report

Kenneth Goldsmith

0. Intro

dropping out is exactly the position to understand what makes digital publishing interesting or limited. You get more knowledge and intelligence from negative reactions.

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

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

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

What do you hope to achieve with your practice?

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

ubu web 1996

“sometimes i’m speaking like it’s 1998” - not comfortable with developments of the digital world

“insta ate my utopia” / dropping out of radical publishing - desolution - dropping out

private and unique publishing - mostly analogue in their production - cannot be usurped and highjacked

making retreated space for himself

dropping out is exactly the position to understand what makes digital publishing interesting or limited. You get more knowledge and intelligence from negative reactions.

*> what went wrong? *

recognize his ideas in a monster

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

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

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

What is the life/evolution of your editorial objects?

What does your workflow look like?

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

How do you ensure or work towards a sustainable practice?

nobody leaves instagram

soc media ate everything Ppl stop using the web

crowding social media and devices

difference betwwrn and artist and a creator (creator have not a critical approach, it’s just monetization)

Creator of closed platform, creator of capital within certain rules set up by the platform

the term of the content creator - creating for a platform

hate the word “creator”

Creator vs artist

critique of creativity - creativity is concurrent

sucked all the air out of the room

taken energy away from experiemntal publishing

ilan: make negativity nice again, force with energizing potential, toxic positivity, how to make space for negativity and criticalness -> / what kind of

kenneth: there is a lot of productive negativity too - can be energising

gaza student protest, displaced anxiety on the 2nd coming of trump, we’re gonna need the angry protestsrs

stop publishing

what does it matter to do another 38th book?

“maybe i should kill my email”

mute on my language, working on paper, nothing happening

ubu web is done

30 years of coding

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

How have you created your community of readers and collaborators?

Who is your audience? How do you engage them?

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

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

do you see your peers enganging in practices of retreat, refusal?

retreat as protection / on social media you can never win

silence

there is violence, people are afraid to speak

avant guarde is marginal to begin with

https://flugschriften.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/flugschriften-6-bogna-konior-the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-v.2.pdf

woodshedding –> dropping out to come out with some other thing, productive

everyone has to b pulic all the time, nyc are public people

why do we have to so public? > being public // publishing

even beards are co-opted

Q: what is the role of small publishers and independent/autonomous practice in this landscape?

4. Open Discussion - 15 mins

Lorenzo: irene’s do not publish, muting yourself as a tactic of radical publishing. is this temporary?

it doesn’t matter if i publish, i’ve publlished so much. younger people “have” to publish, for tenure, status, self worth, the feeling of publishing – a trace, a sense of permanence, especially in the flow of digital publishing, putting a rock in the stream, make sense of the chaos, benjamin dialcetical constellation

john cage: reputation after you die - will be hard to get rid of me, long shelf life, legacy

publishing as acts of desperation

relevancy

as an artist i have a healthy ego

imperative of publishing - also a beautiful narrative of a trail of cultural production

p publishing a sputting a rock in the middle of a stream, freezing chaos

“there’s so much of me out there”

ilan: we don’t care if people read, readership<thinkership, book is just a signal to a community of thinkers

books are an excuse to make friends :3

explosion of printed publishing when digital publishing grew, got more beautiful and more expensive, every mag looks like FUORI!!! >> when you see that object you are wowed

politics and artistic avant garde - are artists making the tools which politicians use to “dominate the world”?

also in casa pound - neo fascist movement in italy -

(I publish therefore I am)

lorenzo: are we not able to read anymore? maybe time to talk about reading?

changes in readership and changes in distribution

kenneth: references “wasting time on the internet” - we are reading and writing more than we ever had

images and texts always linked, almost no pure image (vs. poor image)

ilan: “snowfall of text” - text made by systems to be red by systems, do you want to be involved?

“i see so little good stuff”, ai is bad

make it do something perverse, something strange,

only works if it actually makes things that look like poetry, did not have the taste, the perversion

artiosts have been good at breaking things rather then make something stable

W. H. Auden: “poetry makes nothing happen” beauty is its lack of utility, so you betray it when you want to

!!make a space where nothing happens!!

midjourney could not make a pencil- surrealism of the broken is already tired!! – it couldn’t be so stupid to make something normal, but it can make something incredible

i’m interested in the banality – uncapable of what im interested in

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

What are the more urgent aspects that need to be addressed in the future of publishing?

What is one aspect that already exists that needs to change and one thing that still doesn’t exist that needs to be developed?

How do you imagine publishing expanding in the next few years (audience, medium, tools, models)? In which directions do you see it progressing and in which do you see it regressing?

What is at the horizon of the publishing industry?

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

publishing will continue

books are not going away, but ig posts will all go away

no books at the airport contains a glitch – everybody pretends there is no glitch

“it looks like you are writing a letter”, matthew fueller

https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html

do we need ubu when we have youtube? youtube is all ads now

reacting to tech changes, thinking was i wrong? and then culture moves forward and then i realize i was right

the vision of NERO, follow it, it’s right, it’s good, always has been

impulses are right - intuitions

“they”

tommaso: sadness with the end of ubuweb - question of why? - sustainability of things ? federating ? internet as sharing - have you thought about this - fediverse and federated networks? can this be the future? - have a feel that ubuweb connect a lot of this - valuable for people who support these networks

2tb at most, marcell mars working on making it functional on a hard drive

doesn’t need to grow , maybe there is no need for growth