About Experimental Publishing

What is Publishing? What does it mean to make things public?

The new study path experimental publishing is the merging of two stories:

a singular one
a slightly more general one.

The singular story is the one of the Media Design and Communication Master, which for a decade has established a critical approach to the ambiguous notion of media. In the past years we have welcomed a wide range of practitioners from the culture field, visual and digital artists, graphic designers, musicians, performances artists, architects, fine press book makers, and computer programmers, to help them develop a practice that explore the social, technical, cultural and political dimensions of their work, and ultimately as we took the habit to say, to encourage them to design their own media. Such an approach has resulted in a rich variety of projects and writings, from browser plugins to connect Amazon purchase button to Pirate Bay torrent links, chat system and audio feedback loops working with networks of tape reels, autonomous phone and computer based voice mail networks, theatre scripts based on Wikipedia page histories, peer-to-peer workflows for graphic designers, generative artists book and concrete poetry epub, secret social networks and file sharing hidden in the trash can of your computer desktop, wikis to publish precarious materials and weblogs of emerging forms of online artistic publishing , and many other amazing things.

The common point of these projects is they all look at particular issues, tensions, and conflicts relevant to the field of practice of their authors, and communicate concerns that are relevant to a much broader public. Why? Because they all offer a conversation about the cultural diversity, the systems, the networks, of humans and machines, that constitute our society.

This aspect of communication, sharing, informing, and thinking about how things are made public, and circulate in a public space is what link us today with this other, more general story, that is the one of publishing. Originally rooted in print media, the notion of publishing has in the last decades been both culturally diffused and appropriated well beyond its original domain of preference. It does not mean that publishing has lost its sharpness, in fact, this Cambrian explosion of new publishing potentials, has demonstrated how publishing has become central to a diversity of networked practices.

From app stores to art book fairs and zine shops, from darknets to sneakernets, from fansubs to on-demand services, and from tweeting to whistleblowing, the act of making things public, that is to say publishing, has became pivotal in an age infused with myriad media technologies.

What is more, the tension between the publishing heritage and novel forms of producing and sharing information has shown that old dichotomies such as analog versus digital, or local versus global, have grown increasingly irrelevant given their bond with hybrid media practices based on both old and new technologies, and their existence within mixed human and machine networks.

In sum, by experimental publishing we mean to engage with a broad set of intermingled and collaborative practices, both inherited and to be invented, so as to critically explore and actively engage with an ecosystem in which multi-layered interactions occur that are:

social, technical, cultural and political;
involving actors both human and algorithmic;
and mediated by networks of distribution and communication of varying scales and visibility.

For this journey, we seek students motivated to challenge the protocols of publishing (in all its (im)possible forms) using play, fiction, and ambiguity as methods and strategies of production and presentation, in order to experiment on the threshold of what is possible, desirable, allowed, or disruptive, in this ever expanding field.

Course Structure

The Experimental Publishing study path is structured at two levels:

Periodicals: These are lectures, workshops, and seminars that are running throughout the whole year at a relatively fixed frequency, some are weekly, others fortnightly, or every few weeks.
Special Issues: As the name implies, these are the main themes that will be explored throughout the year, to investigate a specific issue regarding publishing in the context of computational culture and the art. Each investigated issue will also become an issue put together and published on this site by the students and staff. Most of the special issues will be linked to public events hosted and organised by friends of the experimental publishing programme.

Periodicals 2016-2017

Histories of Experimental Publishing

Histories of Experimental Publishing is a series of lectures by core and guest tutors of the course. From Jiahu symbols to darknets, the act of making things public has always involved aesthetic, technological and social experimentation. In this lecture series, publishing will be broadly understood to encompass various symbolic forms and media, including text, image, sound and code. The focus will be on practices that are not always included in mainstream media histories, such as samizdat publishing, music distribution and warez culture. Each lecture will cover one particular medium and publishing (sub)culture. Visits of local experimental publishing initiatives (PrintRoom, Publication Studio, Zine Camp) will be part of the program.

Publishing as Practice

Publishing as Practice aims to develop critical tools (both theory and practice), to explore collaborative practices, editorial concepts and formats of display, graphic design and typographic experiment and new distribution models, through the study of publishing as a medium. What is a book? Under the drastic technological and socio-economical changes brought by the publishing industry, every parameter that used to define a book has been transformed, form authorship to expanded copyright practices, manufacturing, hardware and software, ownership and sharing knowledge, digitisation, preservation and all distribution models. In this context, what could be the role of publishing for artists and designers? Working together as an editorial board, as well as developing individual projects, this course consist of monthly sessions based on a matrix of research questions, publishing experiments and a public programme, where the traditional roles and function of publishing are questioned. These sessions will take the form of intense one or two-day workshops.

Publishing as Practice: Mapping the field. The shifting roles of editor, artist, author, designer, publisher, distributors, readers and collectors. Emerging models.
Publishing Experiments: Editorial concepts, manufacturing, printing techniques, information vs. visuality, (non)narrative structures, different hierarchy of information and the economy of the book will be investigated. Working with the school facilities.
Making things Public: Explore (self)publishing strategies, readership and the new economical models of production and distribution. Visit to professionals from the field. Defining new modes of dissemination and possible sustainable or distributed models for the editions produced during the programme.

Reading, Writing, and Research Methodologies Seminar

The Reading, Writing, and Research Methodologies Seminar is tailored towards (further) developing research methods within the first year of the master. By establishing a solid foundation of research skills, it will eventually prepare students for their Graduate research in the second year. Through reading core theoretical texts, and through the experimentation with different modes of writing, they will establish a common vocabulary and set of references to work from. The course aims to develop a writing practice appropriate to each students practice-based research, through applying general research methods to specific research projects. The course takes as axiomatic that the perceived division between practice and theory is essentially an illusion.

The seminar will include:

Identifying the objects of your research through description and analysis of your work
Contextualizing your work through reflection on contemporary and historical practices.
Identify research material key to your practice.
Synopsis and annotation of key texts
Writing machines: creating methods for the production of group and individual writing.

Throughout, there will be an emphasis on working collectively, whether in a larger discussion group or in smaller reading and writing groups.

Techno-legal Templates and Sandbox Culture

Discussing past, present, and future strategies of publishing and access to knowledge would not be complete without talking about the relationship existing between the distribution of information and the technological and legal frameworks that permit it. In the past decades, such relationship has been articulated in different ways, yet always revolving around the questions of intellectual property laws that need to be either reinforced, reformed, abolished, or simply ignored. From guerilla open access to the normalisation of free culture licensing, from remix culture to GitHub repository forks, we will explore in a series of lecture and readings how code, both legal and software, is effectively shaping publishing culture, by the means of different constitutive templates and platforms. In the process, we will discuss notions of commons, public space and movement, and whether or not these can exist as globalised universal concepts, as opposed to singular sandboxed ideas linked to specific communities, platforms and practices.

The Importance of Being Archive

Archives used to belong to the realm of large institutions and national governments. In an attempt to collect documents and records, such as letters, official papers, photographs, recorded material, or computer files archives tried to preserve a historical consciousness. In a time when the creation of documents and their aggregation into all sorts of different – especially online – archives has become part of everyday life the role and function of archives and its content is changing. Through modes of iteration, appropriations, copies, leaks and other permutations archives can short-circuit, defy and disrupt emphasising the limits of historical representation. By critically analysing theory, reflecting on archival practices and making documentation, this course explores the messy entanglements of the ways documents are created and collected, systems (dis)function and how networks of people, bots and algorithms trigger transformations.

Tools for Procedural Publishing

Tools for Procedural Publishing consists of monthly 2-day workshop, where we will approach the tools, protocols and workflows essential for publishing across digital environments. Through a process of experimentation, research and discussion we will engage and explore the social, political and technological context and conflicts of these technologies.

In each session we'll focus on the production of an outcome, which will require practical and hands-on application of the subject and tools explored.
Outcomes will range from the creation of a website, a social file system, a acoustic data transmitting network, a collaborative and distributed work environment, a multi-format publication, floppy disk videos, audio auscultations of file systems, a digital library, and self hosting servers.
We wont develop these processes for making things public from scratch, but by taking full advantage of the plethora of free software applications, which lend themselves to the UNIX philosophy of using simple and discrete programs, articulated into a complex pipeline. Such formula allows for fast prototyping of complex and idiosyncratic processes, whose outcomes ensue from the choice of programs, inputs and settings given.

Special Issues 2016-2017

Special Issues are a means of putting the ideas explored in the different strands of the course into practice in the form of a series of publications on a roughly 6 week cycle. Each "issue" addresses a specific theme, often coordinated with outside events and collaborations, and culminates in a "release". The form of each issue varies as a means of critically engaging with the diverse media, scales, and historical specificity of a particular issue. This multiplicity of form rejects the conception of "cross-platform" and "multi-media" as seamless, uniform, and ever improving.

Special Issues considers software not just as a means of getting things done, but as a significant writing space for critically engaging with culture. To this end, the tools and methods used to produce each publication are themselves part of the release itself. Code is not monolithic and linear but rather speaks across different systems, at different temporalities, in different voices and modes.

#01: Op is Op

September - December 2016

OP is OP webpage

#02: Pushing the score

January - March 2017 (ongoing)

In collaboration with De Player

IN PROGRESS worklogs...

#03: Interfacing the Law

This is why projects like Aaaaarg, Ubu, Monoskop and the others are so crucial at the moment, because they point to a different future, different not only from today's monopolies but also from tomorrows. — Felix Stalder

Even if reading is increasingly turning digital, Public Libraries have not been able to follow the same path. While technically it is possible to allow anyone acces to books from anywhere, the legal reality is quite different. Libraries are not able to give access to digital resources in the same way as they can with physical books. This is why initiatives such as Monoskop, aaarg.org, sci-hub and libgen are essential as they collect and distribute electronic texts, an indispensible work in times of austerity and privatisation of education. They are serving readers across the globe a collection of materials that start to look quite different than the libraries we were used to, content that is acting out the true potential of digital publishing, distributed freely and accessibly without the limits imposed by the academic commercial complex. University researchers as well as those studying outside institutions have all come to rely on these 'shadow libraries', but can't speak out for them publicly. However critical these resources have become, the recent courtcase of Elsevier vs. Sci-hub and Libgen and another one underway against aaaarg.org shows how vulnerable the projects actually are. While each of them takes a different political stance, in the end of the day their various forms of civil disobedience only count as illegal action.

How can the right to access to knowledge be held up against claims of copyright? Interfacing the law is an attempt to build a platform, both in the sense of an on-line interface and as a public discourse, that would allow us to openly discuss, reflect and respond to the next wave of courtcases waiting to happen. It is urgent that we find ways to make the public debate transcend the juridical binary of illegal vs. legal, and claim political legitimacy for sharing digital books.

In collaboration with librarians, lawyers, activists and archivists, we invite participants to develop their own interfaces to the law: collective annotation systems, digital document analyses, (il)legal use cases, library tools, mirrored servers ... These prototypes will be brought together in a public event taking place June 2017. In order to develop the projects technically and conceptually, we will collectively analyse legal documents relevant to the case, learn from historical activism and civil disobedience against the law and explore the contents of massive text-collections available in pirate, shadow and amateur digital libraries.

Interfacing the law is developed by Constant in collaboration with Memory of the World and MayDay rooms. The project is part of Society for Library Access (SLAX), a coalition of people and organisations that wants to publicly address the antagonism between the access to knowledge and the current copyright regime.

etc

Zine Camp 2016

xPub was present and ran a small workshop at Zine Camp, Rotterdam, a festival to make friends and zines, is an open workspace connecting like-minded zinesters and newbies from Rotterdam to national/international zinesters and newbies. The aim is to make zine together, but also to provide a space and place to socialize and collaborate in an attempt to discover and foster a growing community of zine-makers in the NL and abroad.

People & Colofon

staff

Advisory Board

Thomas Castro

@lustnl

Olga Goriunova

@OlgaGoriunova

Alessandro Ludovico

@_neural

Colophon

Powered by:

leaflet
mediawiki
python
git
pandoc
GNU make
HTML and CSS standards
Debian
Linux Containers
nginx

Does not pass W3C validation (Sorry Tim Berners-Lee!)

Guest Lectures

Next to these recurrent periodicals, we will occasionally welcome guests to reflect with us on the topics explored in the Special Issues:

Guests 2016/2017

Lídia Pereira - Immaterial Labour Union zine http://ilu.servus.at
Dušan Barok - making present
Roel Roscam Abbing - how the networks
Henry Warwick -
Peter Fengler
Koos Siep
Remco van Bladel
Balázs Bodó
Zoltan Puha
Varinia Canto Vila
Séverine Dusollier
Marcell Mars
Dubravka Sekulic
Vaast Colson

Xpub

Contents