t know if you have something to add to that.

Silvio (00:47:46) - It’s really good that you say that, interviews scare and worry me because to pass a message, sometimes I sharpen it a bit too much, I make it too pointy. In writing, it wouldn’t be like this. Of course, I believe in the strength of these ties. It’s interesting to define what the publisher is because I consider myself a small publisher, a bit active in publishing in the sense that I have a little journal in the University where I teach, nothing that requires as many resources as what you all do. But it means trying to bring these people together, text editing, publishing, posting… you know it all.

alternative practicesWhat people appreciate of independent publishing (without going too much into this) is that kind of selfless, thankless job of putting the community in the front without that ego reward that the author gets. I think that an author, at one point, should also be active on that other side and communityit would be nice if every author would dedicate part of their time to do the less visible job of bringing to the front the work of the community, the intelligence of the community. Another point that comes to mind is that very often the publisher is an individual, literally an individual. For example, the publisher of my last book is an individual who has boxes in his house, so I think something is fascinating about the fact that it’s hard to imagine that behind the publisher, very often, there is just a very generous, very committed individual.

And for the occasion, I made a meme, ”All modern digital infrastructure”. And then you see: “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”. So I think there is a really strong analogy between the state of the internet, of the web, where a small library of NPCs crumbles down and all the websites shut down. And the cultural infrastructure, which is full of “the random person in Nebraska”, in Eindhoven, in Bari, thanklessly publishing. For me, reformulating the mission based on this is about how to take care, helping out this part, this little piece, and if you take this piece out, everything crumbles.

Ilan (00:53:02) - We were able to define the publisher. Let’s try to define community because it’s a word we use a lot. As a publisher, I try to understand who is buying the books and the image gets very complex. Because we see people buying books but they are not reading them. So what kind of community is this? It’s not a community of text, it’s a community probably… the support becomes something very abstract or very immaterial. I’ve been spamming everyone about this article that came out two months ago called “No One Buys Books”. Silvio, you probably read it and it’s a beauty. We’re making all this effort, we are discussing for hours, about print-on-demand, great paper or what the state of the image is printed with this kind of premium tier against the free version, etc. But then, in the end, you publish a thousand copies and you sell 200 and 20 people read the book.

(00:54:15) - My question is, if the community is based on something so immaterial, is publishing such an important part of the consolidating factor to continue to sustain? I understand Nero or Topovoros or whoever is this person in Nebraska, we understood the metaphor — every one of us is a person in Nebraska somehow. And I’m wondering if it stands on so little, then we need to understand better who are we addressing and if the means we are using to address them are sufficient and enough. That’s why projects such as this one have to do with the future of publishing, with the expanded use of publishing, because we are all in a panic attack somehow.

Silvio (00:55:07) - It’s a fantastic question. Do you want me to address it? It’s a question I have myself, I can say something about it.

Ilan (00:55:19) - Please improvise, we are sharing thoughts, it’s more of a brainstorming.

Silvio (00:55:20) - I don’t want to over-speak, but the way I see it, the problem with the word “community” I have is that it pushes a perspective of indistinction. A community is like this node, this big network of identical nodes, the community is like a graph — it looks like a graph when I imagine it and this is the marketing use of the term community. That’s why I would start by bringing forward other ways of conceptualizing this group of people. For example, from my point of view as an author, editor, very micro-publisher, the individual nodes are countable. The people I refer to as graphic designers, as authors, I could read their texts and they could read mine or publish them, you count them in two hands, maybe in four hands. They are both passive and active to a certain extent. My metaphor to imagine this group of people, first of all, comes from my point of view because it’s not replicable for any other actor, each one has their own. So words that I would use are, for instance, co-conspirators, as to avoid this relationship to the big institution; Or allies or even — this is a bit of a dangerous reference so take it with a grain of salt — individual anarchism, things like Stirner, the idea of a community of egoists in which the individual prevails, but is not alone because it has to find these like-minded people. Again, with a grain of salt, it’s not Ayn Rand I’m talking about.

communityBut some ways allow the node of the community to be conceptualized both as a passive receiver of the publication (a buyer in the marketing sense, who cares if they read the book or not), but also as someone active in reproducing the scene.To me, it’s a nice exercise to sit down as an author and say “Who is this group of like-minded people that I interact with?” Many are in this room, so I’m happy to participate exactly for this reason. It gets very simple when we get rid of certain mystical terms. And I think a lot is about getting rid of certain mysticism in order to understand the urgency. But I know that in consortia, you have this problem of having to come to an agreement and that takes a lot of time, right?

Lorenzo (00:59:09) - This morning we were talking with Clusterduck and they came out with an interesting thought that may be related to this theme: that the impact that collective imagination has on our reality is much stronger than any kind of technological device or disruptive device, so maybe we can define community in this sense. I mean, it’s a sort of collective power that can impact reality much more than any technology, any tools, any device. Even if I understand what you’re talking about, we refer to super small communities and I still believe in the power of this collective imagination. And somehow I think we are facing a moment in which we should help ourselves, but also defend ourselves from super powerful platforms or technologies that are impacting our reality, producing all sorts of weird visions or weird habits or behaviors. So I think the function of these small communities is also based on that.

Marta (01:01:00) - A way to maybe think of this concept of the squads or squad wealth from what I’ve personally seen, I think I may be part of communities, but when it comes to the practicalities, it’s the small group chat that gets stuff done, or it’s like two or three people. And while there might be a narrative of community, when it’s operationalized it’s a few people sitting at a table or a few people speaking in a group chat. In a sense, that similar understanding of the bigger narrative of what a community is and then the practice of it, that’s much more peer-to-peer individual allies or co-conspirators, which is quite interesting. Maybe we want to move towards a conclusion. I don’t know if you still want to reply to this last intervention, Silvio, before we wrap up.

Silvio (01:02:16) - Of course, I was following the development of those concepts such as squad wealth. I think some things upset me about that formulation, while others were saying something similar to this idea of the individual still being part of the community. What annoyed me there was the depiction of the institutionalized person. In the text, if I remember well, there was a meme depicting the person who works for the institution as a “wage cuck”. You know, like a cuckold. That annoyed me. First of all, because I am one [person that works for the institution], and also it doesn’t acknowledge this dynamic of being inside, which to a certain extent, is going to be true. If it’s not true, it’s very hard to survive without that “wage cuckness” sort of thing. I would be very curious to see what’s the state of this squad now, in terms of who got the professorship, who started this and that, without any envy or jealousy, but just to check the validity of the theory, because after all, they were like institutionalizing themselves by that.

But the part that I liked was exactly this kind of sort of tactical carelessness and not reverence, to use what’s out there, this full bricoleur attitude, by any means necessary, that part was nice. So I think it’s a good reference to at least try to go out of the term of the more classical terms like scene or community. In the Netherlands, a good work in this sense has been done by Pascal Gielen, a sociologist who wrote an article on what “scene” means or the visibility issue of that part, which I think could be interesting from the publishing point of view. The book is called references"The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude".

Carolina (01:05:04) - Good reference, thank you. We’re also writing all of this and working on our forms of expanded publishing from these conversations and reports. We’ll also be able to update you on that. I think we’ll wrap up for now, this was a great conversation so thank you again for joining and offering your points of view and new words, we’ll keep in touch with you.

Silvio (01:05:45) - Thanks so much. It was really nice to discuss this and I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of new imagination you develop. Keep me posted!

Note: Silvio worte about this conversation from his own perspective, read it here: https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/one-finds-comrades-to-publish/

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4 July 2024, 12 PM

Introductions

**Marta (00:02:09) - 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. **

Lorenzo (00:03:24) - 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.

Marcela (00:04:32) - Hello, I’m Marcela, producer and co-founder of Aksioma together with Janez.

Illan (00:04:38) - I’m Ilaan, 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.

Tommaso (00:05:46) - 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

Carolina (00:06:55) - 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?

Dušan (00:07:40) - 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. In 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 Corridor, every few months. It 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. Suddenly, 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 Network 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, which made me realise that they need to 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. Institutions 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.

Carolina (00:17:08) - 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?

Dušan (00:18:24) - In a way, print 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. People 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. For a few years, I viewed the web as five 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. Maybe 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

Carolina (00:25:43) - 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?

Dušan (00:26:50) - 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 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 of articles about shared 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 shared 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 Anna’s text.

Carolina (00:34:30) 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.

Dušan (00:35:04) - 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

**Carolina (00:35:44) - 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? **

Dušan (00:36:43) - 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 the VR2 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. We 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. If 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. There are lots of different committees 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

**Carolina (00:42:30) - 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? **

Lorenzo (00:42:57) - 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.

Dušan (00:43:33) - 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, Media Lab in Wroclaw 2004 and the first users were members of this place. Even if 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.

Ilan (00:49:11) - 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 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?

Dušan (00:49:21) - 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.

Lorenzo (00:54:08) - 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?

Dušan (00:54:49) - 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. They 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, 98% of 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 is just a way to help.

Tommaso (01:00:13) - 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, Genesis and See Up. 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?

Dušan (01:02:34) - 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. I think it’s ethically and also 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 Blog. On the day of the book launch, they gave me a USB stick, I put it on Monoskop Blog and that was the first day the book was published. He did the same with these new books with MIT Press, but it’s open access, and I th

ink 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.

Janez (01:08:04) - 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.

Dušan (01:08:18) - Yes, especially on the Monoskop blog, 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.

Ilan (01:08:53) - 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?

Dušan (01:09:25) - 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.

Ilan (01:09:49) - 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.

Dušan (01:11:18) - 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 Geoff Cox, 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

Carolina (01:13:45) - 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?

Dušan (01:14:23) - 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 (https://webarchive.multiplace.org/artdocweb/) 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 vex 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.

Carolina (01:17:47) - 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.

Dušan (01:18:45) - Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

None

Geoff

(00:02:45)

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) [https://www.centreforthestudyof.net/]. 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.

Marta (00:05:14)

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.

Geoff (00:05:35)

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.

Marta (00:06:28)

How come, if I can ask?

Geoff (00:06:30)

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) [https://www.sternberg-press.com/series/the-contemporary-condition-series/], is a book series with (Sternberg Press) [https://www.sternberg-press.com/], and another is called (Data Browser) [https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/data-browser/], which is with (Open Humanities Press) [https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/]. 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.

Marta (00:08:30)

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?

Geoff (00:09:03)

[[workflows | 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. 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. ]]

[[tools | I could also talk about software. Varia and other collectives are using an adaptation of a MediaWiki that I also use. Hackers and designers, I think, have used something very similar. Then 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. The 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 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. We 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.]]

Marta (00:13:41)

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?

Geoff (00:14:06)

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.

**Marta (00:15:24) **

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?

Geoff (00:15:29)

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.

**Marta (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.

Geoff (00:19:00)

[[sustainability of workflows | It’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.]]

Marta (00:20:20)

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?

Geoff (00:20:47)

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.

Marta (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?

Geoff (00:22:27)

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.

Marta (00:23:56)

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?

Geoff (00:24:19)

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.

Ilan (00:25:46)

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?

Geoff (00:26:36)

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.

**Ilan (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?

Geoff (00:30:02)

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.

**Lorenzo (00:32:39) **

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?

Geoff (00:33:47)

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.

Lorenzo (00:35:02)

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.

Geoff (00:36:37)

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.

Lorenzo (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?

Geoff (00:38:45)

[[digital objects | [[physical objects | My interest in that is more conceptual, so this project (ServPub) [https://servpub.net/] is 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/], which 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. You 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.

Ilan (00:42:19)

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.

Geoff (00:44:27)

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.

print on demandIlan (00:44:43) ** Just to add something here, print-on-demand is one option, but what happens, when we do the printings, is that we do offset, we only change the cover, and then send the books to different countries with a marginal cost again. I mean, it's logistics, and shipping. So, offset is a technology that scales, right? So the more you print, the less it costs. So, the more partners you can find, the better the product can survive in their local markets.** Geoff (00:45:21) 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.

Ilan (00:47:02)

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.

physical objects[[digital objects | Geoff (00:48:16) This 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. Also 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.]]

**Tommaso (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.

Geoff (00:52:25)

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.

Tommaso (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?

Geoff (00:56:09)

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.

**Lorenzo (00:57:16) **

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.

Geoff (00:58:26)

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.

**Marta (00:59:04) **

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?

Geoff (00:59:54)

traditional publishingWell, 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.

**Tommaso (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.

Geoff (01:04:56)

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.

Tommaso (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.

Geoff (01:07:41)

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 Singh, 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? The 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.

Tommaso (01:09:01)

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.

Geoff (01:09:51)

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 style essay as well on poor images, you know, and think about what poor publishing would look like.

Marta (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.

Geoff (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.

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Marta (00:00:00) - 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.

Lorenzo (00:00:52) - 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.

Janez (00:01:54) - 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.

Ilan (00:03:00) - 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.

Tommaso (00:03:35) - Hi, I’m behind the scenes. I’m Tommaso and we know each other already.

Marta (00:03:54) - 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.

Carolina (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?

Gijs (00:05:58) - 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.

Carolina (00:09:16) - 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?

Gijs (00:10:09) - 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.

Carolina (00:12:25) - 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?

Gijs (00:13:44) - 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.

Carolina (00:15:04) - 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?

Gijs (00:15:56) - 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.

Carolina (00:18:43) - 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.

Gijs (00:19:04) - 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.

Carolina (00:20:34) - 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.

Gijs (00:21:36) - 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.

Carolina (00:23:40) - 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?

Gijs (00:24:49) - 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.

Carolina (00:26:05) - 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.

Tommaso (00:26:53) - 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?

Gijs (00:29:23) - 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.

Tommaso (00:37:32) - 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?

Gijs (00:40:28) - 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 stat

ic 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.

Ilan (00:44:34) - 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?

Gijs (00:46:04) - 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.

Ilan (00:49:34) - 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.

Gijs (00:51:52) - 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.

Carolina (00:54:52) - 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?

Gijs (00:57:11) - 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.

Carolina (00:58:37) - That makes sense. It’s also important that someone is thinking about structure, we can’t all be thinking about outcomes.

Gijs (00:58:46) - 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.

Janez (01:01:29) - 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.

Gijs (01:06:20) - 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.

Tommaso (01:10:16) - 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.

Gijs (01:13:03) - 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.

Tommaso (01:16:13) - 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.

Gijs (01:16:59) - 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.

Carolina (01:19:15) - 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…

Gijs (01:20:56) - 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 and I 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.

Carolina (01:25:15) - 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.

Gijs (01:26:25) - Thank you for the invitation, for taking the time and for the thoughtful questions.

None

Carolina (00:00:00) - 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?

Irene (00:00:45) - Before going into more specific politics, I always tell how and why I started Errant. I have a background in visual art; I did Art Academy and Art History. I was working as a curator or, rather, artistic director at an art space, making exhibitions. This format of telling a story at an exhibition is unsatisfactory because I’ve always been interested in combining different voices and non-art objects or voices. The White Cube or any art space diminishes this difference: when you enter an art space, you look at everything in the same way, when you put something that is not an artwork in an art space, it becomes an artwork (also thanks to Marcel Duchamp, of course).

In combining art with activist voices, I have also worked with voices that just speak from experience; I find that it’s troubling. At the time, I was reading Édouard Glissant, and he writes a lot about sameness and difference in multiple ways, about how Western culture — or culture in general — can diminish difference and work towards sameness, which is very destructive. So, I stopped working as an artistic director, and I’ve always liked publications. I also used to work as a journalist and always made publications together with 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. Saying that the Errant Journal is also like an exhibition also got me into trouble because I was rejected. Well, I’ve been rejected for funding many, many times. One of them happened early in the beginning when I said Errant Journal is like an exhibition. And they were like, no, it’s not. So I thought about it and realised that for many people, an exhibition is maybe a collection of images - something that is visual. For me, an exhibition is something that tells a story and also tells a story from different perspectives. So I thought that was a funny experience, sometimes you learn a lot from rejections.

Carolina (00:03:59) - You already mentioned a few inspirations or references that guide your practice, namely Glissant with “Poetics of Relation” and the sort of idea of opacity, perhaps. What other references, materials or theories inspire your publishing practice?

Irene (00:04:24) - 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 — her book, “Potential History”, speaks a lot. 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. But 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. So I find that very 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. So, I really like that format.

Carolina (00:05:53) - 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?

Irene (00:06:52) - 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. The bigger the space is, the more limiting it is. One of the things that constantly frustrated me was that when we didn’t have the budget, we still needed to fill the space, which forced artists to work for nothing. This is the kind of situation that is giving me burnout, thinking how ridiculous it is to have to perform for the funders.

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. I also made sure that we are not publishing periodically, we publish whenever the hell we are 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’re also able to 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 in Nigeria 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, about which the last issue was also delayed because someone was trying to get their family members from Gaza. I’m trying to set up an organization that can make space for people’s lives, people’s problems that are often connected to geopolitical problems, to the problems and the issues that we try to discuss so that the actual work is not removed or cut off from the actual lives and work of people I work with. That is very important, and then, of course, we are a journal, so we now have set up a subscription model. This subscription model is not periodical, that was a bit of a puzzle to find out, as how can you get people to pay for a subscription when it’s not periodical, so maybe one year there won’t be an issue for whatever reason. Do you want to know more about how I work with the actual contributions or with editing?

Carolina (00:11:00) - 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?

Irene (00:11:40) - 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 —, now I have someone who told me that they would not be able to write, and it’s a very private and personal story, which of course I will not go into, but I’m very happy that people are coming forward with that. It’s a very important and delicate relationship, and in that sense, I don’t have any tools besides that. I used to be an editor for different magazines, and I’ve worked with someone over email for two years I never realised that they were 30 years older than I thought, or they were even a different gender, I just never put one and one together. And I think in the work that I do, that just cannot happen, so I have conversations with people in real life, if possible, but mostly over Zoom.

It is also important how I was educated as an editor: there was a mantra for the first magazine I worked for that the editor is always right. Even if the editor is wrong, the editor is still right because you’re the publication’s guide. In this day and age, that might still be true for academic papers. However, from my point of view and politically from Errant Journal, that is insane and ridiculous. I try to create an atmosphere where I let the contributors know that they should push back, and then I get nice pushbacks when correcting texts. There was one text by a Taiwanese writer. We were correcting her English, and she said, “But that’s not the way you say it in Chinese.” It’s very important to leave idiosyncrasies in text, and the basis of that is a personal relation where someone doesn’t feel like they’re talking to a boss.

Carolina (00:14:43) - And, if I’m not mistaken, you’re based in Berlin now, right?

Irene (00:14:51) - The magazine is officially based in Amsterdam, but I am personally based in Berlin.

Carolina (00:14:56) - I remember last time we had a conversation, you talked a lot about the decolonial position that Errant Journal takes and the way you contribute to people from the Global South by providing that platform. 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?

Irene (00:15:34) - I’m very much aware that my position is still that of a Western white academic, so it is about constantly challenging myself. 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. That is fantastic because I’m learning a lot from how they are approaching the editing. Yesterday, I was looking at another magazine that I didn’t know yet. I think that there are a lot of magazines out there that say that they’re giving space to other voices, but it always does give me a bit of the “ick”. I hope Errant Journal doesn’t do that, but it might for some, and I get that as well.

One of the problems that I see often 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. From the beginning, it’s always been very important to pay people, and that’s one of the main focuses when trying to reach other voices.

Carolina (00:18:21) - 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?

Irene (00:19:01) - That’s also funny — from the start, I also find it strange that organisations are always 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, because 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, I cannot count on a certain income. This has been a reason why I’ve been rejected, for not having the right business model. I find that very funny because, again, the way we work and the way we live are very pulled apart. Because I’ve been living like this for 20 years, I can look ahead for a few months, but not more than that. So when I’m starting an organization, it has no overhead, no buildings, and no staff from the beginning. Yet I’m still expected to make a 10-year projection. So because of this, we have received many rejections in the beginning. A friend once said that Errant Journal won’t last because we don’t have a good business model. And 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.

There are other things that I do, the podcast, for example. I’m also working on Open Access now, which I can do without any funding. There are no costs except for the authors, and of course, I do have income from advertising and sales. But again, I’ve been living, and any freelancer that I know, and any artist I know, lives like this for decades. When I registered myself as a freelancer back in 2001, the guy at the tax office said artists are funny because they never actually 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 work.

Carolina (00:21:56) - I imagine that you can find other ways to sustain this practice by not having a very strict deadline.

Irene (00:22:11) - Yes, but I don’t know if you’re also a freelancer, but you could meet someone tomorrow who comes saying they have a pocket of money and that we should collaborate and maybe we can. 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’s been sustaining me for 20 years.

Carolina (00:22:35) - 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?

Irene (00:23:17) -Sometimes I get questions such as “How did you find this or that writer?” It’s not the only way, but one way that this may be unusual is that I will remember something that I read 15 years ago, and I will just go look for a person. I think 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. It’s very fun to Google and see the images. It’s one of the many islands that is sinking; it’s a group of atolls, and it’s not just one island sinking through because of the rise of sea level. I think the total population of this country is 11,000, and they’re on tiny strips of sand in the middle of nowhere while sinking.

Somehow, this just grabs my mind, coming from art, there’s so much to say there. 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 willing to write, who has experience writing, who has good internet access, all these things. 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. And I started writing via Facebook Messenger, and at some point, I got an email from the same person that didn’t reply to me. He said, “You must really want me to write because you’ve now emailed me through three different organisations” — it turned out he worked for all of them, and these are all very small organizations, so he was getting the emails. So that was quite funny. I said, “Yes, I really do want you to write for me”. So, that’s one way I’m just spamming the hell out of people. Other ways now, when the network is growing, it’s also through referrals. We have an open call, although open calls are also very flawed, but I’m still using them.

Carolina (00:26:17) - Can you expand on the flaws of the open call?

Irene (00:26:29) -The space I ran before was also a residency, and we had an open call. Again, you’re looking for other voices. In art, one of the things that they like to say is that they are looking for experimental things, which are never experimental. I find it very strange that installation art is still called experimental. I mean, it’s been around for 30-40 years, so what’s experimental about that? When you do an open call, 99% will be white, in northern-western Europe and the same kind of art. I find it very problematic. I see other organizations doing open calls, and they spread the call widely and then use the amount of people that respond as a sort of marketing tool. Like, “Look, we had 700 people reply”, which I find very odd. When we have the open call, I hardly promote it at all because I don’t want quantity, I want quality. I’m trying to find a place where I hope to find people that I’m actually interested in. The process of announcing open calls is hard because you pour your heart out, and then you get a rejection, so I make the threshold very, very low, I just ask for a proposal of 300 words, and I sometimes say it’s basically an email. I need you to send me an email with your idea, that’s it, and a few references and a bio and that’s it. 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.

Carolina (00:29:19) - I always think it’s also about balancing between the pen calls and the invitations because inviting also keeps you within your frames of reference.

Irene (00:29:33) - That’s exactly why I still do it through the open call, 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. I try to keep it as simple as possible for the people that are applying.

Carolina (00:30:14) - 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?

Irene (00:30:50) - Well, definitely, I think this is important. I’ve been told that sometimes people can be intimidated by me, which I find very sad and 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. I have a certain view on things that come from my background so if you have another view, I’ll never know if you’re gonna pretend that I’m right. I’ve been working with Ghiwa from Kohl and they’re doing writing circles and making their journal collectively. I have always been a bit of a loner, but working collectively is something that I am definitely considering for myself. I have to be honest, groups kind of freak me out. I think making publications is the world of introverts, but I also talk to people who also do translations collectively and I think that is a very good way to think about publishing together. And I think the outcomes of that are also very, very interesting.

Carolina (00:32:53) - 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.

Irene (00:33:12) - Before I started Errant, I realised I had to be part of book fairs. I hate fairs, and those are horror situations for me but I realised 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 realised, it’s great because you can sit somewhere for three days, and no one actually talks to you, because you’re all introverts. I might have two conversations over the weekend, which is perfect.

Carolina (00:33:48) - 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?

Irene (00:33:50) - 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.

Carolina (00:33:52) - Some positive reinforcement, too.

Irene (00:33:52) - 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. One of the first rejections I had put the focus on the kind of audience I reach, saying it wouldn’t be interesting for academics.

Carolina (00:41:34) - It can always be surprising. 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.

Janis (00:41:36) - 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?

Irene (00:41:56) - 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 now. Obviously, there are some limitations that have always 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. At some point with White Cube, there were a few exhibitions where I tried things, and in my eyes, I felt miserable. I was so unhappy; people were saying, “oh, it’s a nice exhibition”, and I was thinking, “ugh, it’s another nice exhibition”. It was completely unsatisfactory. So, I do not have the same feeling yet and we are also doing fun things that might be unusual. I am absolutely a book fetishist. The material and the paper are always important to me. And I always tried 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 disappear. I work with Mediamatic in Amsterdam, which has an olfactory studio to add smell. I think this is also about how we communicate language and a story. I am really happy to add the smell to this because it’s a very subversive way of saying or doing something. I have not advertised the smell a lot because people were 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!”. During the book fair last year, I saw

someone at the booth next to me, smelling all the books. I knew that the smell was coming from Errant Journal. So, if we are talking about expanded publishing, this is a fun way for me.

Lorenzo (00:44:12) - 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?

Irene (00:44:43) - If you really want to support Errant Journal, please subscribe. I’m kind of amazed with how steady our income is because we only have 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 so I’m already seeing some developments. Of those 44 subscribers, 11 of them are universities, and they pay a lot more. When I was getting all those rejections, I had a feeling that there was nothing to see. In the meantime, there have been organisations that are supporting Errant Journal, like the CCA in Montreal, Canada. Never been there, never met those people in person and yet they put money into each issue. If I lose one partner, the next phone call I’m going to make is to the CCA, they have a great program and are a really nice organisation. So, in terms of growth, these chance encounters or collaborations are created as you keep going. Other organizations have already expressed their wish to collaborate but I try to be as independent as possible. It’s always a balance between money that people can offer and my independence. I’ve been very surprised, actually, at how much revenue I can get from advertising. The first budget that I made, the income from that was very low. I was wrong about that, the only way I found that out was by trying it. So, I don’t think these models are fragile, we have been taught to think in a very neoliberal, capitalist way. As you were talking, I was also thinking banks are usually not considered precarious or fragile, 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.

Marta (00:47:27) - 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?

Irene (00:49:28) - Yeah, there is growth, the sales of Errant are going well. 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. I 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, sometimes you want to get more experience, 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 organisations work with interns and it’s 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.

Tommaso (00:52:38) - 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”.

Irene (00:54:08) - 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. I 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. It was within the research they were already working on, so it made sense from all angles. Then there was an issue with this piece, and I asked myself, “Should I edit this?” So, you can let the artist or the contributors lead. I also have a wonderful designer who is very good at thinking. Sometimes, the limitation is cost. I hate to be the one, but sometimes I do have to say, “I’m sorry guys, we cannot do this, we cannot spend X amount of money just for this one page.” When something doesn’t work because of cost, it does play in my mind and maybe later on, I might think about doing it.

Thank you for mentioning “Subversive Publishing”. That was a commission from Framer Framed to me as a person, but all the work in there comes from Errant Journal. There is a collection of so-called limitations, but they are not limitations, they are just the things that you come across that make you think about how to deal with them, especially with the background of politics and decolonial ways of thinking. I ask for the rights, or either rights-free images, I do a lot of research for that, but 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. Fuck them, no way. But, of course, they can fuck me up as well. Redrawing something is a very lovely way of circumventing restrictions. That is inspired by Sarah Ahmed’s way of citation. I also have written texts where I’ve only cited female writers because it’s a habit to always go to the same people, and I’m doing it, and everyone’s doing that. It’s not like those male white thinkers were 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. Citation is very important. Sarah Ahmed wrote a very cool essay on her blog about how citation works within knowledge creation and publication. (https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/) I thought it was very interesting. 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 because Errant is very themed and overarching. I hope to do that next year.

Lorenzo (00:59:04) - Since we’re talking about Hispanic publishing, 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.

Irene (01:03:11) - 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. I had a 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.” I thought, “Okay, that’s good.” So that’s how the podcast started, because I felt like I was sitting at home anyway, so 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. So this series on adversity, like I said, is an example that I come across, and it makes me want to know more. I’ve had a lot of positive responses from this first publishing booklet, along with some critique of people who felt that things were missing, so this is a great starting point.

After this, I want to revamp the entire website: I built the website myself by googling codes, which can be done, but it’s time-consuming if you don’t know how to write code yourself. Now, it’s also falling apart a little bit. It’s really “houtje toutje”, as Dutch people say, you put things together with strings and elastic band and hope it will hold. So this is also another practical reason I’m looking into applying for funding. As funders don’t like to just pay for technical things, you have to make up some content, and the content is there. I don’t know if that answers your questions. As for the public events, like I said, I don’t really like doing public events. I just cancelled one also because, in my many years of doing public events, I decided that I don’t want to talk if I don’t feel I have something to say. I could sell Errant and get more subscribers at that public event, but I didn’t feel I had anything to say at that moment because I was very concerned with other things. I didn’t want to just sell my magazine at that moment, so I cancelled it. This is also something funders don’t like to hear.

Carolina (01:03:35) - 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.

Irene (01:03:36) - 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. Please do not distribute, which is incredibly polluting.

Janez (01:04:01) - 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. When I come to Berlin, I make sure I pay a visit to you. 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 organisation 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? Or, in the case of the Chinese author, you accepted her claim or their claim to respect that form of English. 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?

Irene (01:08:09) - I want to get back to the topic of the booklet on Subversive Publishing because there are two, I also try to make it as a manifesto. The centrefold has 20 points to consider if you’re publishing subversively. One of the points I want to make here is to consider not publishing. This came up very often since publishing the booklet, I’ve also heard many people saying that this was a really good point - consider not to publish. 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. Another part of the manifesto was also to enjoy it. 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 learned to press pause just now. My business structure allows for that because there is no pressure of time. I do it for others, but I also do it for myself — I press pause. I also have such conversations with the designer, saying I’m not enjoying myself anymore, we need to take a break. So this is the way I try to 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 organisation, 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.

Carolina (01:09:12) - 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?

Irene (01:10:26) - 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. However, 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 organise 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.

Carolina (01:12:54) - 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.

None

**Marta (00:14:27) **

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.

Kenneth (00:15:14)

Okay. So, 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. I 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 I’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.

Marta (00:17:42)

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?

Kenneth (00:18:51)

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: the 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. So it’s real Stasi era shit. I was like, wow, I mean, I also really do think that (Zuboff’s book) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

Marta (00:21:06)

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.

Kenneth (00:21:33)

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.

Marta (00:22:12)

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?

Kenneth (00:22:32)

Well, 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.

Marta (00:23:44) - Yeah, I mean, 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.

Kenneth (00:24:10)

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. How 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.

Ilan (00:26:45)

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. I know you are right now in the Adriatic coast, this doesn’t look like your Manhattan loft, obviously. You’re in a place where you can develop some negativity. 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.

Kenneth (00:28:39)

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 that, that cannot, as you’re saying, Ilan, 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.

So, as for Yugoslavia, I can’t really read the culture well, because of my language, obviously, I don’t speak any Croatian, and my Italian is shitty, where I’m in an Italian speaking part here. My Italian is shitty enough that I actually lose nuance, I’m okay, practically speaking. But for me, just 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, because I love you, all of you. I love Nero and I love you, Ilan. We’re just friends here. I’ve just taken a break. I signed off my email. 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. I have to have my university email for my job when I get back. But the stuff where all things come in, that’s kind of dead. 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. It’s just an agricultural environment of winemaking and olive oil producing. 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 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. I kind of 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.

**Ilan (00:35:10) **

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.

Kenneth (00:36:22)

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, for me? I mean, it really doesn’t matter. Who the fuck cares? Younger people have to publish. I think that’s the imperative of publishing, right? To get your tenure, even for your own status, even for your own sort of self-worth, your trajectory, like who the fuck am I? 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, you know, 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 I 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 John Cage said something like, somebody had asked him, so what’s gonna happen to your reputation after you 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. You 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.

Ilan (00:42:02)

But at the same time, Kenny, 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 thinkership 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.

Kenneth (00:42:36)

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, but your actual books that I have are the most valuable things I own. They’re great to think about, when I show them to people, they freak out. I mean, you started publishing with Jean Bois at that time. I showed David your books and I could tell him about it, but wow, when he saw them, he was like, okay, this is incredible. You know, it’s both ways, right? So, your books are propulsive in thinking, but they’re also extraordinary in their physical presence. 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 or some shit like that. 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 the fashion things that I can’t remember the name of the fashion company, did you know, which is just those incredible sleek, (sequined cover of FUORI!!!) [https://www.gucci.com/ch/it/st/stories/article/gucci-twinsburg-fashion-show-details]. I was like, oh fuck, this is great. So 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.

Ilan (00:45:33)

Sorry, I don’t want to monopolize the discussion, but I am. I want to come back to the thing that you said about Trump. You know, that the way Trump used Twitter has been developed or nurtured to be artistic avant-garde. So he took the means of art and he made politics out of it. Similarly, I’m expecting Biden to do that. The debate between Biden and Trump was so pathetic, Biden felt like some sort of poet, in a Dadaist way. I’m sure there’s a lot of poets doing this kind of work and I’m wondering, we are some sort of sandbox, making tools for politicians to use later and to dominate the planet. If we understand the role of artists as a laboratory for global governance, then there’s a renewed interest and creativity again, in all the sports. I mean that’s beautiful and I think the hope is that the work we’re doing is channeled and seeps through in different ways.

Kenneth (00:47:03)

It’s some useful, extraordinarily perverse and I believe that. I didn’t think about the Biden thing and I, fortunately, I’m here, I didn’t see any of it, which I’m so thankful for, and I’m actually going to be here on Election Day in the US, which I’m really thankful for. We can reframe them, but it gets sticky, because it gets back to Marinetti and Mussolini, and the Francesco- they were at Bono Ragazzi’s the other day- were telling me that there’s some right-wing figure, a cultural figure that keeps citing futurism. I can’t remember the name, maybe you guys know the name of that person that he’s thinking about. They’re talking all about futurism all the time. Then there’s also the real problem, like CasaPound in Italy, which is, like, fuck. As a Jew, I’ve always had some problems with Pound, but he was just fucking crazy, like so many artists are, just a crazy guy, brilliant artist, crazy man. I forgive him. Allen Ginsberg, the biggest Jew of all time, went to visit Pound, I think in Rapallo, and got Pound to admit that his antisemitism was “suburban” right, I mean, the guy was out of his mind, clearly. So if Ginsberg could forgive Pound, I can forgive Pound, but then when I see shit like CasaPound, it really blows my mind. So this is where the opposite side is of what you’re talking about, Ilan, where it’s propulsive and perverse and sort of funny. Do you think the CasaPound followers actually read the cantos? That can’t be. Can you Italian people tell me if those young fascists of Italy are actually reading the cantos?

So, what the fuck? So the Pound is just some great fascist proponent, anti-Semite to them? Dinunzio keeps coming up, So there’s this thing between Pound, Dinunzio, and Marinetti, and the fun part begins to fall off a little bit and gets me scared, I think.

Marta (00:50:12)

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?

Kenneth (00:50:57)

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. So I find my community marginalized, de-platformed, it doesn’t have a voice. That’s really, really been hard and discouraging, but I think it got swept out in a tidal wave of populism. So yeah, it feels extraordinary. 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.

Marta (00:53:05)

What about the community of readers then? Do you see that, with the rise of populism or social media, or whatever, how has that affected readership and the extent to which you can connect to it maybe in a more direct way?

Kenneth (00:53:26)

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 the fuck 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.

**Marta (00:56:05) **

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?

Kenneth (00:57:20)

I 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. Anyway, it’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. It was like what Ilan was talking about, 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. It’s kind of like, sometimes 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 fucking crazy beards, and what do you fucking 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.

Ilan (01:01:00)

So Kenny, you’re like 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?

Kenneth (01:01:45)

I mean, around uncreative writing, I talked a lot about, or no, maybe it was around the book called Wasting Time on the Internet. That’s right. It was a book that 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, but there were still some good things there. 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. 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], so I don’t know if you’re talking to Marcell, but he runs (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.

Ilan (01:06:29)

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, Kenny, 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.

Kenneth (01:08:01)

Well, I see so little good stuff. I mean, your AI comic book is genius, totally genius. I love that book so much.

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. I said, you know, come on. I mean, 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. They 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 fucking pencil, and Mid Journey could not do it. It kept putting like a finger on the end of the eraser. It couldn’t make a fucking 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 the fuck 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.

**Marta (01:13:14) **

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?

Kenneth (01:13:56)

I mean, 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) [https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html], 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”. 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. That’s good, it’s still good. Then something else will happen where that changes again. So I just think that a vision like Nero is so beautiful. I’m really also curious about you guys in Ljubljana because I’m just outside of Trieste here. So I’m going to come see you in Ljubljana and see what you’re doing there.

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.

Tommaso (01:19:26)

**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? **

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

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.

Kenneth (01:22:27)

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. So Marcel is much more the person to talk to about that than myself.

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

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.

None

Thomas (00:03:59)

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 Petsch from the University of Tromso and Sheyda Kurt. She is an author, who wrote two bestsellers and also is a journalist and moderator of different panels. She 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.

Marta (00:05:59)

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?

Thomas (00:06:26)

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.

Marta (00:08:47)

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?

Thomas (00:09:18)

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.

Marta (00:11:05)

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.

Thomas (00:11:53)

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 Petsch is working in Norway, as I already said, and she’s the oldest among us. She has numerous publications in media studies, Shadow Court. She is also 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.

Marta (00:15:42)

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?

Thomas (00:16:07)

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.

Marta (00:17:33)

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?

Thomas (00:18:05)

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.

Marta (00:19:48)

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?

Thomas (00:20:24)

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.

Marta (00:23:02)

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?

Thomas (00:23:58)

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.

Marta (00:25:41)

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.

Thomas (00:26:26)

Yeah, that’s interesting to see it as a way of publishing.

Marta (00:26:30)

Very expanded idea of publishing here.

Thomas (00:26:34)

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.

Lorenzo (00:29:30)

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.

Thomas (00:31:26)

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.

Lorenzo (00:35:03)

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.

Thomas (00:36:11)

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.

Marta (00:37:35)

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.

Thomas (00:38:29)

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.

Marta (00:40:46) - 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.

Janez (00:42:47)

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?

Lorenzo (00:44:08) - 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?

Thomas (00:44:38)

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. 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.

Lorenzo (00:46:24)

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.

Thomas (00:47:48)

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.

Lorenzo (00:50:22)

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.

Thomas (00:51:49)

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.

Tommaso (00:53:41)

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?

Thomas (00:57:16)

I’m also thinking at the moment. 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?

Tommaso (00:59:32)

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?

Thomas (00:59:53)

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.

Marta (01:00:45)

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?

Thomas (01:01:48)

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.

None

Expub

Your work has touched a lot of different parts of the publishing industry. Could give a bit of an introduction to your work. What is your practice at the moment and what have you worked on in the past?

Yancey (00:00:25)

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. 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.

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. One is creating a physical book built around the Dark Forest Theory piece, 11 pieces together, 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.

Then the second piece that’s the main focus of my energy these days is a project called MetaLabel, which 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 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. In the project of MetaLabel, 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. 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 then my research notes. Then all 250 of those editions sold out in a week, so I got paid $1,000 for that piece.

I’m seeing more projects beginning to release work as a limited edition zip or even an open edition zip. Just expressing my piece as just a text or a blog post or whatever doesn’t feel like enough. I’m very invested in making digital work feel more tangible, feel more valuable, feel worth paying for.

Expub

**What are some tools that you use? **

Yancey (00:05:27)

There’s this hard question of how to be seen. I get so many sub stacks in my inbox every day, many of which are fantastic, but it creates a devaluing experience.

Just in terms of useful tools, I have had four different times in the past three years where instead of publicly publishing pieces, I instead 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. There’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 Mischief, 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. I actually met a label that 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 ever cared. They cared about were just 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.

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.

Yancey (00:08:53)

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.

I 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, The 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 and I took the right pick. 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 to like, flip that and say, like, what 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- you know small runs, I think there’s a power to that and what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset and it can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something”, it means to participate and I think that there is 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.

Expub

**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? **

Yancey (00:11:43)

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. We would meet in zooms and then look before Covid and living rooms each week. That was a group of people held together by a common interest that could be manifested through people meeting each other.

Maybe that’s the difference between community and fandom. Fandom is probably the more dominant model online which we mistake for community. You and I both might be fans of the same things for similar reasons. We are not in community with each other but our fandom makes us co-aligned in some ways. With Metalable I’ve always found it important to make a distinction to say that this model of releasing work like a label is not to say that you are collaborating, necessarily, but as to say you are co releasing.

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 contact. I’m at the camp that says like yes, true community, that should be a bar that’s held to people willfully coming to do things with each other. It is not that we are all looking at the same thing all the time.

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, beings of other people. 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 red 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 as a result of this. 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, what it means to be a person that’s just changed by all these digital experiences that we have. It might end up being that the future of community is something defined by the internet and the things that we say now.

Expub

**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. **

Yancey (00:17:05)

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, 60 years, of thinking there’s one way. We’ve been individual-maxing. And 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. 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.

Expub

**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. **

Yancey (00:18:59) -

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. We 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 like 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.

And then we always loved the splits part of crypto. And we ourselves made several innovations in that of building recoups into a split. Then 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 them as a platform at a point of transaction. That ability existed for these big players. That model did exist in the world of payment.

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 for 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. And so it’s this notion of a little private account ledger within each release. And this is also architected to allow that same structure of revenue distribution. That could also be tied to an ownership agreement if you wish. That can be a space where you could just contractually set the boundaries of this work. The artist has full rights to their work. The label is just licensed to sell it for whatever time. It’s built right in there. 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 t

hree things a week because that whole split system we’ve been manually running on in 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. I want to be a museum.

Then there’s this question of what do you do about mediocre music, mediocre publishing, and mediocre art. This is first and foremost a mission-driven project which says we want people to feel not alone in their work, so you don’t want to turn people away. But you also want to build the reputation as a place where it means something to be there. So I think in the near term it’s going to mean being kind of choosy. It’s going to mean a lot of control over what appears on metalabel.com. But also by September all label pages will be customizable to your own look and feel so it won’t look identical and it’ll be way more functional. People will be able to follow you, to apply to release with you if you wish. They can directly support you financially if you wish to allow that to happen. People can have their own worlds on their own Tumblr-like micro-pages. The main metalabel.com remains a space that is very opinionated about what it chooses to celebrate and show. Then we have this open data model underneath we use to self-host. I feel like Kickstarter, that was the attitude. What got out of control of Kickstarter was people selling tech products, and I don’t see how that could happen with this. And we’ll fight that happening with this.

Expub

**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? **

Yancey (00:25:21)

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. But 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.

Expub

**How open MetaLabel is in different forms of media? **

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. But just like this, how do we put out shit questions? You’re calling expanded publishing. That category is the most interesting thing.

If 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. 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. My Dark Forest book, you got the PDF, an EPUB file, a physical edition, and you got to join a Zoom call with the authors all spoke together. And that was $45. It’s just that it’s allowing you to think beyond the boundaries that the market has created for us and to redefine them. I think real creative heads, culture heads, there are more of us than people give us credit for.

Expub

**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? **

Yancey (00:29:04)

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 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.

Those 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.

Expub

**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. **

Yancey (00:32:13)

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. The gallery Museum Rhizome, which is a part of the New Museum in New York, will be launching a series with us in August called Rhizome.zip, and there will be a digital monograph of an artist. Within a zip file will be an interview with an artist, their artist statement, some of their pieces as JPEGs or videos, and then a little provenance to say, this is an edition of this artist’s work at this time. Every edition’s money gets split between Rhizome and that artist. We’re going to do a similar thing with David Graeber’s estate, take a new David Graeber work about construction, bullshit construction, the previously unpublished essay, along with a talk he gave about construction, and then we’ll have a new voice write liner notes to say, here’s why we want to hear David Graeber talk about construction today. And that will be like a $5 release. I myself am going to post something next week, a talk about my creative experience that turned into a piece called nine creative meditations- these little vignettes, 25-minute talk and a very visual text. So I’m making a PDF of it.

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 MetaLable. 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. They do these talks, so engineers, like Kim Stanley Robinson, come to give a talk about geoengineering that they recorded and will publish. And Brian Eno will also publish a new book with us, a physical book, the only time I’ll ever be sold 2,000 editions, and then he’s gonna put it in the comments for other people to reprint it if they wish, which is what he did with. The bleak strategy thing is that, like consumers, collectors respond. They like it.

Expub

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?

Yancey (00:35:55)

It is important to own your identity. We’ve seen a lot of examples of platforms going defunct and data being lost and what felt safe was not. I think homesteading on the internet is advisable, but not everyone has the geek in the group. For a lot of creative people, every one of those steps is the antithesis of everything that they want to do. So it’s like: “give me the thing that does the thing”, and I find generally people start that way and then, as you get more advanced in your career and you have more of a reputation at stake, you start to look for more of the self hosted solutions.

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. And 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. And 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.

Expub

**As an academic, we have the 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 Zenodo, which allows 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 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 more easy way to operate with. **

Yancey (00:39:59)

There was an interesting case last week of exactly this, where I wished it was there yet, where we had an artist, Chantal 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’d be cool if I’m cited as someone using her thing and I get to give her credit. But I think it could be a very simple citing of work, providing a level of provenance. You can hit a plus sign and start typing a title and it will auto-complete and suggest what it thinks you’re connected to. Making citations very easy, allowing you to publish on your own personal website, publish all things credited to my decentralized identifier address.

Because all decentralized identifiers have cryptographic public and private keys that are invisible to you, but allows things to be locked and unlocked even offline. And so you can use your key and by authenticating it’s you just through email login. And you could say, publish the catalog of my decentralized identifier on this page. And it should be able to pull that database of exactly what’s yours and output it anywhere. That’s the dream of the DID structure and like the open directory and just the similar data models, open phone book.

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”.

Expub

**You have an identifier that means that you also have to log in when you download a zip file. Does it mean that the zip file is protected? **

Yancey (00:42:55)

No, so the way we work on a website is that if I shared with you a link to my record page of something that I purchased, if you visited that page and you weren’t authenticated as me, you would not be able to access or download that. And on the server side, is this the right user? If yes, then unlock and allow them to see the components. But that same function can be extended offline because the same notion of the data is held inside of a package that is cryptographically secured on both sides. As the creator, saying their private key is authenticated just having made this work. So it’s validated as being real. And as the collector, it is authenticated that you are the person who purchased this work. As a result, it opens. But that same notion could exist offline where maybe it is, we apply that to a zip file. It’s just making an off system that can live beyond our servers and is independent of our servers for each piece of media.

Conversations on Expanded Publishing

None

ideas

asking guests to add links/references to report, opening it up in the future to a public, — ye s!! they can create annotations / links :)

make new media new again

maybe we should release this under metalabel?

reflections

ability to adust as me move forward with interviews

pivoting from o.g. more monolithic idea of a toolkit

critical:

western pool of experts

gender imbalance

accesssibility

MEETINGS - 4 and 5 July - debrief and future

to-do:

- emailing the guests: thank you and follow up! - ask for references / sharing links!

- cc everyone in the future!!!

- administration and budget/payment - inc is paying for carolina and marta

3 MINUTES each

**Aksioma: **

• • prudcing post script brochures:
• • still need to comission 2
• • feb/march - conference in ljubljuana - expand on aksioma - november void
• • topic: e-girl adjacent
• • produce brochures
• • accumulate/avalanche with a focus
• • something like screentime with tools after the conference

Echo Chamber:

• • new series of books
• • monthly events in rome from october on
• • electronic book review - more research outcome
• • bring in the application that we did so it will increase the chances: label things as part of expub

• • comission research papers on ai comics - thematic issue on expanded comics 4 JULY

  • future of the process/the project - connect to more grants?

• • scale up the project , expanded publishing
  • • federated press - publishing union
• • yes, we want to continue
• • we just need to find project manager / coordinator
• • meeting notes - how to process and why?
• • tomorrow - we talk to andrej and we are talking about either a small project or medium or big - depends - set up a meeting in september ***3 MINUTES each ***

**Aksioma: **

• • prudcing post script brochures:
• • still need to comission 2
• • feb/march - conference in ljubljuana - expand on aksioma - november void
• • topic: e-girl adjacent
• • produce brochures
• • accumulate/avalanche with a focus
• • something like screentime with tools after the conference
• • review on exit reality

Echo Chamber:

• • new series of books
• • monthly events in rome from october on
• • electronic book review - more research outcome
• • bring in the application that we did so it will increase the chances: label things as part of expub
• • comission research papers on ai comics - thematic issue on expanded comics
• • 12 meter book on all pages

INC:

- publishing longform with the aksioma book from noura

- report of expert sessions (toolkit in the application): deadline: late august

- void coming to the conference in march

- combine video and comic - needs updating, based on the video of valentina

- final publication - nero x inc: think of the conference of aksioma as a step of the project - 4 events - final publication should wrap up

NERO:

- developing within expanded publishing

- final publication promote and produce - promoting everything - the platform for this

- platform channel to stream the contents

- web to print platform for the zine - developing this method

- showing "landscape without a logos" - book - university of bolzano - asking to create trilogy - research center "studio image - transform visual knowldge"

- party committee gals in nero - studio visits - workshops, events, posters, printing - different tech and machines, riso machine - collective publishing - deliverables work in the first half

- hosting this session - its a deliverable!

5 JULY

10h—11h:30:

1. debrief on the sessions
2. methodology to process material
3. emare - model example to take and consider/engage with
4. timeline for the second half
5. BIS!!! > more sessions like this ?

6. recording conversation NOTES

7. marcella receives newsletter - 1 million every year // big 2 million biennal: the group can apply for the 1 million - question of how to apply and who is in the lead - if geert starts a new institution? - associated partner is hva ? - for this, tommaso has to wait for september; question is who will be the other two partners?

8. other network - portugal / spain? - gateway to latin america - maybe interesting?
9. debrief:
   • marta: all went well - no issues! - but issue will be work load and amount hours to be put in making the sprint sessions - the format workerd and it was flexible and would alow to repeat the format - maybe we can also answer these questions ourselves. the output: keep it simple and not focus too much on textual elements - hyperlinked, a lot of references, get the definition going by using everyone’s ideas
   • carolina: enjoyed convo, positive to be here all together despite zoom interview, cohesivness of group, convos went well, good structure of interview, combining answers along the shape of the interview, one part editorial takes on expub together, plus annex, group of guests could have been more diverse in our circle, second one we should be more mindful/intentional, even tho all guests had valuable contribution, more help with note taking, agreeing on role division before session, fun!
   • marcela: also to get to know each other, our skills and limitations, we still like each other, personal approach was very important, ope, friendly, great job moderation, fit in very well also if didn’t join from the start, appointing only one main writer, can’t jump on fast notes, we can’t do this in this consortium, not be idealist, knowing our limitations, great tool and useful for future, do we have budget for more interviews? - final outcome: video editing tool - now, not a lot of writing work
   • janez: endorsing the keeping it simple approach of marta, editing all the transcription is a lot of work - generational divide and disucssions are valuable - good move to decide involve younger people leading
   • ilan: agreeing with marcel with note taking. were we victims of “technosolutionism” with using etherport? we don’t have to necessirily use a tool because it’s there. wants to do something he enjoys. thinking through diversity - this group is already “not diverse”, we are able-bodied etc. generational divides. we can produce more - we did not hear something completly “new”, because they are already in our network. for the future, we have to be more “challenging” , arguing to get some colour in, radical ideas from opening up the pool of contributors
     • –> marcela: this thinking for the next project, we took a small setp, good starting step, knowing each other is a good basis for the next
   • tommaso: designing the people better for next time - also maybe they didnt fit that much ? - but practices had a good perspective - we can have a definition withis this! also go outside of our comfort zone. this was supposed to be a design sprint. we don’t have anything “to design” - there is no workflow/solution to expanded publishing. important to focus on the future of publishing - proposing to focus on narrowing this, discuss some more specific themes from the sprint e.g. lowtech/donotpublish
   • lorenzo: should i agree or disagree, too early to say, good grocery but what can we cook, good to go so deep with the interviewees - shifting to networked publishing as concept - networked knowledge. more interesting to define this as a define research field, more than what is “expanded publishing” - finding a field in which to expand, good moment for reflection - more diverse pool of people not from an ethics - stepping forward - perspective, but to give different knowledge
     • – marcela: side knowledge is important , even in ways in which people work, think, collaborate
     • – marta: so many guests were curious about what we do and think, eager to connect on this
   • expansion and contamination - future of publishing: either academia and public funds or capitalism - curious to know something out of this
   • tommaso: discuss together - can we “decide the menu”?
   • ilan: shows redact
10. two step process: looking / rough draft - sending out - summarising and then organising
11. report - visualise the main keywords and tagging - marcel’s idea - incorporate redact and etheport?

12:00:

- talk with andrej (see point above)