Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media invite you to a year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in media in all its forms. All the seminars are free to attend and open to all.

Podcasts of previous Open Media seminars are available here.

For more information see here.
 
Programme: January – March 2012
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January 31st:
Tessa J. Houghton (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus) – ‘#blackout: the viral counterpublicity of online protest’ (Read More)
 
February 14th:
Paolo Ruffino (Goldsmiths, University of London) – ‘How to open an engine: narratives of production and consumption in video game culture’
 
March 6th:
Cornelia Sollfrank (net.artist) – ‘title tbc’
 
March 20th:
Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University) – ‘Just Gaming: Digital Games, Remediation, Electracy’
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When: 1:45-2:45 on selected Tuesdays in January, February and March
Where: ICE, Media and Communications room
 
Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE)
Coventry University Enterprises
Puma Way, Coventry
CV1 2TT
 
All seminars are free to attend and open to all.
 
For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx
 
How to get to ICE, see:
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=&daddr=52.403937,-1.505545
 
All enquiries please contact:
Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections 

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Digital Media have become ubiquitous. Our experiences are on the verge of being mediated and augmented non-stop via mobile and web-based recording devices which offer the possibility to merge, mix, and mash up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we seem to be no longer confined by the boundaries that have governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can follow an education via iTunesU, call friends abroad via Skype for free, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter and fund projects via Kickstarter.

These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing options for media producers, consumers and critics. However, reality is more complicated. Many (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed via commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Music mash-ups are sued for copyright infringement and fears for ebook piracy rule the literary world.

The concept of openness constitutes a radical critique against the closed-off worlds of what we might call the ‘traditional media’. It urges for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. However, openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who pays the producers? Do open data pose security risks and who gets to control this data? Who governs our creative output? In what way can we control and keep check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media or are these notions explicitly being challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they really be truly open? Where does openness end? Should we rather focus on specific aspects of openness? How can we generate a media critique when media are constantly updated and changed, including our critique itself?

In this lecture series various examples and aspects of openness in media will be explored. Special attention will be paid to the benefits and drawbacks of openness and the kind of possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

A list of the publishers belonging to the AAP is available here.

Among the publishers of critical and cultural theory on this list at the time of writing are:

• Sage (who publish numerous journals in the area including Theory, Culture and Society and New Media and Society)
• Palgrave Macmillan (publisher of Feminist Review)
• Stanford University Press
• Fordham University Press
• Harvard University Press
• NYU Press
• Cambridge University Press

Peter Suber has created a regularly updated list of those AAP members who have already publicly disavowed the AAP position on the Research Works Act here. At the time of writing it includes:

• MIT Press
• ITHAKA
• Council on Library and Information Resources
• Penn State University Press
• Rockefeller University Press
• University of California Press

More information on the Research Works Act is available here.

For a take on the subject written from the perspective of a scientist based in the UK, see Mike Taylor’s ‘Academic Publishers Have Become the Enemies of Science’.

However, as a result of modernity and the ‘development and spread of the concept of the author, along with mass printing techniques, uniform multiple-copy editions, copyright, established publishing houses, editors’ and so on, they have ‘tended to be taken for granted, overlooked, marginalised, excluded or otherwise repressed’. Consequently, books have taken on the impression of being much more fixed, stable, reliable, permanent, authoritative, standardized and tightly bound than they actually are, or have ever been. For even if a book is produced in a multiple copy print edition, each copy is different, having its own singular life, history, old-age and death -- which is why we can form affective and symbolic attachments to them.

This is not to say we have never been modern, that books have never been tightly fastened or bound; but rather that this force of binding is just what modernity, and the book, is. Or was, perhaps. 

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

Just as interesting however is the fact that the Codex is also history’s most altered biblical manuscript, containing approximately 30 corrections per page, roughly 23,000 in all. And these are not just minor corrections. For instance, at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is not described as being the son of God. That was a revision added to the text later. In the original version, Jesus becomes divine only after he has been baptised by John the Baptist. Nor is Jesus resurrected in the Codex Sinaiticus. Mark’s Gospel ends with the discovery of the empty tomb. The resurrection only takes place in competing versions of the story that are to be found in other manuscripts. Nor does the Codex contain the stoning of the adulterous woman – ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’; or Jesus’s words on the cross – ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’.


So the Bible -- often dubbed ‘the Book of Books’ -- cannot be read as that most fixed, standard, permanent and reliable of texts, the unaltered word of God. On the contrary, the text of the Bible was already seen as being collaborative, multi-authored, fluid, evolving, emergent when the Codex was created in 350 AD.

•   

Another example is provided by Shakespeare’s First Folio. As Adrian Johns has shown, this volume includes more than six hundred typefaces, along with numerous discrepancies regarding its spelling, punctuation, divisions and page configurations.  Indeed, the Royal Shakespeare Company recently opened its newly renovated theatres in Stratford with productions of Macbeth and Cardenio, a previously unperformed work by Shakespeare. Yet Cardenio, a missing 1612 tragedy by Shakespeare and Fletcher, may contain hardly anything by Shakespeare at all, while Thomas Middleton is now thought to have been heavily involved in the writing of Macbeth. In fact, Macbeth, Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure are all also to be found in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s collected works of Thomas Middleton.

•   

We could thus say that books have always been liquid and living to some extent: digital technology and the internet has simply helped to make us more aware of the fact.  

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

Living Books About Life is a series of books on the topic of ‘life’. Produced by an international network of humanities writers and academics, including Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder), Anna Munster (University of New South Wales), Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University), Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia), Monika Bakke (University of Poznan), Timothy Lenoir (Duke University),  Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla) and Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art), the books repackage science-related research content on topics as diverse as air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access. On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles.  On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

‘Producing twenty one “living books about life” from start to finish in just seven months, this series represents an exciting new model for publishing’, said the project leader, Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University and one of the co-founders of OHP. ‘Living books is an example of a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech approach to publishing high-quality books that can be easily and freely shared on an open access basis with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals’.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

Aside from its goal of promoting a greater public understanding of recent scientific advances, the series has already had an impact on the scholars taking part. As Erica Fudge, co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there.’

The books are called ‘living’ because they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as clustering open access science research – together with interactive maps and audio-visual material from YouTube and Vimeo – the series aims to rethink ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, and e-book readers such as Kindle and iPad.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said, ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing.  It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’
***

Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections:  Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

Website: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.


Mark Amerika should be included in this list, as the first version of this text was written as a contribution to his remixthebook project. It is a remix of his ‘Sentences on Remixology 1.0’, which is itself a remix of Sol Lewitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’. So when I say ‘I’ here, this also means at least all of the above.

It means even more than that, though, since some of the collaborative projects we are involved with and which feature in the Media Gifts book are also open to being anonymously written. Remixing Amerika remixing, this time, Alfred North Whitehead, it is what might be thought of as stimulating ‘the novel production of togetherness’. In this sense it is not possible to say exactly who, or what, ‘we’ are.

(Even the original title of this series of posts and its topic were generated at least in part by others: Mark Amerika, and also the organisers of The Unbound Book conference, which was held at Amsterdam Central Library and the Royal Library in Den Haag, May, 2011, and where version 1.0 of this material was first presented.)

•   

‘What does it mean to go out of oneself?’ Am ‘I’ unbound?  Out of bounds? Is all this unbound?

I am channelling Mark Amerika again, but we should think of any contemporary writer or theorist such as myself as a medium, sampling from the vocabulary of critical thought. In fact if you pay close attention to what I am doing in this performance you will see I am mutating myself – this pseudo-autobiographical self I am performatively constructing here - into a kind of postproduction processual medium. Just think of me as a postproduction of presence.

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)



•    that the ‘correct’, ‘proper’ and most effective form for creating, publishing, disseminating and archiving academic research will be progressively difficult to determine and control. Scholars will continue to write and publish paper and papercentric texts. However, they will also generate and distribute their research as video, film, music, photography, graphics, animation and 3-D technology and combinations thereof. (What the academic publisher Elsevier is calling the ‘Article of the Future’ is already pointing in this direction -- although, as we can see from the beta version, in being based on the webpage, it actually repeats a lot of the latter’s papercentrism.)

•    that scholars will be far less likely to  publish a piece of academic research in just one place, such as a tightly bound book or edition of a peer-reviewed journal produced by a ‘brand name’ press. Again, they will no doubt still place their work in such venues. Nevertheless, their publishing strategies are likely to be far more pluralistic, distributed, multifaceted and liquid, with academics making simultaneous use of the likes of WordPress, MediaWiki, Aaaarg.org, YouTube, Vimeo,  iTunesU and their future equivalents to disseminate their research in a wide variety of different places and contexts. It is even possible we will move to a situation where the same material will be reiterated as part of a number of different texts and groupings; or, as Derrida speculates in ‘The Book to Come’, where research will no longer be grouped according to the ’corpus or opus – not finite and separable oeuvres; groupings no longer forming texts, even, but open textual processes offered on boundless national and international networks, for the active or interactive intervention of readers turned authors, and so on’.

•   that an increasing number of scholars will create and publish their research not just as long or even medium-length forms of shared attention along the lines of Amazon’s Kindle Singles, Ted Books (part of the Kindle Singles imprint), The Atavist and Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets, but in modular or ‘chunked’ forms, too – from the ‘between the blog and the journal’  posts of ‘The New Everyday’ section Nicholas Mirzoeff co-ordinates and edits for  Media Commons, right down to the level of passages, paragraphs and at times even perhaps sentences. Scholars will do so to facilitate the flow of their research between different platforms and other means of support: books, journals and archives, but also emails, blogs, podcasts, tweets, text messages, p2p file-sharing networks, e-book readers and iPad apps - places where, depending on the platform, it can be commented and reflected upon, discussed, debated, critiqued, changed, updated, annotated, linked to, ripped, remixed, reimagined, re-combined, reversioned and reiterated.

•    that scholars will also publish and disseminate their research in beta, pre-print and grey literature form (as the Public Library of Science is already doing to a limited extent with PLoS Currents: Influenza, as is the recently launched PressForward).  In other words, academics will publish and archive the pieces of paper, website or blog posts, emails or tweets on which the idea was first recorded, and any drafts,  working papers or reports that were circulated to garner comments from peers and interested parties, as well as the finished, peer-reviewed and copyedited texts.

•   that many scholars and scholarly journals will publish just the data generated in the course of research, with a view to making this source material openly and rapidly available for others to shape and bind into an interpretation, narrative, argument, thesis, article or book (see FigShare, for one such example).

•    that much of the emphasis in institutional publishing, archiving and dissemination strategies will switch. This will be achieved not least by both institutions and scholars offering users new ways to read, write, interpret and engage with their research, references and data, both pre- and post-‘publication’, and in the process create new texts, objects, artefacts and performances from this source material. It is even conceivable that the process of creating new texts, objects, artefacts and performances from this source material - including bringing groups of people together, organising, educating, training and supporting them, providing the appropriate platforms, applications and tools and so on - will become the main driver of research, with the production of papercentric texts such as books and journal articles merely being a by-product of this process rather than one of its end goals.

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

In not too many years we will have reached the point where literally anyone can publish a philosophy book in electronic form in a matter of minutes, even without the least trace of official academic credentials. I don’t bemoan this at all – the great era of 17th century philosophy was dominated by non-professors, and the same thing could easily happen again. As far as publishing is concerned, what it means is that all publishing is destined to become vanity publishing. (Alberto Toscano recently pointed this out to me.) You’ll just post a homemade book on line, and maybe people will download it and read it, and maybe you’ll pick up some influence.

Yet what is so interesting about recent developments in electronic publishing is not that, what with open access, WordPress, Scribd, Smashwords, Booki and Aaaaarg.org, producing and distributing (and even selling in the case of Smashwords and Kindle) a book is something nearly everyone can do today in a matter of minutes. It is not even that book publishing may, as a result, be steadily becoming more like blogging or vanity publication, with authority and certification provided as much by an author’s reputation or readership, or the number of times a text is visited, downloaded, cited, referenced, linked to, blogged about, tagged, bookmarked, ranked, rated or ‘liked’, as it is by conventional peer-review or the prestige of the press. All of those criteria still rest upon and retain fairly conventional notions of the book, the author, publication and so on. What seems much more interesting is the way certain developments in electronic publishing contain at least the potential for us to perceive the book as something that is not completely fixed, stable and unified, with definite limits and clear material edges, but as liquid and living, open to being continually and collaboratively written, edited, annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered, reiterated and reimagined.  Here, what we think of as ‘publication’ -- whether it occurs in ‘real time’ or after a long period of reflection and editorial review, ‘all’ at once or in fits and starts, in print-on-paper or electronic form -- is no longer an end point. Publication is rather just a stage in an ongoing process of unfolding.

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)

Indeed, while each of the media projects the book is concerned with – at the moment there are ten in all - constitutes a distinct project in its own right, they can also be seen as forming a dynamic network of texts, websites, archives, wikis, IPTV programmes and other internet traces. Consequently, if it is to be thought of as a book at all, it should be understood as an open, distributed and multi-location book: parts of it are to be found on a blog, others on wikis, others again on p2p networks. To adapt a phrase of Maurice Blanchot’s from The Book to Come (for whom Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés orients the future of the book both in the direction of the greatest dispersion and in the direction of a tension capable of gathering infinite diversity, by the discovery of more complex structures’), Media Gifts is a book ‘gathered through dispersion’. 

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)