Makingitpublic-report

Makingitpublic-report
Name	Making it Public
Start Date	Monday 2nd November 2015
End Date	Wednesday 4th November 2015
Organisers	Annet Dekker, Andre Castro
Guest speakers	Aymeric Mansoux, Amy Wu, Sandra Fauconnier, Micheal Murtaugh, Pia Pol, Florian Cramer
Thematic Project page link	https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Thematic-Making_It_Public

Decision made to return to the groups that prepared assignments for each of the days: Each group takes care of reporting all of the activities for each day: The reading assignment, the practice sessions, the speakers for that day.

Introduction & Conclusions will be produced after the first writing session along with the final report on how we decided to proceed with the actual thematic assignment of creating an epub.

Distribution Networks — Monday 2nd Nov

reading assignment

texts that informed the exercises
texts that informed the exercises
texts that informed the exercises

speakers

Thesis, argument and conclusion research strands

practice outline and report

Day 1 https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/day_1

Writing the archive — Tuesday 3rd Nov

http://stuff2233.club:9001/p/PZI-making-it-public-report-writing

reading assignment

Mathew Fuller: It looks like you're writing a letter: Microsoft Word
Geoff Cox, Nicolas Malevé, Michael Murtaugh: Archiving the Data body, human and nonhuman agency in the documents of Kurenniemi
Lori Emerson: Reading, Writing Interface

Assignment Group: Colm, Pleun, Sara

In relation to the texts assigned for this day, we decided to focus on Mathew Fuller's hypothesis which takes McLuhan's statement, "A society is defined by its amalgamtes, not by its tools". This was the starting point.

We collected a set of tools whose functions are very specific and uncommon among average users: an extension grip used for a cordless drill, two clasp rings meant to hold pages together, a bike chain link tool, a radiator key, and a disc from a label making machine. We first split the classroom into two groups, asking one of the groups to step out of the room. We then instructed each member of the remaining group to choose one tool and prepare an intruction manual for it. As most of the people in the group didn't have any prior knowledge as to what the items actually were or what function they served, the instruction manual was left up to imagination.

Then, each member of the first group had to explain the instructions they had prepared to a person from the second group but without showing them the actual tool. Then, finally, the person receiving the information had to repeat it to the whole class. The objects described by the end of the exercise, of course, had nothing to do with the original objects: a bike chain link tool became a pinching device, and a label disk became a device meant to communicate with aliens!

In this assignment, there were several layers of transmission: a first layer between us and the first group, then between the first group and the second group, and then between the second group and the whole class. And in each of those layers of transmission, a power structure revealed itself between those who behold information and those who receive it; those who are capable of reavealing through concealing, and concealing through revealing, as Lori Emerson would describe in "Reading, Writing Interface".

Reflecting on the argument on tools and society, Fuller states that a program like Microsoft Word, for example, somehow defines our society; not only by providing an excess of tools, but also by providing the paths between those tools, how they intermix, the boundaries and correlations between their functions, and especially, their relation to the users. In this sense, Microsoft Office somehow offers a seires of interfaces or points of transmission on several levels. The result being, an over cluttered, illogical toolbox, with many overlaps and double uses, which just confuses users, and simply means they end up using a small handful of icons repeatedly, and never explore other functions.

We live in a computing world that drowns its users with an excess of tools, who's communications are locked in a 'user-friendly' yet closed-off interface; a strategy that places the user inside an ideology of obscured information, distorting reality by convincing the latter that this is exactly what the notion of "user-friendly device" actually is.

speakers

Sandra Fauconnier - Writing Wikimedia

Thesis, argument and conclusion research strands Sandra Fauconnier is a Wikimedian. This is the term employed to name contributers to Wikipedia. Sandra's career has always involved net art / media art in some way, between the introduction that Annet gave and the very beginning of Sandra's presentation, we hear briefly about her experience at V2 here in Rotterdam, but very quickly get into the topic of the talk.

Thesis

How editing collective knowledge can be achieved by separation into language communities and functionnal splitting. Sandra gives an overview of the functionnings of Wikipedia. She calles it an ecosystem. A scheme with multiple parts that interdepend on each other. One of the key features of the workings of Wikipedia, is that all tools are developped to be used inside and outside of the context of Wikipedia.org itself. The project constantly acknowledges it's origin by maintaining and developping the tools necesary to achieve collective and individual infomation banks, collectively. From Wikimedia itself:

Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Through various projects, chapters, and the support structure of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia strives to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

Argument

If everybody tries to contribute to all aspects of the building of a wikipedia page, the system does not work properly. A good page should be an amalgamation of multiple editors, multiple sources, and a discussion on the quality of the page. So, who writes Wikipedia? The speaker explains a list of techniques that the wiki community has designed for itself to continue its project. An interesting point is the one of The fundamental principles of Wikipedia summarized in five "pillars":

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and the community of people who build it
Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view
Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute
Editors should treat each other with respect and civility
Wikipedia has no firm rules

Conclusion

Ever changing, ever evolving, self governed model of building has proven its power. Many issues still have to be resolved, for example the monochromatic aspect of the community of wikipedia editors, who have a strong tendency to be young, white, western, male humans, explaining the lack of information available for Asian, African and oriental culture in general. An other issue that needs to be solved is the lack of space for original content. Typically a Wikipedia page, is a record of available knowledge. An encyclopedia is tertiary in a certain maner. So for information to be accepted into Wikipedia it should have previous publication references. This is slowly becoming an issue because of the distributive nature of the platform, it could be interesting, in some cases, for original content to appear on Wikipedia, but this debate of the inclusionnists versus the rejectionnists on Wikipedia is long standing.

Michael Murtaugh - Active Archives; Erkki Kurenniemi: In 2048

Project outline

How should one go about sorting through Terabites of data generated by a document obsessed artist?

Erkki Kurenniemi has documented his life but not archived it in any traditional sense, and didn’t develop a systematic model for what he calls a template for all human life. In his profound techno-enthusiasm, he relies on future quantum computers to make sense of it all. By 2048, Erkki states that the technology will be ready for the advent of this new artificial form of intelligence. The quantum computer will sort by itself the documents he has been recording, capturing, filming, photographing, drawing, and talking about.
Usually when invited to work on an archive, the material has been already processed, ordered, and a classification scheme is more or less decided. Our role as “active archivists” is often to negotiate between the classifying scheme already in place and the resistance of the data to comply with it. In this case, however, it is left to us to investigate the material and try to understand its specific character and qualities.

Argument

Software as an interlocutor: By using file formats, we give the programs a taxonomy of objects with which it can interact. A text format will allow the processing of lines, verbs and expressions, while an image format allows the processing of colors, contours, shapes. On Erkki’s hard drive, we found many files saved in “historical” formats and regularly transformed and exported. Through the various transformations, the taxonomy of the file changes. A text can behave as an image or an image can masquerade as a text.

Links

practice outline and report

To decide on the goal and philosophy of the final e-publication, we split up in the same groups as we did in the monday practice, to each come up with one. To later as a single group discus what would be the best approach to take on.

Divided into the same 3 teams of yesterday:

having ePub as your minimum final output format.
Stipulate a goal for your publication.
write-down all the steps that you'll need to go through in order to achieve the final publication.
write-down the limitations that you envision.

Group: Colm, Nataliya, Pleun

Automation

Goals: automation, sustainability, updatability.

A reusable recipe to sort through the documentation projects, for them to be able to be handled and outputed at any perticular moment in a collective manner. This recipe is the central element and it uses different conventions and editorial decisions to form the publication.

Therefore every result of the recipe could be different. The order could change, or the amount of content. The output wouldn't be stuck in time and place, but evolve with the input.

There would be certain rules of how each type of media would be presented implemented in the script. For example, for the offline usage of video the 'script' would automatically screenshot every few seconds.

("The book of the future will not simply imitate the forms of a codex migrated onto new platforms ... It will arise from ananalysis of the functions of each element of design for the purpose of navigation, orientation, representation, referenceand commentary and then rethink the ways the capacities of networked electronic environments can extent thesefunctionalities and encode them in a innovative approach to design." – Johanna Drucker Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production.)

Group: Julia, Samira, Sara, Stone

Distortion

Goal: Layers, distortions and loops

The group thought it would be a good idea to take a step back and think of what exactly we are expected to produce and what would that process mean in a broader sense. The act of documenting a documentation of a document seemed like a loop that carries within itself a series of distortions, extractions, and a continuous dialogue between reveailng and concealing information.

In this sense, despite the general belief that a document is meant to grasp or capture a work and give it a fixed space in memory, we felt that the document served as an apparatus of modulation and a continuous shift of meaning and form.

Key ideas for the behaviour of the content:

Layers, distortion and loops
Loops of information: which came first; work or documentation of work? something like the egg and chicken situation
Continuous mobility
Extraction and Reduction
Distortion and modulation
Revealing, concealing

Group: Chloe, Nadine, Max

Narrative

Goal: Creating a storyline as a relation between the projects

Thinking things along a narrative, a story. A more organic relation between the items. Using a story line to guide the content flow.

Content ideas:

   * Structure >< Template

   * The folders and subfolders of the HDs being what defines the levels of headings.

Andre gave a refence to a project that used narrative to address a big geopolitical subject: http://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Discussion, Conclusions

During the discussion we figured there where two main poles of ideas, in which one was very practical and technical and the other very philosophical:

   The first group proposed a technical system of templates which are updatable to automatically create new outputs with each year of new input.  
   The second group looked into what it means to make a documentation of a documentation.
   The third group might function as a bridge between these two poles.

While these poles seemed far apart at first, we soon discovered they weren't far apart at all and might even be two sides of the same coin.

Digital & Hybrid Publishing — Wednesday 4th Nov

reading assignment

texts that informed the exercises
texts that informed the exercises
texts that informed the exercises

speakers

Working on the pad: http://piratepad.net/b5pzPdKFOF

PIA POL

Pia Pol, publisher at Valiz, talked about going digital from a publisher's perspective and her experience in this area. Valiz specializes in books mainly in the field of contemporary art, photography, design of architecture. In her talk she addresses background of publishing, advantages and disadvantages about e-publishing and the role of digital books in modern reading culture.

Thesis and arguments:

Publishing ebooks is not as easy or cheap as it may seem. Most of the time production costs are as big or even bigger than those of paper publications, if you take in account that the digital book market is only 5 percent of the entire market, there is a lot of discussions about the necessity of production an ebook as a addition to printed one. Nevertheless there are obvious advantages to ebooks, especially when it comes to distribution and accessibility. Various other advantages were mentioned, such as searchability of the content, its interactive potential and the nearly none-existing storage costs.

Conclusion:

Valiz still tries to be a relevant publishing house in the Netherlands. For them this means covering all the steps of production and to work closely together with all parties like the author and the designer. To achieve this and to reduce production costs projects like the hybrid publishing toolkit are very interesting for them. Designers can now work simultaneously with the author and the work of each party can influence each other. They also tried to coax the author to write his text in markdown language because this would encourage the connection of the parties even more. She stayed out that as a publisher they have to watch the progression of the digital book carefully and be need to adapt to the upcoming changes.

FLORIAN CRAMER

Florian Cramer, theorist and critical researched, presented his point of view on how changed the role of curator and the whole term of curation in recent days. In the beginning curator was an Invisible bureaucrat hidden away in offices far away protecting collections. Originally the word 'curator' was not connected to the art system, but to natural science museums. However, in the 1990-s the term 'curation' gained new meaning and curator became new type of cultural worker in the art business. As the result curating also became a subject in art education. Sometimes the role of the curator becomes even more important than that of the artist.

Thesis and arguments:

Curator as a collector of objects and ideas, who establishes the policies whether the piece fits the collection or not. The collection became a new type of artwork. As in the music industry, DJ becomes new rockstar mixing and curating content, rather than creating it. Nevertheless collection should be stored and preserved. In terms of digital store it online does not guaranty safety. Cloud services, new collectors networks such as Pinterest, Tumblr are dependent on politics of the owner companies and the economic profits. As a prominent example, Florian mentioned Geocities. A webhosting service that was bought by Yahoo in 1999. Only a little later the company decided to shut the service down and to delete all the websites that were hosted on their servers.

Conclusion:

An epub could be a handy tool for digital collections, providing various possibilities for different kinds of media and being independent of the internet.

ANDRE CASTRO

André Castro is a media artist focusing on e-pub, hybrid publication and offline libraries. His lecture was dedicated to various opportunities e-pub format and hybrid publishing offer for artists and writers.

Thesis:

The main feature of hybrid publishing is multiple outputs from a single workflow. One content source leads to many different formats as output. Another advantage of hybrid publishing is that work on the source and work on the design can be simultaneous. This means the interaction between writing and design is becoming more intense. The template can be reused this results in more flexibility and lower costs than traditional publications.

Conclusion:

In terms of these features, numbers of hybrid publishing tools and viewers have came out, such as Pandoc and Calibre. And also, according to the feature of open standard, publishers and/or designers are able to edit the content and styling with different languages like HTML and CSS. As a result, users could made their own e-books in a easy way.

practice outline and report

“Distortion as inevitable consequence of Documentation” After two and half days of theoretical lectures and discussion sessions, we came up with the idea that combines all three approaches into one solid concept. We are looking at the process as our subject, which seeps into our method as well as design. Documentation of documentation of document creates distortion and buries original object and its attributes under the layers of documentation specificities and its media attributes. Nevertheless, our strategy does not condemn documentation as a negative thing. It simply considers documentation to remain in flux, and the values evolve, it becomes different not necessarily negative or positive.

How Being focused on the process of documentation, we decided to pick scanning as a method and general strategy to work with content. Scanning as a process is very fragmented yet systematic with the aim of creating an entity. When you are scanning the scanner has no idea of the whole, the image is that of the fragmented images. Scanning as a concept could be implemented different ways on different types of documentation objects. To underline disruption while documenting, while we are scanning something, there exists the framework - even it is a successful or unsuccessful - just doing it once.