Transmedial2013 workpage

Workshop descriptions

Spam Publishing

(Andre & Silvio)

UNCOMPLETED

From: Karmela Fitness Expert  
Subject: This is My Erotic Story With Weight Loss. 
"My name is karmela,24 years old, Since my childhood I was having extra weight, very extra, I loved eating too much various foods who they make me increased weight day after day, and I can't never stop."

The workshop will function as a laboratory for the development of strategies for publishing texts found in spam emails. We'd like to find ways not only to communicate the latent richness of these texts, but also to explore their fluid and networked nature. Although some lines of action will be proposed, we'd like the participants to play an active role in imagining and devising these yet unknown

prototypes.

For many of us our relation with spam emails consists in moving them from the inbox to the junk-mail folder of our email accounts. Yet, if we take a close look at some of the unsolicited emails we receive we might find them curious, and may even be amuse by them. We might even begin to see them as a literary creations, in which considerable amounts of inventiveness, and awareness to the current global situation, as well as possessing knowledge on society's anxieties. These elements are cleverly explored in spam emails in order to produce persuasive messages. Curious glitches also abound, such as the heavy use of stereotypes, Google-translate misinterpretations, typos, word obfuscations, and recurring text fragments. Being it such an idiosyncratic and rich area of text production I believe it deserves to be embraced as a literary genre. Being it so, I am interested in exploring it as a literary device, as a template for writing and communication.

Consent to Print

(Eleanor & Dave) As digital content is increasingly atomized and paper assumes the role of curated 'best of', how do we decide what qualifies for printing? Voting systems and individual curation are the usual answers, but could there be more interesting and self-reflexive methods? A workshop to prototype experimental, democratic methods of filtering online content and using them to create custom print publications.

note from eleanor: Theoretical input from me will come from my research on Consensus decision-making, and the critiques that can be made of it by feminist theories of consent.

Dave => My research interests lie in how the participants negotiate decision-making processes as a group. I'm particularly curious about how the participants respond to the challenge of developing a social system as a means of avoiding the emergence of a fixed-hierarchy, and how their system performs practically given the task of co-producing a text.

Some Resources on Hybrid Publishing

Silvio => I'm currently researching the multiple ways in which (media) art responds to the technical possibilities offered by the landscape of publishing. In particular I'm interested in in the ways in which tools, softwares and devices for publishing become entities that are representative of the current state of technology. Examples: the printed book as an authoritative form, the digital reader as the battleground for ownership over content, etc.

Resources:

MMMMarginalia - Notes on publishing (in the broadest sense): http://mmmmarginalia.tumblr.com/

Out of Ink - Future Publishing Industries: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/outofink/

56 Broken Kindle Screens (collaboration with Sebastian Schmieg) - PoD paperback depicting broken Kindle screens: http://www.silviolorusso.com/home/project/56-broken-kindle-screens/

Blank on Demand (collaboration with Giulia Ciliberto) - Experiment that probes the limits imposed by PoD production: http://www.silviolorusso.com/home/project/blank-on-demand/

Flatland - Conceptual piece about the skeuomorphism of the digital book through different dimensions: http://silviolorusso.com/flatland/

Students

List MD students who wish to go