User:Michael Murtaugh/What is XPUB?

Sketching a history of the XPUB course, including it's pre-history as Media Design + Networked Media. With some key texts along the way, traces of which are perhaps already in the wiki!

Media Design 2002-2007

Such as Matthew Fuller's The Impossibility of Interface, including Haron Farocki's video work I though I was seeing convicts.

Initially there was also an associated Research program.

Re-reading TIOI... thoughts of example of outlooks hot-air balloon and the Boeing 737 fatal software glitches. Also came across this contemporary video essay exploring the essay.

On second thought, maybe consider the Web Stalker...

• I/O/D Texts
• https://anthology.rhizome.org/the-web-stalker
• emulated version

I would also touch on Femke Snelting's Awkward Gestures (linked from nice wiki page with a programmatic layout tools), written as a reflection of the origins of OSP

While a familiar gesture is one that fits perfectly well in a generally accepted model, an awkward gesture is a movement that is not completely synchronic. It’s not a countermovement, nor a break from the norm; it doesn’t exist outside of the pattern, nor completely in it. Like a moiré effect reveals the presence of a grid, awkward behaviour can lead to a state of increased awareness; a form of productive insecurity that presents us with openings that help understand the complex interaction between skills, tools and medium.

and link to FLOSS+Art the book, edited by Aymeric Mansoux + Marloes de Valk, designed by OSP.

Networked Media 2006-2010

Networked Media was directed by Florian Cramer, whose 2014 essay on the What is Post-Digital is interesting for this consideration of the post-digital:

Proponents of ‘post-digital’ attitudes may reject digital technology as either sterile high tech or low-fidelity trash. In both cases, they dismiss the idea of digital processing as the sole universal all-purpose form of information processing. Consequently, they also dismiss the notion of the computer as the universal machine, and the notion of digital computational devices as all-purpose media.

Though Florian has more recently published a revised view of the term in the context of Urgent Publishing (2021) in which he questions the terms usefulness in an artistic context.

Media Design 2010-2016

The course, directed by Renee Turner, became Media Design again then was fused for a while with Lens-based Media, directed by Simon Pummell

Experimental Publishing (XPUB) 2016-

as it's part of Aymeric Mansoux's formulation of XPUB.

XPUB is the Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing of the Piet Zwart Institute. XPUB focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.

XPUB’s interests in publishing are therefore twofold: first, publishing as the inquiry and participation into the technological frameworks, political context and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, how these are, or can be, used to create publics.

From AM, How Deep is Your Source.