Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital MediaObject from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife by MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim)

Open Humanities Press is delighted to announce the first publication in our new MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series, edited by Joanna Zylinska.

Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital MediaObject from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife by MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim)

Remixing Persona is comprised of two components: a visual manifesto that doubles as a theoretical e-reader and a work of music video art. In building this project, the artists collaboratively investigate persona-making, performance-thinking, and applied remixology. Playfully presenting their research as an intergenerational and intercultural ‘research band’ named MALK (Mark Amerika / Laura Kim), both artists, individually and as a performance duo, bring their own unique experiences and ontologically filtered ‘ways of remixing’ to their intermedia art, writing and performance practice.

The research questions the artists initially presented to themselves were unconventional: ‘Who am I this time?’ ‘What does it mean to share a sense of humor?’ ‘What is an otherworldly aesthetic sensibility?’ The artists were not interested in coming up with answers per se, but in using their artist skills to deploy both intuitive and improvisational performances that would generate a set of primary source material to remix into their creative project. This was when they decided to form MALK and began creating the Digital Afterlife music video artwork as a conceptual tool to investigate persona-making as a meta-practice. The culminating field of recombinatory expression that informs the production of this imaginary digital media object is an inversion of their practice-based research conducted in the TECHNE Lab at the University of Colorado.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Remixing Persona is freely available at:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/remixing-persona/ 

Paper Struggles & Public Library and the Property Form: Exhibition and Seminar

Paper Struggles & Public Library and the Property Form

The exhibition and the seminar will take place at:

Raven Row, 56 Artillery Ln, London

Exhibition opening: Monday, December 9th, 18.30-21.00

Remains open: Tuesday and Wednesday, 11.00-21.00

Seminar: Tuesday, December 10th, 10.30-13.30, guest speakers: Balász Bodó & Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, seminar registration: http://tiny.cc/public_library

Post Office Research Group, Centre for Postdigital Cultures

Coventry University

https://postoffice.media

Exhibition “Paper Struggles”

The exhibition documents how the struggles over access to knowledge in the digital realm are reflected in the world of print and paper. The digital access has expanded the volume of available text by orders of magnitude compared to the days of print. Yet, paper remains the preferred format of reading for many students, scholars and researchers across the globe. Copying on paper is also often the most affordable way of obtaining texts. Struggles over access can thus be seen as struggles over (abundance of) paper. This status of paper in a digital age serves as a starting point for the exhibition, which tells the story of the uneven and messy world of knowledge today.

The exhibition includes five documentary and artistic works:

1. Rameshwari Photocopy Services legal case
2. Kenneth Goldsmith: “Printing out the Internet”
3. Monoskop: “Architecture” & “Anthropocene”
4. “Piracy Project”, a collaboration between Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr
5. "Memory of the World, Catalog by Slowrotation"

Conceived by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, on the invitation of Kaja Marczewska.

We wish to thank: Alex Sainsbury, the technical staff at Raven Row, Rosemary Grennan, MayDay Rooms, Lawrence Liang, Rabindra Patra, Shubigi Rao, Mohammad Salemy, Dušan Barok, Kenneth Goldsmith, Andrea Francke & Eva Weinmayr.

Seminar "Public Library and the Property Form"

The seminar will explore how intellectual property in the digital realm has impacted the institution of the public library and its mission to provide access to knowledge to all members of society. While the Internet has enabled a massive expansion of access to all kinds of publications, libraries were initially and remain severely limited in extending to digital “objects” the de-commodified access they provide in the world of print. One of the consequences is that the centrality of libraries in facilitating, organising and disseminating literature and science has faded. Thus, while a transition to digital has provided opportunities to reconsider how societies produce, sustain and make available literature and science, incumbent interests in combination with a property-form that treats intellectual creation as if it were a piece of land, have resisted the transformation of our systems of cultural production. Given this context, readers who have been denied access to information due to territorial, institutional and economic divides have created their own systems of access through the sharing of PDFs and shadow libraries, doing what public libraries are not allowed to do.

In this seminar we want to take stock of the present and future role of libraries in publishing texts, supporting universal access to information, and advocating the radical social and economic imaginaries needed to change the above-described status quo.

Schedule

10:30 Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak: "Public Library and the Property Form"
11:00 Balász Bodó: “Is the Open Knowledge Commons Idea a Curse in Disguise? Towards Sovereign Institutions of Knowledge.”, respondent: Janneke Adema
12:00 coffee break
12:15 Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: “Gleaning Knowledge: The Infrapolitics of Shadow Libraries”, respondent: Gary Hall
13:15 Discussion, introduction: Kaja Marczewska

The seminar is moderated by Valeria Graziano.

Speakers

Balász Bodó is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, Institute of Information Law. He is interested in conflicts around freedom, which take place at the intersection of digital technologies and the law. He is currently leading an ERC project on the regulation of decentralised technologies.

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Media at Copenhagen Business School. She is interested in how media theory, cultural theory and critical theory can unpack and unfold issues related to datafication and digitisation. She is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitisation published by MIT Press (2019) and has co-edited Uncertain Archives (forthcoming).

Post Office Research Group (CPC@CU)

Paper Struggles and Public Library and the Property Form are organised by the Post Office Research Group, a research collective affiliated to the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. Post Office follows a methodology of affirmative critique. Our projects are both critical and performative: actively changing the situations in which they intervene while helping devise protagonist-centred approaches to organisation, methodology, and technology. It is involved in changing scholarly and creative writing, publishing, libraries, open access, universities, cultural production, the humanities, technologies, and labour relations, and wants to explore alternatives for a more just, diverse, and equitable future.

How To Be A Pirate In The 21st Century

This is the abstract for my keynote lecture at 20 Years of File Sharing - What is Next?: Third Futures of Media Conference, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University, Suzhou, China, 8-10 November 2019.

Over the last 20 years I have helped to develop over 15 grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructure and the commons. They include: Culture Machine, a journal of critical and cultural theory that was launched in 1999 – the same year Napster started; Open Humanities Press, an international publishing collective; and the Radical Open Access Collective, a community of non-profit presses, journals and other entities formed in 2015 and now consisting of over 60 members. 

In this lecture I will discuss the politics underpinning these initiatives together with some of the associated concepts and practices, including pirate philosophy, radical open access and anti-bourgeois theory. In the process I will explain why, as academics and researchers, we should be interested in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing: as an object of study; but also as activity we should become involved with ourselves more and more in the future. The likes of Napster, Gnutella, MegaUpload, the Pirate Bay and BitTorrent will all be featured. Particular emphasis, however, will be placed on pirate file-sharing libraries such as Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, Monoskop, Public Library: Memory of the World, Libgen and Sci-Hub.

Experimental Publishing III – Critique, Intervention, And Speculation

A half-day symposium with talks by Cristina Garriga (My Bookcase) and Aymeric Mansoux (Piet Zwart Institute)

2:30-5:30pm October 21
Centre for Postdigital Cultures
The DigiLab
William Morris Building
Coventry University 

Registration (free): https://coventry.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/experimental-publishing-iii 

This is the third in a series of symposia hosted by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) exploring contemporary approaches to experimental publishing. Over the course of the series, we will ask questions about the role and nature of experimentation in publishing, about ways in which experimental publishing has been formulated and performed in the past, and ways in which it shapes our publishing imaginaries at present. This series aims to conceptualise and map what experimental publishing is or can be and to explore what lies behind our aims and motivations to experiment through publishing. As such, it forms the first activity within the CPC’s new Post-Publishing programme, an initiative committed to exploring iterative and processual forms of publishing and their role in reconceptualising publishing as an integral part of the research and writing process, i.e. as that which inherently shapes it. https://www.post-publishing.org

Speakers

Cristina Garriga

Cristina Garriga is a designer based in Amsterdam. Since 2014 she works as My Bookcase, a creative studio exploring the role of the book and its reader in today’s society through digital projects, workshops, events, commissions and exhibitions. In 2018, My Bookcase launched the online directory of independent publishers ‘Readers & Publishers’ – a response to the need among artists and writers to know how publishers work and how to reach each other. Garriga is also a founding member of Publication Studio Glasgow and has led many courses and workshops in a wide variety of art organisations and institutions. She holds a Mlitt in Fine Art from The Glasgow School of Art, a BA and Masters in Architecture from ETSAB Barcelona and an Expert Class in Type Design by the Plantin Instituut voor Typografie in Antwerp.

www.mybookcase.org

www.readersandpublishers.org

Aymeric Mansoux

Aymeric Mansoux has been messing around with computers and networks for far too long. Recent projects include What Remains, an 8-bit video game about the manipulation of public opinion and whistleblowing for the 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, and LURK, a server infrastructure for discussions around cultural freedom, experimental, new media art, net and computational culture. Aymeric received his doctorate from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London (2017), for his investigation of the decay of cultural diversity and the techno-legal forms of social organisation within free and open source based cultural practices. He currently runs the Experimental Publishing (XPUB) master course at the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.

Concept

Experimental publishing can be positioned as an intervention, a mode of critique, and a tool of speculation. It is a way of thinking about writing and publishing today that has at its centre a commitment to questioning and breaking down distinctions between practice and theory, criticality and creativity, and between the scholarly and the artistic.

In this series of events we propose to explore contemporary approaches to experimental publishing as:

• an ongoing critique of our current publishing systems and practices, deconstructing existing hegemonies and questioning the fixtures in publishing to which we have grown accustomed—from the book as a stable object to single authorship and copyright.
• an affirmative practice which offers means to re-perform our existing writerly, research, and publishing institutions and practices through publishing experiments.
• a speculative practice that makes possible an exploration of different futures for writing and research, and the emergence of new, potentially more inclusive forms, genres, and spaces of publishing, open to ambivalence and failure.
  

This take on experimentation can be understood as a heterogeneous, unpredictable, and uncontained process, one that leaves the critical potentiality of the book as a medium open to new intellectual, political, and economic contingencies.

100 Atmospheres: first of the OHP Seed Books

We are delighted to announce the first of the OHP Seed Books: 100 Atmospheres by the Meco Network, a collectively written book/breath for the troubled present.

100 Atmospheres is available at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/

Published with assistance from https://theseedbox.se/

At a time when climate panic obscures clear thought, 100 Atmospheres is an invitation to think differently. Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human relationships with other species and the planet. The process of creating 100 Atmospheres was shared, with works (written, photographic and drawn) created individually and collectively. To think differently, we need to practice differently. The book contains thirteen chapters threaded amidst one hundred co-authored micro-essays. In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation 100 Atmospheres dwells in the deep past and the troubled present to imagine future ways of being and becoming.

"This collection is simply wonderful. Truly. The text manages to be performative and pedagogic at once (it enacts its content through its form; it teaches). It invites extended contemplation (such gravity, the fate of the planet and more) and then tempts with moments of distraction and slivers of insight (and sometimes light humor/chunked conversation). There is so much of a world (several worlds, and *this* one) in this collection.”

Greg Seigworth – Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication and Theatre, Millersville University

“100 Atmospheres is an ambitious and unique collection. Driven by an experimental spirit, it beautifully articulates, in multiple voices, our current planetary concerns. The book’s vignettes, embracing a plethora of genres, styles and voices, challenge the reader in her intellectual assumptions and theoretical affinities. The theoretical-writerly ‘compost’ produced as a result of the authors’ joint efforts takes the form of a powerful narrative about the polysemic concept of the ‘atmosphere’ - which stands for breath, vapour, weather, climate, sensation, affect and relationality. Inviting the reader into their already crowded conversation, the book becomes a hospitable space for learning how to live with multiple voices, viewpoints and agencies.”

Joanna Zylinska – Professor of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London