Content/Form
We are looking forward to the Content/Form research workshop organised by SHAPE Digital Citizenship & Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, and the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), London South Bank University, in collaboration with transmediale festival for digital art & culture, Berlin. The workshop is to be held in Berlin, January 29-31, 2024.
Through the workshop’s activities, we reflect on how the technical conditions relate to sustainable research practices and explore ways of collapsing the traditional workflows of academic publishing, drawing more closely together work-in-progress and feedback, writing and review, experimental print production and its dissemination, form and content. Importantly, our point is to stress how technological and social forms come together, and encourage reflection on shared organisational processes and collectivities.
At the workshop participants not only engage with research questions and offer feedback to eachother, but also with the conditions for producing research, the ways it is shared and reviewed, the infrastructures through which it is served, and more.
In support of this we use ServPub an experimental platform for research and practice on computational publishing, to reflect collectively on affective infrastructures, minor tech and autonomous networks within, and beyond, institutional constraints. ServPub is facilitated by In-grid with contributions from Systerserver and supported by CSNI at LSBU, Creative Computing Institute at UAL, SHAPE at Aarhus University, and Varia/CC.
wiki4print
The collective newspaper will be made with wiki4print: a collective publishing environment based on the MediaWiki software and web-to-print layout techniques. Using wiki4print allows us to work shoulder-to-shoulder as collaborative writers, editors, designers, developers, in a non-linear publishing workflow where design and content unfolds at the same time, allowing the one to shape the other.
To get started
- Create a page using the form above. The name that you use for your page is just the wiki page name. You can add the title of your 500 words article/text in the page itself.
- Make sure that you do not delete the line:
[[Category:Content form]], as this will add your page to the Category:Content form. It can be written anywhere on the page, the bottom is usually where most people put it. - After saving the page, it should then appear in the list below.
- For editing, please see the editing guide.
Created pages
The choreography of war Marie
Since Jean Baudrillard’s provoking claim that ‘the Gulf War did not take place’ warfare has been associated with illusion . Today’s hyper-medialized warfare raises new questions about conflicts of reception and truth value in the images we see. We're accustomed to seeing distant wars through fragmented snapshots, often captured amid the disorder of conflict via news media or blurry "poor images" shared via camera phones . Such alleged spontaneous representations reproduce an experience of the authenticity of war. Blurriness and pixelation is here seen as technical testimonies of the truth value of images. “Pixelating – or blurring has taken over the role of authenticity”, as the Artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s has phrased it in relation to his Pixel-Collage series . This stands in sharp contrast to the pre-staged image, that this article centers around: a still-photo from a live-broadcasted press conference at Al Jazeera held in the rubbles of the bombed Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza on oct. 17, 2023. The disturbing thing about this image, that quickly circulated on social media and news sites, is less to be found in its extreme gruesomeness, epitomized in the dead baby in the arms of the man sitting at the center of the image, blood covering its little body in lieu of a white sheet. It is rather the almost collage-like choreography, the formal clash between the press conference and the warzone. Somewhat echoing Martha Rosler’s collage-technique in her photomontage-series House Beautiful (1967-72), this clash of contradictory forms creates an alienating effect of the war. The very thought of practically preparing and arranging the podium, the stage, and the dead bodies is hard to even imagine. Did the speakers straddle over the dead bodies to the stage? Did someone yell ‘action’ before livestreaming this macabre scene? The predictability in the composition of the official press conference, following a pre-set choreography of elements, is disrupted by the dead bodies covered by blood-stained sheets, placed in a circle around the podium. Like the other elements of the press conference – spotlights, stage, microphones, authority evoking clothes – the bodies have been staged in the frame of the camera directed at the scene. If one thing, the video, the still-images that quickly circulated, hereby brought testimony to the very ‘exhibition value’ of war. This ‘exhibition value’ of the war site was only bolstered in the subsequent days and weeks where forensic image analyses of the crater and the surrounding areas began to circulate on X (former twitter) and on global media. The still-photo was different though. It was meant to be seen, it was staged, or it became staged, and thus opposed and affirmed in one and the same gesture our very desire for authentic images of war.