↺. Project Proposal

what do I want to make?

↺ publication ↺ glossary ↺ system ↺ experiment ↺ manifesto ↺

A publication that is a glossary, a system, an experiment, and a manifesto.

It is a publication that uses the idea of a glossary as its own core. It is a glossary that is conceived as a system of interconnected words. It is a system that suggests reflections and draws paths by experimenting. It is an experiment that points out possible futures for small publishing practices on arts.

The plan is to use the structure of a glossary to cross-references between words. These words are gonna be selected from the already existing publishing vocabulary but also from other vocabularies inside other realms of knowledge such as anthropology, science, cybernetics, and philosophy. This aims to highlight problematics and bring up questions, experiments, and examples over methods, processes, and infrastructure.

Both vocabularies come from books I have been reading, projects I'm interested in, and also personal experiences working individually and collaboratively inside the field of art publishing.

How do I plan to make it?

Challenging the glossary structure

To challenge the idea of the glossary itself, I plan to unpack its structure and recognize which aspects of it are useful and which ones would be interesting to experiment with. It is interesting to me to explore what is beyond the definition of a word regarding the ontological possibilities.

Some of the questions I'm planning to reflect on in this stage of the process are:

↺ What does it mean conceptually to write down a list of terms, words, and explanations?

↺ How a vertical and closed structure of terminology can be conceived as a horizontal and open one?

↺ What is the voice of these annotations on the words, who is speaking?

↺ When constructing knowledge, how to not prioritize written language?

Glossary of Glossaries

As a HackPack that explored the glossary structure I proposed a collective workshop of making a 'glossary of glossaries' by collecting, reflecting, writing and annotating on glossaries.

{diagram} {photos}

Out-puts to have in mind:

↺. The alphabetical hierarchy

↺. Explanation beyond written Language

↺. The location of it inside a publication

↺. The power of collective & multiple interpretations

Gathering Nodes

The words of the glossary are gonna be gathered by reading, writing, surfing, drawing, conversing, and reflecting on my own practice as an artist and publisher, but also in close collaboration with my publishing partner, Maria Paris.

So far, I have the glossary just as a list of words, and some of them have already an annotation. The idea is to start annotating on them and then do an exercise of filtering. I still don't know how many are they going to be and how it's going to be the style of its annotations. I'm working on it.

{show the markdown}

For the technical side, the workflow for gathering the material is using markdown, etherpad, pandoc, html and css. Concretely, I'm writing down all the words on a etherpad using markdown language and converting them into html using a python script that calls the markdown file via API and process is it with the library pandoc. This creates a website that is styled using css.

One of the intentions of the project is to start creating the glossary in a way that lets me manipulate and transform easily into different materials and mediums. That is why I'm using the web-to-print flow to be able to experiment with the words in a hybrid way.

{show the website}

Weaving threads

As an exercise of making this project a tool for creation. I'm planning to 'thread'(make connections) some nodes of the system to suggest routes over it. That would give me the opportunity to experiment and give concrete outcomes out of it. Not to prove a sort of modularity, but to entangle the multiplicity of it, being able to ground it down by giving reasons, materials, and ideas for the actual publishing practice.

These threads are attempts to activate the glossary as a manifesto.

↺. How to not make this project a 'ready to use' modular structure?

Translating

Lately, I've been thinking about the possibilities to construct this glossary in different languages, more concretely English and Spanish. But, due to the limitation of time, maybe this can be something to solve at the end of the process if it's possible.

Why am I doing this?

I'm currently starting a publishing project with Maria called attempt, and we would like to state ourselves paths and resources to focus on. This project would be the continuity of an ongoing practice that I've been developing as an artist and publisher, but most of all would be the way to digest, ruminate and **circulate** the experiences, tools, and projects I was part of the last year of the course.

Therefore, this project is an attempt to state a path inside my own publishing practice, because I believe it is necessary to state our mission as contemporary actors inside the publishing realm. Although this path may be one and multiples at the same time, those have to come with the strong idea of "creating with" in a collective interconnected world.