23 January 2017, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam
Present: Janneke Adema, Marc de Bruijn, Mathieu Cenac, Florian Cramer, David Desrimais, Leonieke van Dipten, David Gauthier, Inte Gloerich, Gijs de Heij, Silvio Lorusso, Geert Lovink, Andrea Nienhaus, Pia Pol, Søren Pold, Miriam Rasch (notes), Nikola Richter, Elisa Rusca, Margreet Riphagen, Simon Worthington
After our first meeting to start up an international hybrid publishing consortium, we met again to dive further into different publishing research questions.
A very short recap would state the following: What new formats can be developed on the intersection of digital and print publishing – what we call hybrid publishing – with the aim to make independent publishers more resilient or sustainable both in the sense of business and of materiality of publications (dead links, bitrot, non-traceable references etc.), which means in the first place to be and stay of worth to the audience or readership?
The consortium has explicated their wish to do practical research into new formats and practices of publishing in the digital age, within the cross section of automated and algorithmic publishing on the one hand and high-quality craftsmanship on the other, all in the field of artistic, academic and activist publication practices with a highly independent, experimental, and do-it-yourself character.
Conditions of the project are: tools should be open source, non-black box, flexible, and easy to handle for non-tech professionals.
Methodology would consist in research through experiments, using artistic and technological methods, using ‘real’ content.
We can distinguish four dimensions of future developments which can all be seen as sub-domains to the main research topic described above.
1. Computation (technicalities)
2. Modern messages (writing)
3. Curation (publishing)
4. Visuality / spatiality (design)