XPUB Curriculum

Overall course structure

The Experimental Publishing (XPUB) study path of the Media Design and Communication Master is structured at three levels: Special Issues, Periodicals, and Self-Directed Research.

Special Issues

Under the drastic technological and socio-economical changes brought by the publishing industry, every parameter that used to define the act of making things public has been transformed, from 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? How can we articulate the idea of publishing as a critical network art practice?

To explore these questions, each Trimester, you will work with core staff of the XPUB course together to make a publication. Such publications are called Special Issues (SI). Each SI addresses a specific "issue", often coordinated with outside events and collaborations, and culminates in a release party. The form of each SI 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. The object that is published is therefore not limited to print media, it could be a vinyl, a software, and ideally a combination of different things.

The organisation, tools, and workflows are reset every trimester to both allow the rotation of roles within this publishing experiment, but also permit to explore novel collaborative methods beyond their archetypes and stereotypes. To be sure, the making of these publications can therefore follow traditional division of labour relevant a particular publishing industry (editorial board, graphic designers, production and distribution teams, etc), but, and this is something we actively encourage, can also become something to critically reflect upon and challenge such structures (algorithmic publishing, participatory and crowdsourced content, constraint and system art inspired games and rules, piracy, etc). Similarly, XPUB 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. Decision processes and hierarchical models should also not be seen as static but instead something to play and experiment with. Choosing the right production and organisational workflow is the first collective decision to be made every trimester, and might of course be influenced by the topic of the SI.

Last but not least, a modest fixed budget is allocated for each SI, and making efficient use of this limited resource is an important aspect of the process. At the end of each trimester a release party will be hosted at a partner organisation, and the SI will be distributed.

Special Issues 2016/2017 (current year)

• Trimester 1: Bootstrapping XPUB: Scarcity hosted by WORM
• Trimester 2: Graphical Music Notation, in partnership with DE PLAYER
• Trimester 3: Interfacing the law, in partnership with Constant/HNI

Special Issues 2017/2018

• Trimester 1: Untitled, SI on Squatting in partnership with Het Nieuwe Instituut
• Trimester 2: Untitled, SI on Book scanners in partnership with WORM
• Trimester 3: TBA

Special Issues 2018/2019

• Trimester 1: TBA
• Trimester 2: TBC Unbound Libraries, in partnership with Constant/MI2
• Trimester 3: TBA

Periodicals

Two very important aspects of the XPUB course are: (1) the ability to critically reflect on societal issues in the context of publishing, computational culture and the art, and (2) fluency with a couple of free and open source software tools, programming and markup languages relevant to networked media, graphic design, and publishing practices.

To support these two aspects, XPUB offers regular lectures, seminars and workshops, from guests and core staff, and that are gathered under the name periodicals: Histories of Experimental Publishing, Reading, Writing, and Research Methodologies Seminar, Techno-legal Templates and Sandbox Culture, Tools for Procedural Publishing.

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.

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
• Contextualising 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.

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.

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 - TBA

Self-directed Research

For those who have never learned a programming or markup language before, or have only worked within the specialised sandbox of a specific framework (ie Processing, Max/MSP, etc), it can be difficult to see where loops, iterations, lists, arrays, variables, conditionals and all this stuff might be connected to a practice, let alone doing something less abstract like generating images, PDFs, text, or sound.

This is where the self-directed research aspect of the course is relevant. Each trimester we will assess your contribution to the special issue, but also will assess your self-directed research, which in a nutshell is your individual practice that may or may not be in collaboration with others and may or may not be linked to the special issue. Said differently your self-directed research this trimester does not have to be linked to the topic of the Special Issue, and does not need to end up as content for the Special Issue, but if it makes sense to make a link, you should not be shy doing so.

Each trimester, we will help you set up a learning plan for a small project of yours, a tool, a publication, a workflow, an experiment, etc, that combines both a clearly identified topic and theme to explore, combined with the technical skill(s) you want to acquire in the process. This will be tailored to your own needs and existing skills.

Each trimester we will evaluate the result and repeat the same process, every time rising the bar a bit more, both technically but also conceptually, up to the point where in second year you will have to develop a full graduation project that demonstrate both your conceptual and technical capabilities in critically reflecting on a subject of your choice that you will be exploring for a whole year.

Notes on First and Second Year Students Participation in XPUB

Attendance to Special Issues and Periodicals is mandatory for first year students. These two elements of the course in relation to Self-Directed Research will equip you with essential conceptual and technical skills required to develop a challenging graduation project in your second year (refer to Media Design course handbook for details regarding the structure of your second year). Second year students are welcome to contribute to any Special Issues as long as they actively contribute to the project and attend all the sessions. Similarly, second year students are welcome to join any of the lectures, seminars, workshops that form the Periodicals.

XPUB Reader

The XPUB Reader can be found on the PZI MD wiki. At the moment it is a work-in-progress, but it aims at providing a categorised collection of writings we think are relevant for XPUB, and that will be used during the Reading, Writing, and Research Methodologies seminars.