<nettime-ann> Urgent Publishing, New Strategies in Post-Truth Times, Amsterdam/Arnhem (NL), May 15-17, 2019

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

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http://networkcultures.org/makingpublic/conference/

Institute of Network Cultures,  ArtEZ University of the Arts  and Willem de Kooning Academy are happy to invite you to Urgent Publishing, a conference with presentations and workshops about publishing strategies in post-truth times.

memes as means – federated publishing 

– post-humanist writing –

 critical design – #synchronicityofparasites

The 21st century has witnessed the liberation of publishing practices. Digital technologies have brought the printing press to the masses. Who gets to publish and when, the medium used and the channels through which information is consumed have all changed drastically. An ever accelerating development of emergent technologies has lead to a wide array of emergent publishing practices, be it in the form of longreads, vlogs, zines, collaborative platforms or print-on-demand – all the while leaving the status of and love for paper books in tact. A plethora of tools, applications, infrastructures, models, and hacks thus makes many futures of publishing possible. How to realize sustainable, high-quality alternatives within this domain of post-digital publishing?

Liberation comes with its downsides: while the availability of publishing technologies have helped bring different voices onto the stage, connect new communities and identify hegemonic intersections of power, they have also played a role in bringing about what is known as the ‘post-truth era’. Critical interventions have been somewhat self-referential and concentrated on the needs and demands of people and communities engaged in the history of art or avantgarde publishing. In the meantime the scale and scope of once emergent publishing practices have exploded, leaving a disenchanted public to scavenge the rubble of breaking fake news stories, information pollution and broken links. Speed and availability of publications may have increased, but the quality of the information presented and of its containers lags behind.

What is needed is a break with the old, closed pre-digital era of gatekeepers or high entry costs. Publishers, writers, researchers, designers and developers need new strategies for urgent publishing. A critical set of discourses, practices and productions to intervene in the public debate with high-quality information that can be issued in a timely manner and that will reach the desired audiences. The development of such a toolbox of strategies has been the focus of diverse critical cultures that have interacted and experimented with publishing in the last two decades. Concentrated efforts directed towards furthering these practices within the context of the current information age will open up robust futures for a publishing domain that remains forever emergent – and urgent.

How can designers, developers, artists, writers and publishers intervene in the public debate and counter misinformation in a meaningful and relevant way? What are new publishing strategies for our current media landscape? How to design for urgency without succumbing to an accelerated hype cycle? Join us for three days of discussions, explorations and experiments at Urgent Publishing.

When: 15-17.05.19

Where: Amsterdam (15 May) & Arnhem (16-17 May)

For whom: students, designers, developers, artists, writers, publishers and researchers who want to experiment with new forms of hybrid publishing.

Admission: free

Program

(more names and project presentations will be added soon)

15.05.19 Pre-conference Night

19:00 – 20:30  @Academische Club, Amsterdam

Oudezijds Achterburgwal 235, 1012 DL, Amsterdam

Post-Truth Publishing

Inventing new ways of publishing between fast populism and slow academia. How to counter misinformation and stimulate open public discussions through a speedy publishing process, high quality content and spot-on positioning?

With Padmini Ray Murray, Morten Paul, Nikola Richter and Clara Balaguer, moderated by Florian Cramer.

16.05.19 Conference

09:30 – 18:00 @ArtEZ University of the Arts

Utrechtsestraat 85, 6811 LW, Arnhem

09:30 – 10:00 Opening by Nishant Shah

10:00 – 12:00 Session 1: The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction

With Janneke Adema & Gary Hall, Lídia Pereira and Axel Andersson, moderated by Miriam Rasch.

Modularity in form and process, after proving itself in software development, has conquered the world at large. Working with modules is efficient and neatly fits the dynamics of the market. It also serves the ongoing presentation of our social media-self, allowing us to build up a never-to-be-finished modular portrait through the different platforms, communicating in bits and pieces, ever more fierce, hyped-up and snappy. Efficient medium, efficient messages. 

Still, modularity also holds a promise of critique. Adopting modularity in publishing can mean to challenge myths of origin and originality, authoritarian authorship, single voiced narratives, hero perspectives and definitive truths. Instead of building one block on top of the other, adding power, value, meaning in a lineair fashion, can we think of the modular publication as a container holding multiple blocks and thus – possibilities? 

What can a critical, post-individualistic, perhaps even post-humanistic modularity mean for research, writing, publishing and reading? What potentialities of collectivity, collaboration and commons does it set free? How would that challenge existing roles and practices in the publishing process? Can we devise a ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction’ – one that helps to make thought-through and valuable publications, holding grains of knowledge and experiences of various kinds and species, which can be laid out in different ways and directions, by different readers following different paths through the modules? ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ Something to read.

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch break

13:00 – 15:00 Session 2: Memes as Means

With Isabel Löfgren and Clara Balaguer, moderated by Inte Gloerich.

In the memeverse different rules around aesthetics and communication apply. The tackier the visual style, the better. However a truly tacky and tired meme will be discarded and banished. What makes a meme stick and resonate, how can it nest in our brains and onto our retinas so effectively that we can conjure it up effortlessly in our online and offline communication?

However trivial and frivolous the meme might seem, its function as a cultural and communicative object deserves investigation. The meme can bear witness to shifts in language and cultural norms. Memes can function as political agent: spreading like a virus and changing sentiment, become a talking point, and set an agenda. Are memes the ammunition of online culture wars, and have they contributed to the normalization of the alt-right? Should we study these symbols and tropes, or focus on creating our own?

The ubiquity of memes in our online communication affects our visual literacy, we learn new codes and formats, and new visual representation of our lived experience. What can we learn from memes as a form of communication, and how can it inform our publishing practice and strategies? 

15:00 – 15:30 Break

15:30 – 17:30 Session 3: The Afterlife of the Publication

With Alice Twemlow, Marc van Elburg and Krista Jantowski, moderated by Geert Lovink.

“It is […] crucial not just to limit oneself to the design of individual publications as such, but to consider the constellation of formats and platforms available, the mutual influences of other media and the active role of users, who, although not all publishers, may certainly be more than mere carriers.” Silvio Lorusso, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Publishing’

What remains of a publication after it has been published? In this session we look at the status of a publication in the post-production phase. Fragments of published works live on in search engines, on different content platforms or in new physical spaces: aggregated, fragmented and re-contextualized. Does it survive and thrive or will it suffer a slow, unimportant death? Some works keep circulating, others do not. Does the materiality, positioning and design of the work influence this? How can we design for sustainability of the publication? 

We need to consider the constellation of readers, publishers, designers and editors. Why are we publishing? Who reads, and what does it mean to read nowadays? When and where is the publication positioned, and why are aspects of time and space important? When we shake off the idea of the book as a static object, we can start to look at other aspects of publishing: the social, the emotional, the material and the spiritual. Let the echoes of the afterlife reverberate through new publishing strategies in the era of post-truth.

17:30 Closing

17.05.19 Workshops

10:00 – 16:30 @ ArtEZ University of the Arts

Utrechtsestraat 85, 6811 LW, Arnhem

10:00 – 12:00 Workshops part 1

12:00 – 13:30 Lunch + presentation

13:30 –  15:30 Workshops part 2

15:30 – 16:30 Plenary closing

You can register for one of the workshops:

Workshop 1: Say it ain’t so by Amy Pickles and Cristina Cochior

Say it ain’t so is a sound to voice to speech making, recording, arranging and announcing workshop.

The workshop will be split into three distinct parts:

1. The production and bundling of sounds from non-digital sources through group work and individual recording. We will produce work in our throats and transmit it with our mouths.
2. We will make use of speech to text software to move voice to speech, and incorporate the errors that emerge during the transformation.
3. With the basic computer text processing technique called Bag of Words, we will create new orders looking at frequencies of – what the algorithm perceives to be! – words.

We will think through dialogues and sounds that do not make it into writing, in attempt to bring back what Ursula K Le Quin feels is necessary in a story “conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc, within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle … its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.” (Le Guin p153)

The day will culminate in presentations of our Bags, new forms we make in groups of the debris from our workshop. How can we disrupt the algorithmic tracking of our voices and language in the ‘cacophony of digitally distributed voices’ (Dankert & Panekoek) in which we reside, where everywhere ‘directing attention becomes a political act’.

Materials Needed – a recording device such as a phone and/or laptop.

Workshop 2: All Sources Are Broken: a Post-Digital Reading Group by Labor Neunzehn

Where does the networking purpose of hyperlinks actually starts in offline texts? What happens to the text when we decide to explore the  hyperlinks and the online media resources which are there referenced? We all use the Internet every day to retrieve tons of information, without paying too much attention to the sources. In this workshop we will try to radically connect research with reading strategies. Participants will receive a quick overview of digital archival best practices and dive into ASAB, a web-based application and an artist experiment about books, hyperlinks obsolescence and reading strategies developed by Labor Neunzehn. The project considers how hypertext and print already coexist (as opposed to one superseding the other), through a navigable archive of collected reference material that visitors can both navigate and shape themselves. Participants will learn how to create a profile and use ASAB’s main backend features to cross-reference book citations and online media sources. We will be reading books together, just like in a reading group, but gradually shifting from the material to the digital world, in order to explore the deferred space between offline and online, its delay and decay.

Link to the project: http://allsourcesarebroken.net

Materials and requirements: Participants are required to bring their own laptops with Chrome or Firefox browsers installed in advance.

Workshop 3: Surgencies: Writing Your Personal Protest Statement by NXS

How do we consume? How do we get influenced? How do we protest?

This workshop is aimed at creating a collective lexicon of personal viewpoints towards the influence of the ubiquitous technology around us, by drawing attention to those implementations that are so vowed into our daily lives that they normally go unnoticed. The intangibility and unclarity of where and how exactly digital technology works and affects us, creates tension. By investigating and collectively mapping emotional responses to technology and their behavioral implications each participant extracts inspiration for a personal protest statement, that will be published in the directly surrounded public space.

The collective “research through making” approach mixes fast speed visual and textual assignments with performative elements that require quick responses that do not allow over-rationalization or over-explanation of behind lying constructs and promote production of associative and subconscious ideas. By exposing the seemingly trivial daily urgencies in life, we can stop asking questions and make strong and profound statements to counter them.

Materials needed: none

17.05.19 #synchronicityofparasites

18:00 – 22:00 @Motel Spatie

Hisveltplein 21-35, 6826 EM Arnhem

The evening #synchronicityofparasites is organised by Marc van Elburg of the Zinedepo in Motel Spatie, Arnhem. Working with theories on the parasite as a metaphor for media culture, Marc found himself in a hotel in Ljubljana one day right next to an artspace called P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. which he did not previously know of. This coincidence can be explained by the inherent synchronicity of parasites, which is probably also why we planned our publishing conference on the exact same day as Marc’s event!

Join us for a dinner prepared by People’s Kitchen SPOON at Motel Spatie in Presikhaaf.

Speakers include:

• Anders M Gullestad, author of ‘Literature and the Parasite’
• Anna Polett, author of Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture
• Wilfried Houjebek, psychogeographer, Cryptoforestry

The evening includes a 5-course Mexican dinner which is free if you hand in your conference badge.

Contact for more information: Kelly Mostart (kelly@networkcultures.org)

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