Chapter 1: Collectivities and Methods

Collectivities and Methods (to serve and publish)

Pad for working https://ctp.cc.au.dk/pad/p/servpub_methods

Coordinator: Winnie & Geoff Contributors: In-grid, CC, Systerserver, Winnie & Geoff

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What does it mean to publish? To publish is to it make something public, but in this apparently simple act, there’s a lot at stake, not simply what but more how we publish. This book is an intervention in these debates, emerging out of a particular history of experimental publishing and an ongoing collaboration of various art-tech collectives situated inside and outside the academy who are all invested in making information public [need to check in: such as xpub, hackers and designers]. Our motivation emerges from a history of radical publishing, in finding ways to publish outside of commercial and institutional norms, and the ethics of free and open software in which modification and versioning are core principles. What links these traditions is the need to address the social relations that experimental publishing can help to expose and activate differently.

Our working premise is that despite the trend towards open access, relatively little has changed in academic publishing and scholars still seek to distribute their work through enclosures and based on lumpen workflows that still follow a model that is largely unchanged since industrialism. The book is an attempt to draw attention to these material conditions for the production of books, and to strengthen the possibility of working alternatives to mainstream publishing.[here can add open humanities press - liquid series, data browser e.g volumetric regimes wiki to print, and MIT Press pubpub] Our concern is that books, and academic books in particular, follow a model of production that belies their criticality. By criticality, we mean to go beyond a criticism of conventional publishing and acknowledge the ways in which we are implicated at all levels in political choices when we engage in producing books. It's this kind of reflexivity that has guided our approach.

The book is a kind of manual to build and think with -- to register the importance of its own coming into being as a book (as an onto-epistemological object if you like). It is produced in a reflexive manner so that the content and the form through which it is produced are recognised as interconnected.

Background

More pragmatically, the aim is to develop a radical alternative platform and workflow for publishing. We build upon previous projects and collaborations in the field of experimental publishing such as Aesthetic Programming (Soon & Cox, 2020) in which the authors developed a book about software as if it were software. All the contents were offered as an open resource, to encourage others to fork copies and customize their own versions of the book. In free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) culture, more than one programmer contributes to writing and documenting code. Contributors might be unknown and are able to update or improve the software by forking—making changes and submitting merge requests to incorporate updates—in which the software is built together as part of a community. To merge, in this sense, is to agree to make a change, to approve it as part of a process of collective decision-making and with mutual trust. This is common practice in software development particularly in the case of FLOSS in which developers place versions of their programs in version control repositories (such as GitLab) so that others can download, clone, and fork them.  We were curious to explore how the concept of forking in software practice might inspire new practices. By encouraging new versions to be produced by others, the book set out to challenge publishing conventions and make effective use of the technical infrastructures through which we make ideas public. Clearly wider infrastructures are especially important to understand how alternatives emerge from the need to configure and maintain more sustainable and equitable networks for publishing.

It is with this in mind that we have tried to engage more fully with the politics of infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of books. In this way we would argue that the project responds to the pressing need for publishing to acknowledge its broader apparatus. This follows both a technical and social protocol, and it is crucially important that this is a collective enterprise, taking further inspiration from "A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers", a collaborative project that builds on selfhosting infrastructural practicies that follow  intersectional feminist principles. The aim is to rethink the current landscape of publishing infrastructure and digital knowledge organization, and offer a viable alternative which can support new and existing publishing initiatives. Part of the motivation was the perceived need to develop a community of shared interest around experimental publishing and affective infrastructures in London. We could see similar initiatives elsewhere, in particular in the Netherlands and Belgium, and were envious.

[to be continued...]

1. Structure

The book charts the development of a bespoke publishing infrastructure that draws together previously separated processes such as writing, editing, peer review, design, print, distribution. Each chapter unpacks practical steps alongside a discussion of some of the poltical implications of our approach.

[go on to describe each chapter in detail]

2. Collectivities

- short semi-structured interviews with each collective

.......0. What characterizes your collective as collective?  

.......1. What are your approaches in working together as a group and working with others?

.......2. How does your group work with infrastructure?

.......3. What do you want to work on Servpub?

.......4. How do social relations become transformed?

[minor composition]

2a. social relations meets tech

....... and minor compositions here

2b. ideas of the commons and autonomia/anarchism

3. Methods

Feminist, intersectionality, queer, radical referencing

doing and making and thinking

development of tools perhaps too

artistic practice/research/artivist approach

end chapter with idea of Book as reflexive practice - reiteratung this point - book about its own making.