Gersande Hackpact

First notes

21.9.2022

Research role as a facilitator, editor & curator towards PUBLISHING WITH EMPATHY without falling into saviorism
Experiment with different collaborative configuration
Explore publication as performative acts rather than finished product, one where the user/public has agency over the work > universal interface to custom through interaction
Try to break down traditional publishing infrastructures > what are those traditional publishing infrastructures?
Practice as a form of discourse > critique and analysis
Research material practice along role as facilitator/curator in order to research way of PUBLISHING WITH EMPATHY
Step out of standardisation > the abstract and material shelf

Interview with LB

22.9.2022

Interview with Luca

Interviewee GI
Interviewer LUCA
Note-taking EMMA

L: what are you doing at the moment? currently working on a project
G: I’m picking up for the graduation project, the writing practice has been ongoing since last year. i see writing for my grad proj
The material aspect, bookbinding workshop, my colleagues have been producing tools to access to make books
It became a social project, to make people together, showing them they can make themselves, to create pantograph, developing different things, active in the social part not design I was thinking about producing a shelf
Shelf my mom found, one self-standing shelf, it’s more like a transportable shelf, to travel with books, it’s outstanding, that can keep a collection of books, want to prototype it but that ppl can customised, customed through the interaction

Where do I involve ppl? design, curator part, a lot of layers, design constraints, What I have it’s not accessible, find a more accessible design Public or individual use?
Public, I want to make workshop where ppl can reunite and do things together I’ve been interested in my role of mediator, facilitator and writer, writing down protocols and ethics, always collaboration with ppl that have different needs, I worked in it but never paid attention why it succeeded or failed? never been recorded

L: What’s the difference to public bookshelves that we already have?
G: The abstract of the shelf, similarity with facilitator that show a body of work, a small library, the street ones, unwanted books that get adopted, but I feel more like practically how to make a tool and see how much people can interact with it

L: It’s not about one shelf, but to make it fit everywhere?
G: Yes, I also want to record the process. Do I go to collectives, specific places to ask what is their ideal shelf? create something is needed
Organise workshop with the same tool and end with personalised ones
What’s the idea of shelf? and what books on them?

L: how do you plan how would you need a shelf? how would you mix it with your theoretical research?
G: I tend to be really big, if I have one project/platform focus is good

L: project documentation between your thesis?
G: Shelf research and thesis together, research to find better publishing environment, if you are deep into what you do you do more, compromise, exploration, that it’s not necessary
Because it’s always collaboration towards something, I want to scale it down to a shelf together /human scale
Building level, design, putting it outside? idk

L: thought the shelf as a publication tool? New-stands with a lot of things on? what’s the influence of publishing in your project?
G: for me publishing is beyond the book media or website, the abstract of the shelf has the potential itself, I relate with the shelf as a facilitator, a newspaper can always be revisited, you can change

L: it’s an intra-action, find something that fits so many fit at once.. News-stands, has this already been done?
G: work with traditional media and subvert it. Find old models and redesign them to current needs. No need to create new things all the time. The more conscious approach to thing

L: bigger fear? the killer?
G: insecure to not narrow it down. So many potential leads that it’s hard to choose one, not a final outcome, my work starts when it’s out there. Where people can be active. Bring able to bring that to people, if I have to hold/support it al the time it means I failed a bit. Should be readable by all, see whatever they want in it.
If it doesn’t talk to ppl, I failed. But if it does, whatever the way and the result it’s okay.

L: research topics?
G: this morning the text a lot about materiality (Johanna Drucker). Digital platforms as materials? plain text she sees as performative acts, not as finite products. Many layers, I need a case study to focus on, I love that publishing has become an active field, a lot of theory I read it’s still not something I relate with, there’s room for me to research, I already have a lot of material, literature, my main focus alongside I want to keep in my working experience, just this contact and experience I have with ppl with successes and failures. I want to make my research out of my experience, academic stuff can be a bit out of touch. It lacks a bit of practical sense sometimes.

L: how do you see yourself as the curator defining the size? or you put the curation of this to the user of the shelf?
if the shelf has limits, it’s limited physicality? if you look at public spaces you decide how much can fit and how?
G: I do not see myself as the one in control of the shelf. If I have to produce the shelf for the bb workshop, but bringing it somewhere else, it would be interesting to think about public shelf, outside of the private sphere.
Could also prototype a shelf that can work autonomously if that the way

L: interaction of ppl with the shelf?
G: I find interesting the potential bringing body of work everywhere. I don’t know what could be in it. Im excited to create a platform where ppl can say and think how to use it.

L: you’re the mediator for the possibility for the individualised shelf and put their media on?
G: I’m still unclear here. Could also make a series and give it to ppl and ask for documentation.
Shelf design based on what the person need but not making it but mediate the creation.
Would be nice if every writing stage has a different shelf

L: do you see yourself as an instructor? to be usable as a shelf? you need to instruct them?
G: I haven’t placed myself yet. Just asking ppl to use it? Im interested in

L: ppl might not make practical shelf that fit or estetically pleasing? maybe they can do it totally differently than what you thought?
G: you can’t have control on it. To be a good facilitator is a lot of planning ahead knowing what could happen.
Giving them materials, that can be assembled.

L: like Ikea but unclear instructions. They can use on their own
G: textual set of instruction and materials and see how they interpret it

L: personal but also business? two

All different leads, potential “shelf-making” need to be written and collected, archived

Notebook Transcripts

24.9.2022

"A circle (?) whose centre was a box", Nothing is Rambling, Helvetia

> circular publishing

Shelf Proposals

"Nomadic" Shelf??? peripatetic > relating to Aristotle, teaching philosophy while walking in the Lyceum
>itinerant
>learning while building together, teaching while collaborating
rover/roamer/itinerant/drifter/ramble/wander
>to wander over or through >to go from place to place, especially in a regular circuit (as a preacher or a judge) >to be carried along by currents of water or air, or by the force of circumstances (being dislodged from private shelves to put in public sphere)
tenor = the course of thought that runs through something written or spoken gist = the main or essential part of a matter
GIST-SHELF SINGULARSHELF-PUB PUBLISHELF SINGULAR SHELF THATSHELF ALTERNATIVE SHELF (occur in turn repeatedly) > as substitute alternative/other/different/possible take turns/occur in turn repeatedly
OG "Nomadic" shelf > sliding book-ends (adjustable) > best no screws
Make shelf prototypes that can be easily declined, revisited, customised.
The abstract of the shelf as a FACILITATOR
A platform for people to claim space to occupy, curate, make use of a small space in BIG WAYS.
Investigate, infiltrate public spaces?

The public shelf

>shelves in public spaces: libraries, book stores, newspaper stands, free-book shelves bookshelves on the streets (unwanted books, collections, flyers in public spaces, in community centres/ museums/cinemas/theaters/schools/cafes...
>momentary "shelves" in books fairs/brocante...
> re-imagine those shelves? > provide support

What are the steps? DESIGN OF THE SHELF > PRODUCTION OF THE SHELF > ASSEMBLING THE SHELF > CURATING THE SHELF > PERFORMING THE SHELF
SHELF INTERVENTION, when do people come in?

bookends by simon and garfunkel
buttress: "A buttress is an architectural structure built against or projecting from a wall which serves to support or reinforce the wall. Buttresses are fairly common on more ancient buildings, as a means of providing support to act against the lateral forces arising out of the roof structures that lack adequate bracing."

"sheetmetal bookend uses the weight of the books standing on its foot to clamp the bookend's tall brace the book's back"

"The word 'bookend' also used to refer to any pair of pair of items which frame and define a significant or noteworthy event or place."

Patent

Discovery

26.9.2022

Discovery of Book Support patents https://patents.google.com/patent/US186974A/en

Our current Book-ends are the Book-support of before.

patent = "a government authority or licence conforming a right or a title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude other from making, using, or selling an invention" > easily recognisable, obvious

Write satirical patents for bookends/shelf ALTERNATE > social/publishing through material/craft practice lens, like social collaboration all needs to work together or fair all-together > in relation to expected desired outcome

Publisher-run kiosk

Make "technical" description of the OG Shelf, in the spirit of [[1]]? Or more straightforward? On the now.

Sketchs

1.10.2022

First Patent: First Draft

16.10.2022

Introduction of the Social Shelf for the Leeszaal with the first satirical Patent (still WIP)

Project Proposal

First Draft

29.9.2022

Project proposal brainstorm

1 What do you want to make?
2 How do you plan to make it?
3 What is your timetable?
4 Why do you want to make it?
5 Who can help you and how?
6 Relation to previous practice
7 Relation to a larger context
8 References/bibliography

1 I’d like to work on a series of book-supports and fictional patents narrating the social and material structures of those book-supports. This would lead to a series of social interventions and workshops, in which public or private participants would be invited and involved in some stages of the book-supports’ coming to perform with others.

/// I will create a series of narrations of them, describing a shelf as a social structure. Techniques, material and assembling will be adjusted according to the context of the shelf. The patent is used to tell the story of each particular book support. For instance bookshelves on the streets, public private blending. Or publishers identity reflected in shelves at expo's. Create/curate a space for people to occupy. Subverting patent into opening rather than closing off.

2 The first stage of this project would be to research privately the material and theoretical significance of book-supports, followed by their fictional potential. Then, this research will be brought in different public contexts, discussed and finally reflected upon in a final material and writing stage (maybe a book-support handbook or situation with assessments of all the different experiments). Protocol as outcome potentially, open ended.

3 In the first trimester I’d like to focus on my material and theoretical research on my own, trying to figure out what are the entry-points for others to join the research, experience it and, in the best case scenario, benefit from it. After the Christmas break, I will make a series of book-support intervention and/or workshop in which participants will be involved. In the last trimester I’d like to focus on the outcome of this series of interventions and/or workshops, gather informations into a sort of “Book-support Handbook” to assist/guide/encourage further interventions and/or workshops.

4 Fiction is for me a great path to re-imagine social structures and ways of working or being together. Through the material research and relationships made with human-structures and material-structures (working together as “an aim towards something”), I want to explore and investigate with others, ways of working together with more empathy, in circular circuits rather than linear ones. The workshop format (1), the craft methodologies/requirements and co-working/co-thinking environment, are fertile grounds for research around alternative or fluctuating publishing ways of being, take the authority out of the hierarchy and put it into site-specific community.

/// empowering for people to build and not be tied to 'the proper way', reclaiming spaces, making public spaces welcoming. Relation to guerilla gardening, graffiti, guerilla crochet and knitting, publishing as survival, circulating work without gatekeepers or absurd thresholds like galleries or bookshops.

6 My work is a crossover between curating and facilitating other’s work within my professional practice (workshop technician/educator (2), bookbinder, editor…) and my personal practice, that is always nested within collaborative publishing platforms (books, theatre, radio, workshops, …). The investigation and prototyping of publications as a context within which the “public” has agency, evolves and extends the publication has been a main interest in my work, each publishing stage seen as a moment of craft, from the conceptualisation stage, to the designing one, production to “publication” stage, that is not seen as an end, but an ongoing process, where one leave the agency to a new set of people. The past year I’ve been very interested in developing my writing practice, trying to more thoroughly trace and record the steps taken together, methods to enable those steps and my role as a facilitator. This “background” work has become an exercise and a work itself, becoming a way to publish in a self-reflective way, offering transparency to the social structures underlaying each project.

7 See 4.

(1) that is very similar to an educational environment where reciprocity is key, the workshop-manager assists and learns, from the workshop-guest, that challenges craft with different kind of material and conceptual needs

(2) as a workshop practitioner, I like to observe how crafts create context, how makers write fiction through objects, tell stories without words.

notes

The "shelf" as a social structure
The social structure of/as the shelf

FICTION OF THE SHELF/BOOKENDS

Publisher-run shelves/bookends/book support

Public interventions of the BOOKENDS > interrupt public spaces by turning them in spaces for the "public" to occupy

C O N T I N U I T Y Reclaim certain structure of knowledge / learning / working / research

Tool workshop > empowerment > distribute agency equally throughout whole publishing process

Second Draft

16.10.2022

1 What do you want to make?
2 How do you plan to make it?
3 What is your timetable?
4 Why do you want to make it?
5 Who can help you and how?
6 Relation to previous practice
7 Relation to a larger context
8 References/bibliography

1 For this year I’d like to focus on a series of work called the Social Shelf, constitutive tools that could physically be referred to as book-supports that are theoretically a way to research and try to make collaborative-learning-tools: performative tools bringing communities to design and curate their own spaces together.

2 & 3In order to make this happen, I aim, in the first trimester to research book-supports as objects and investigate their potential as constitutive tools. After what I will design and produce a few Social Shelf prototypes (with different features, materials, accessibility) and create the Social Shelf fiction with a series of satirical patents narrated from the point of view of each of those Social Shelves in order to describe the shelf as a social structure. At the end of this process, entering the second trimester I’d like to isolate a few Social Shelves and introduce them to the public with a series of social interventions and workshops. In the third trimester, I’d like to gather all the information I have on the Social Shelf, what I have learned from that process, what can be changed or should remain and potentially make a handbook with that information and documentation to encourage others to learn from and further that research.

4 Fiction is for me a great path to re-imagine social infrastructures and ways of working or being together. I want to make use of a non-human perspective to give the tools needed to people to reclaim space in what can be, precarious situations and empower communities. Through the material research and relationships made with human-structures and material-structures. I want to explore and investigate with others, ways of working together with more empathy, in circular circuits rather than linear ones. The workshop format, the craft methodologies/requirements and co-working/co-thinking environment, is a fertile ground for research around alternative or fluctuating publishing ways of being: to take the authority out of the hierarchy and put it into site-specific community.

5 I’d like to stay grounded in this research by taking direct inspiration and embrace continuity in my experience as a bookbinder-workshop manager. My colleagues, Miquel Hervás Goméz and Ott Metusala have always been of great support and inspiration in my pedagogical interests and material research, themselves being very implicated in creating DIY tools through the BB (Bookbinding Workshop) channel and supporting community-publishing-projects in all forms. Altogether we have been exploring channels at the crossings between tools/community/pedagogy/empowerment/publication.
I have been wanting to get deeper in my writing and would appreciate any advice, critique, tips or correspondence in this area, but don’t have an exact idea of who could help me in that regards.
Last year, I sensed at different occasions that Manetta had a lot to share with me on the subject of social performative platforms of work, being investigation or practice. The references given to me last year were very exciting to discover. In general, I have a hard time knowing specifically who can help me yet, I like to get inputs from very diverse entry-points and unexpected ones. I look forward to introduce the project in the second trimester to people foreign to it.

6 My work is a crossover between curating and facilitating other’s works within my professional practice (workshop technician/educator, bookbinder, editor…) and my personal practice, that is always nested within collaborative publishing platforms (books, theatre, radio, workshops, …).
The investigation and prototyping of publications as a context within which the “public” has agency, evolves and extends the publication, has been a main interest in my work, each publishing stage seen as a moment of craft, from the conceptualisation stage, to the designing one, production to “publication” stage that is not seen as an end, but an ongoing process, where one leaves the agency to a new set of people.
The design of the box in Special Issue 17 last year with Jian Haake is a good simple example of this intention materially: we designed the publication in a “universal” way, each box had been made with the same material, closed with the same stickers and engraved with the same text. But we introduced a feature on the inside that would make the box personal through its interaction with the public: the box’s modular shape enabled each and every one to open the box as they wished, once on the inside a set of new stickers with different shapes were given for people to close their box again in their desired fashion.
The past year I’ve been very interested in developing my writing practice, trying to more thoroughly trace and record the steps taken together, methods to enable those steps and my role as a facilitator. This “background” work has become an exercise and a work itself, becoming a way to publish in a self-reflective way, offering transparency to the social structures underlaying each project.
Good examples of this progress are the different textual material I have produced from one issue to the other, evolving from [in Issue 16], becoming a [voice in Special Issue 17] to become a [critical voice in Special Issue 18], trying each time to be an empathetical yet pro-active portrait of work stages to help the group grow and let go.
In April/May 2022, for a project called [Headquarters], I was commissioned to write a text that would perform female and queer labor in workshops and environment, and tried to explore those newly acquired writing methods to explore a non-human voice in a modular structured prosaic text. Last month, in September, I presented at an [[2]] in collaboration with Mariana Jurado and Carmen Gray in Amsterdam a work called the “Office Rules”, a growing rewritten transcript of all our meetings towards the exhibition as a fictional guideline to the space and story we had put together, that had become a sort of guideline into how to successfully fail to work together. To temper with existing materials and grow beyond it, explore its potential, transcend its reality is for me an exciting resource I want to bring to others.

7 See 4.

8 The exhibitions in which I have taken part the past year with the XPUB, the Headquarters at puntWG led by Olga Micińska or with the Office for Small Decision Making at Plan B have been very inspiring and led me to this project with arms wide open.
The series of tool workshop we have been doing for a couple of years now with the Bookbinding Workshop at the Rietveld is one of my biggest reference in the pedagogical and social matter of this platform. Recently I have come across book-support patents from the 19th century which I found very inspiring in the sort of romantic yet excessively administrative rhetoric they contain. This motivated me to write satirical patents, in an ambiguous fashion.
I have found a lot of inspiration in publications around the matter of publishing or of fiction as a way to transcend social dead-ends. Some of my latest readings:

Bibliography

Patent
(i) Barnard, W.S (1877) Improvement in Booksupport, United States Patent Office

Books
(i) Cras, Sophie (sous la direction de) (2022) Ecrits d'Artistes sur l'Économie, Éditions B42
(ii) Barette, Lucie (2022) Corset de Papier, éditions divergences
(iii) Gilbert, Annette (2016) Publishing as Artistic Practice, Sternberg Press
(iv) Flusser, Vilém (2002) Petite Philosophie du design [Essai], Éditions Circé
(v) Calvino, Italo (1983) If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Vintage Classics
(vi) De Munck, Marlies & Gielen, Pascal (2022) Kwetsbaarheid, Valiz
(vii) Klement, Elisabeth & Pappa, Laura (2017) Signals from the Periphery, Estonian Academy of Arts Press


Articles
(i) Drucker, J (2013) 'Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface' in DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol.7, No.1