User:Nadiners/ unpublishing

Project Proposal very very Draft

An individual unpublishing his own material is considered to be his right, an organisation or a nation unpublishing someone else’s material can be seen as censoring. A group burning another’s material can lead to murder. (Heinrich Heine "Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.”)

This thematic comes from a reversal of my previous topics of interest, where I dealt with the revealing or highlighting unpublished or leaked documents. In one project I collected three different documents relating to drone attack, one being the instruction manual, the second a transcript from leaked audio files of pilots talking during an attack in Afghanistan, and the third was a list of the resulting number of deaths from each attack that was recorded. In another project I created a food wiki where I would collect processed factory packed foods and divide the information found on the packing (on the surface) to information about the corporation (under the surface) in order to make it easier for consumers to know what is in and where their products come from, at the same time revealing the industries secrets.

I would like to begin researching this topic through visual traces of unpublished material, meaning things that have been published but then removed from the public sphere. An example would be traces of a torn down poster, or a website leaving a text saying “this post has been removed”. In parallel to making a collection of visual ‘proof’ I will research unpublishing in history, examples that only have written traces, or remain in the collective memory.

At the moment I don’t have specific content I would like to unpublish, however I am interested in the act of it. It might be interesting to create traces of unpublished documents that have never existed, but to get theories and reactions around it. Leaving the content to be unnecessary and the act to have a bigger impact.