menu

The Experimental Publishing study path is structured at two levels:

-   PERIODICALS: These are lectures, workshops, and seminars that are
    running throughout the whole year at a relatively fixed frequency,
    some are weekly, others fortnightly, or every few weeks.
-   SPECIAL ISSUES: As the name implies, these are the main themes that
    will be explored throughout the year, to investigate a specific
    issue regarding publishing in the context of computational culture
    and the art. Each investigated issue will also become an issue put
    together and published on this site by the students and staff. Most
    of the special issues will be linked to public events hosted and
    organised by friends of the experimental publishing programme.


Periodicals 2016-2017

HISTORIES OF EXPERIMENTAL PUBLISHING

_Histories of Experimental Publishing_ is a series of lectures by core
and guest tutors of the course. From Jiahu symbols to darknets, the act
of making things public has always involved aesthetic, technological and
social experimentation. In this lecture series, publishing will be
broadly understood to encompass various symbolic forms and media,
including text, image, sound and code. The focus will be on practices
that are not always included in mainstream media histories, such as
samizdat publishing, music distribution and warez culture. Each lecture
will cover one particular medium and publishing (sub)culture. Visits of
local experimental publishing initiatives (PrintRoom, Publication
Studio, Zine Camp) will be part of the program.

PUBLISHING AS PRACTICE

_Publishing as Practice_ aims to develop critical tools (both theory and
practice), to explore collaborative practices, editorial concepts and
formats of display, graphic design and typographic experiment and new
distribution models, through the study of publishing as a medium. What
is a book? Under the drastic technological and socio-economical changes
brought by the publishing industry, every parameter that used to define
a book has been transformed, form authorship to expanded copyright
practices, manufacturing, hardware and software, ownership and sharing
knowledge, digitisation, preservation and all distribution models. In
this context, what could be the role of publishing for artists and
designers? Working together as an editorial board, as well as developing
individual projects, this course consist of monthly sessions based on a
matrix of _research questions_, _publishing experiments_ and a _public
programme_, where the traditional roles and function of publishing are
questioned. These sessions will take the form of intense one or two-day
workshops.

1.  PUBLISHING AS PRACTICE: Mapping the field. The shifting roles of
    editor, artist, author, designer, publisher, distributors, readers
    and collectors. Emerging models.

2.  PUBLISHING EXPERIMENTS: Editorial concepts, manufacturing, printing
    techniques, information vs. visuality, (non)narrative structures,
    different hierarchy of information and the economy of the book will
    be investigated. Working with the school facilities.

3.  MAKING THINGS PUBLIC: Explore (self)publishing strategies,
    readership and the new economical models of production
    and distribution. Visit to professionals from the field. Defining
    new modes of dissemination and possible sustainable or distributed
    models for the editions produced during the programme.

READING, WRITING, AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES SEMINAR

The _Reading, Writing, and Research Methodologies Seminar_ is tailored
towards (further) developing research methods within the first year of
the master. By establishing a solid foundation of research skills, it
will eventually prepare students for their Graduate research in the
second year. Through reading core theoretical texts, and through the
experimentation with different modes of writing, they will establish a
common vocabulary and set of references to work from. The course aims to
develop a writing practice appropriate to each students practice-based
research, through applying general research methods to specific research
projects. The course takes as axiomatic that the perceived division
between _practice_ and _theory_ is essentially an illusion.

The seminar will include:

-   Identifying the objects of your research through description and
    analysis of your work
-   Contextualizing your work through reflection on contemporary and
    historical practices.
-   Identify research material key to your practice.
-   Synopsis and annotation of key texts
-   _Writing machines_: creating methods for the production of group and
    individual writing.

Throughout, there will be an emphasis on working collectively, whether
in a larger discussion group or in smaller reading and writing groups.

TECHNO-LEGAL TEMPLATES AND SANDBOX CULTURE

Discussing past, present, and future strategies of publishing and access
to knowledge would not be complete without talking about the
relationship existing between the distribution of information and the
technological and legal frameworks that permit it. In the past decades,
such relationship has been articulated in different ways, yet always
revolving around the questions of intellectual property laws that need
to be either reinforced, reformed, abolished, or simply ignored. From
guerilla open access to the normalisation of free culture licensing,
from remix culture to GitHub repository forks, we will explore in a
series of lecture and readings how code, both legal and software, is
effectively shaping publishing culture, by the means of different
constitutive templates and platforms. In the process, we will discuss
notions of commons, public space and movement, and whether or not these
can exist as globalised universal concepts, as opposed to singular
sandboxed ideas linked to specific communities, platforms and practices.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ARCHIVE

Archives used to belong to the realm of large institutions and national
governments. In an attempt to collect documents and records, such as
letters, official papers, photographs, recorded material, or computer
files archives tried to preserve a historical consciousness. In a time
when the creation of documents and their aggregation into all sorts of
different – especially online – archives has become part of everyday
life the role and function of archives and its content is changing.
Through modes of iteration, appropriations, copies, leaks and other
permutations archives can short-circuit, defy and disrupt emphasising
the limits of historical representation. By critically analysing theory,
reflecting on archival practices and making documentation, this course
explores the messy entanglements of the ways documents are created and
collected, systems (dis)function and how networks of people, bots and
algorithms trigger transformations.

TOOLS FOR PROCEDURAL PUBLISHING

_Tools for Procedural Publishing_ consists of monthly 2-day workshop,
where we will approach the tools, protocols and workflows essential for
publishing across digital environments. Through a process of
experimentation, research and discussion we will engage and explore the
social, political and technological context and conflicts of these
technologies.

In each session we'll focus on the production of an outcome, which will
require practical and hands-on application of the subject and tools
explored. Outcomes will range from the creation of a website, a social
file system, a acoustic data transmitting network, a collaborative and
distributed work environment, a multi-format publication, floppy disk
videos, audio auscultations of file systems, a digital library, and self
hosting servers. We wont develop these processes for making things
public from scratch, but by taking full advantage of the plethora of
free software applications, which lend themselves to the UNIX philosophy
of using simple and discrete programs, articulated into a complex
pipeline. Such formula allows for fast prototyping of complex and
idiosyncratic processes, whose outcomes ensue from the choice of
programs, inputs and settings given.

Planning:

_HTML: the mother of all markups_

-   World Wide Web
-   HTML
-   CSS
-   Personal homepages: from DIY to templated
-   Digital memory
-   Web pages' archives

_Social Shell_

-   UNIX
-   Time sharing
-   The shell
-   Command-line applications
-   Pipes
-   Package managers

_Encoding/Decoding_

-   Bits and bytes
-   Encoding:
-   ASCII
-   Unicode
-   Hexadecimal
-   Base64
-   Modems
-   Bitmaps

_Versioning_

-   Git: local and distributed versioning
-   Github: free software at the service of a proprietary software
    company
-   Distributed workflows for: text editing, digital drawing, text
    layout, programming

_Hybrid Publishing_

-   Markups: the ingredients
-   Pandoc: the ingredient converter
-   Calibre: the library manager, ebook viewer and editor
-   Make-files: the recipe book
-   Epub, websites, book trailers, PDFs and apps: some of the dishes

_Digital Audio and Video_

-   What is digital audio and moving image?
-   Codecs
-   Bit rates and sampling rates
-   ffmpeg: Swiss army-knife for av conversions
-   mpv/mplayer: media players
-   Data mulching with(out) key frames
-   Listening to data with raw audio

_Networking_

-   Servers & clients
-   Local networks
-   Self-hosting
-   Web-servers
-   Firewalls and tunnels
-   WiFi


Special Issues 2016-2017

Special Issues are a means of putting the ideas explored in the
different strands of the course into practice in the form of a series of
publications on a roughly 6 week cycle. Each "issue" addresses a
specific theme, often coordinated with outside events and
collaborations, and culminates in a "release". The form of each issue
varies as a means of critically engaging with the diverse media, scales,
and historical specificity of a particular issue. This multiplicity of
form rejects the conception of "cross-platform" and "multi-media" as
seamless, uniform, and ever improving.

Special Issues considers software not just as a means of getting things
done, but as a significant writing space for critically engaging with
culture. To this end, the tools and methods used to produce each
publication are themselves part of the release itself. Code is not
monolithic and linear but rather speaks across different systems, at
different temporalities, in different voices and modes.

Zine Camp 2016 + Parazine

Zine Camp, a festival to make friends and zines, is an open workspace
connecting like-minded zinesters and newbies from Rotterdam to
national/international zinesters and newbies. The aim is to make zine
together, but also to provide a space and place to socialize and
collaborate in an attempt to discover and foster a growing community of
zine-makers in the NL and abroad.

Zine Camp 2014 Zine Camp 2015

Interfacing the Law

  This is why projects like Aaaaarg, Ubu, Monoskop and the others are so
  crucial at the moment, because they point to a different future,
  different not only from today's monopolies but also from tomorrows. —
  Felix Stalder

Even if reading is increasingly turning digital, Public Libraries have
not been able to follow the same path. While technically it is possible
to allow anyone acces to books from anywhere, the legal reality is quite
different. Libraries are not able to give access to digital resources in
the same way as they can with physical books. This is why initiatives
such as Monoskop, aaarg.org, sci-hub and libgen are essential as they
collect and distribute electronic texts, an indispensible work in times
of austerity and privatisation of education. They are serving readers
across the globe a collection of materials that start to look quite
different than the libraries we were used to, content that is acting out
the true potential of digital publishing, distributed freely and
accessibly without the limits imposed by the academic commercial
complex. University researchers as well as those studying outside
institutions have all come to rely on these 'shadow libraries', but
can't speak out for them publicly. However critical these resources have
become, the recent courtcase of Elsevier vs. Sci-hub and Libgen and
another one underway against aaaarg.org shows how vulnerable the
projects actually are. While each of them takes a different political
stance, in the end of the day their various forms of civil disobedience
only count as illegal action.

How can the right to access to knowledge be held up against claims of
copyright? Interfacing the law is an attempt to build a platform, both
in the sense of an on-line interface and as a public discourse, that
would allow us to openly discuss, reflect and respond to the next wave
of courtcases waiting to happen. It is urgent that we find ways to make
the public debate transcend the juridical binary of illegal vs. legal,
and claim political legitimacy for sharing digital books.

In collaboration with librarians, lawyers, activists and archivists, we
invite participants to develop their own interfaces to the law:
collective annotation systems, digital document analyses, (il)legal use
cases, library tools, mirrored servers ... These prototypes will be
brought together in a public event taking place June 2017. In order to
develop the projects technically and conceptually, we will collectively
analyse legal documents relevant to the case, learn from historical
activism and civil disobedience against the law and explore the contents
of massive text-collections available in pirate, shadow and amateur
digital libraries.

Interfacing the law is developed by Constant in collaboration with
Memory of the World and MayDay rooms. The project is part of Society for
Library Access (SLAX), a coalition of people and organisations that
wants to publicly address the antagonism between the access to knowledge
and the current copyright regime.

Other (possible) Special Issues []

Unconfimed and in development special issues.

-   A Situationist Filesystem What does a ‘situationist’ filesystem look
    like? []

-   Bibliotecha

_Bibliotecha_ is a local offline network for distribution of digital
texts, that allows local communities to build and share their electronic
text collections. _Bibliotecha_ relies on a small computer (RaspberryPi)
running open-source software to serve ebooks over a local and open WIFI
hotspot. Using the browser to connect to it, one is given the option to
retrieve or donate ebooks to that _Bibliotecha_ node.

[]

-   Bot Publishing: the "bot" has been a model for engaging with
    software from Weizenbaum's Eliza through to IRC chatterbots up
    through to emerging models of social media bots of today;
-   Social shell: Considering the history of time-sharing systems
    condensed into a modern operating system such as Raspbian running on
    an inexpensive single board computer like a Pi (Release: Server as
    a publication)
-   Machine Readers: Understanding text mining and critically engaging
    with "big data" practices (Release: Tactical data visualisation
    deconstructing data mining)
-   Computation Vandalism: The ever changing role of "computer vision"
    from surveillance cameras to optical character recognition to image
    archives (Release: A poster(series) produced in part with CV tools)
-   Make Book: Understanding traditional programming workflows and tools
    and applying them to publishing (Release: a makefile capable of
    compiling materials into a durable digital form)
-   Browser: Considering the history of the Web Browser and alternative
    protocols for publishing online (release: a custom browser)
-   ArtEZ joint session

versions