report

Dušan Barok

0. Intro

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

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

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

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

What do you hope to achieve with your practice?

talking from norway

local culture scene

non profit sector, art and technology

90s print mag, friend introduced him to html, discovered web publishing

(web magazine?) Koridor was redesigned every few months

2-3 years after wiki

master in network media –> XPUB, interventionalist way of working with tools, bottom up

entered world of contemporary art, media installations conservation, diff needs than classic art forms,

media labs inside museums becaus of growing need,

early interest in documentation (visits at Tate). Setting yp medialabs inside museums.

The need for tools in museums. They are using mediawikis and CMS (surprise)

publishing platforms

rhizome tv net anthology, li-ma in amsterdam -https://li-ma.nl/

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

• Monoskope and shadow libraries

• Living archives

• linked open source for museums

• How do you ensure or work towards a sustainable practice? - how to survive, maintain the platform?

living archive -> in opposition of stable, dark room, hidden, untouched

archiving the digital,

print as an archive for digital items/contents

environments and ways of finding contents change

social media suckinga ttention, people stopped clicking on links and just got stuck scrolling, preventing exit, veiwing the web as 5 websites, worst with AI,

transforming the logic of the search, queries with a question mark -> chat, chatbot, talking to an entity and getting answers –> vacuuming the web

q for digital publishing, how to operate in this context which is much different, developing around chat bots,

search algorithms flattening through AI prompting

data repositories

i was never really good, people look at shadow libs and say good, but now you’ve basically fed chat gpt,

context search, non structured data, collection of images, etc., lazy approach, counter productive to what is happening on the web,

https://monoskop.org/reader/index.php

• sustainaility because own infrasturcture

having control over software and hardware, ngo, legal body attached to several of these elements, used to live from grants, catastrophe if it had comemrcial provider

not easy but possible

-federated instances for peer tube and mastodon and other social media alternatives

• often overlooked but very crucial to work on a long term

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

• archival communities

• “The online environment has created its own hybrid form between text and library, which is key to understanding how digital text produces difference.”

4. Open Discussion

• editorial process: how do you collaborate ? how is the editorial stream? (lorenzo)

simple but not easy

never had a clear definition of what they do, documentation, art work? no one knowns what monoskop is

• open from the start - everyone contributes something because they relate to something that is already there

organic, keep looking at recent changes, rare to delete or moderate,

looks at recent changes almost everyday - moderation is actually very easy , almost no deleting

• coming to monoskope from social networks (IRL)

ilan: so many resources, piracy works better than whats around? iwhat if you made it now? what would it look like

how would you make monoskope now? whats the next step?

there was a lot of enthusiasm to put things online

putting them into thematic categories, copying from somewhere + act of creating context, web has always been huge, recontextualizing

copying/spreading/crediting

• creating own context with what s there

lorenzo: whats your relationship with publishers? - hosting pdfs/books - do you have a collaboration/silenct comms/problems?

mama in zagreb https://mi2.hr/

https://monoskop.org/MaMa - they make translations very quickly into croatian

• the more people read it, its researcher or talked about, more people want it -

• this all for the commons / research community - selling epubs “way to hell”

internet archive forced to remove books through lawsuit

tommaso: shadow libraries are banned in italy - how do you position yourself in this?

monoskop not fro blockbusters, triggered publishers in case of internet archive, monoskop stays niche, difference between academic funding and different publishing

• university libraries and closed access

• post digital print book - open access online but helping the sales of print books

a way to give value to the publiscation – piracy as a signal for relevance/badge opf honour

ilan - new ideology revolving around open access publishing - piracy as resistance as open access is a model - do you see this tension in monoskope?

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

• websites have a life span of 3 years - we will need to look into archiving platforms - not just printing them out but diital

https://webarchive.multiplace.org/artdocweb/

archiving through scraping - internet archive model - a frozen insta on time - zeeschuimer –> platform content as art? –> making them unfragile and stable