Content-Form/Editorial

EDITORIAL

This publication explores content as inseparable from the forms and formats through which it is rendered. If our attachment to all forms and formats – served to us by big tech – limit the space for political possibility and collective action, then we ask what alternatives might be envisioned, including for research itself? What does research do in the world? Perhaps what is missing is a stronger account of the structures that render our research experiences, that produce new imaginaries, new spatial and temporal forms?

In pursuit of these questions, the publication is the outcome of a research workshop leading up to the 2024 edition of the transmediale festival, Berlin. Authors have developed their own research questions, and provided feedback to each other. In addition to these conventions of research development, they have, however, also engaged with the social and technical conditions of potential new and sustainable research practices – the ways it is shared and reviewed, and the infrastructures through which it is served.

In order to facilitate this process, the publication has been based on an experimental publication tool/platform, ‘wiki4print’. Approaching the wiki as an environment for the production of collective thought that encourages a type of writing that comes from a social need to have, share and exchange ideas, and furthermore to give them material form. Working in the format of a publishing 'sprint', contributors have made collective decisions. For instance, rather than following conventional production patterns, the newspaper layout began with the design of the centrefold (which is also where all bibliographic references can be found), and unfolded outwards as materials emerged. Using MediaWiki software and web-to-print layout techniques, wiki4print is an attempt to circumvent academic workflows and conflate traditional roles of writers, editors, designers, developers alongside the properties of the technologies in use. Form and content unfold at the same time, allowing for one to shape the other.

Wiki4print is also part of a larger infrastructure for research and publishing, ‘ServPub’, a feminist server and associated tools developed and facilitated collectively by grassroot tech collectives In-grid, Systerserver, and Varia/CC. As such, it transgresses conventional institutional boundaries of research institutions, like a university or art school, and underlines how the infrastructures of research, too, depend on maintenance, care, trust, understanding, and collective (un)learning.

Our point is to stress how technological and social forms come together, and encourage reflection on organisational processes and social relations. As Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel argue in “Publishing to Find Comrades”: “The openness of open publishing is thus not to be found with the properties of digital tools and methods, whether new or otherwise, but in how those tools are taken up and utilized within various social milieus.”

Following the workshop, the contributors will extend their arguments into peer-reviewed journal articles to be pubished in APRJA, Summer 2024 (https://aprja.net/).

The workshop was organised by SHAPE Digital Citizenship and Digital Aesthetics Research Center (Aarhus University), and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University), and further supported by the Creative Computing Institute at University of the Arts London (UAL), in collaboration with transmediale.