conceptual in Adema 2019
tion focused on auto-poesis (self-making), generative
systems and automatic writing. As Hughes argues, we see this tradition in
print forms such as Oulipo and in Dada experiments and surrealist games
too.[45](ch3.xhtml#footnote-108) But there are connections here with broader
theories that focus on distributed agency too, especially where it concerns
the influence of the materiality of the text. Media theorists such as N.
Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker have extensively argued that the
materiality of the page is entangled with the intentionality of the author as
a further agency; Drucker conceptualises this through a focus on ‘conditional
texts’ and ‘performative materiality’ with respect to the agency of the
material medium (be it the printed page or the digital
screen).[46](ch3.xhtml#footnote-107)
Where, however, does the redistribution of value creation end in these
narratives? As Nick Montfort states with respect to the agency of technology,
‘should other important and inspirational mechanisms — my CD player, for
instance, and my bookshelves — get cut in on the action as
well?’[47](ch3.xhtml#footnote-106) These distributed forms of authorship do
not solve issues
re seen as standing outside the system. Gibson uses actor
network theory (ANT) as a framework to construct her network-based model of
creativity, where for her ANT allows for a vision that does not fix creativity
within a product, but focuses more on the material relationships and
interactions between users and producers. In this sense, she argues, a network
model allows for plural agencies to be attributed to creativity, including
those of users.[56](ch3.xhtml#footnote-097)
An interesting example of how the hegemonic object-based discourse of
creativity can be re-appropriated comes from the conceptual poet Kenneth
Goldsmith, who, in what could be seen as a direct response to this dominant
narrative, tries to emphasise that exactly what this discourse classifies as
‘uncreative’, should be seen as valuable in itself. Goldsmith points out that
appropriating is creative and that he uses it as a pedagogical method in his
classes on ‘Uncreative Writing’ (which he defines as ‘the art of managing
information and representing it as writing’[57](ch3.xhtml#footnote-096)). Here
‘uncreative writing’ is something to strive for and stealing, copying, and
patchwriting are elevated as import
, our
identities are also in flux and ever shifting, turning creative writing into a
post-identity literature.[60](ch3.xhtml#footnote-093) Machines play important
roles in uncreative writing, as active agents in the ‘managing of
information’, which is then again represented as writing, and is seen by
Goldsmith as a bridge between human-centred writing and full-blown
‘robopoetics’ (literature written by machines, for machines). Yet Goldsmith is
keen to emphasise that these forms of uncreative writing are not beholden to
the digital medium, and that pre-digital examples are plentiful in conceptual
literature and poetry. He points out — again by a discursive re-appropriation
of what creativity is or can be — that sampling, remixing and appropriation
have been the norm in other artistic and creative media for decades. The
literary world is lagging behind in this respect, where, despite the
experiments by modernist writers, it continues neatly to delineate avant-garde
from more general forms of writing. Yet as Goldsmith argues the digital has
started to disrupt this distinction again, moving beyond ‘analogue’ notions of
writing, and has fuelled with it the idea that there might
be (2011) ‘What’s Feminist About
Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law
1.1,
Cramer, Florian (2013) Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and
New York, NY: nai010 publishers).
Drucker, Johanna (2015) ‘Humanist Computing at the End of the Individual Voice
and the Authoritative Text’, in Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg
(eds.), Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp.
83–94.
— (2014) ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing
Bibliographical Alterities’, MATLIT: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em
Materialidades da Literatura 2.1, 11–29.
— (2013) ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’,
Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1 [n.p.],
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea A. Lunsford (2001) ‘Collaboration and Concepts of
Authorship’, PMLA 116.2, 354–69.
Emerson, Lori (2008) ‘Materiality, Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated
Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels with Erin Moureacute’s Pillage Land’, ESC:
English
vity’, in Proceedings of the Linköping Electronic Conference
(Linköpings universitet: University Electronic Press, 2005).
[46](ch3.xhtml#footnote-107-backlink) N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat,
Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25.1
(2004), 67–90,
‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, Digital
Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013),
Drucker, ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing
Bibliographical Alterities’, MATLIT: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em
Materialidades da Literatura 2.1 (2014), 11–29.
[47](ch3.xhtml#footnote-106-backlink) Nick Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution
of the Author’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and
John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17 (p. 201),
[48](ch3.xhtml#footnote-105-backlink) Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of
the Author’, p. 202.
[49](ch3.xhtml#footnote-104-backlink) Lori Emerson, ‘Materiality,
I
conceptual in Adema & Hall 2013
h permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.
This document is the author’s post-print version of the journal article, incorporating any
revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published
version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version
if you wish to cite from it.
CURVE is the Institutional Repository for Coventry University
http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open
Abstract
In this article we argue that the medium of the book can be a material and
conceptual means, both of criticising capitalism’s commodification of knowledge (for
example, in the form of the commercial incorporation of open access by feral and
predatory publishers), and of opening up a space for thinking about politics. The
book, then, is a political medium. As the history of the artist’s book shows, it can be
used to question, intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions, and even
offer radical, counter-institutional alternatives. If the book’s potential to question and
disturb existing practices and institutions includes those associated with liberal
democr
ure Machine (http://www.culturemachine.net), and co-
1
founder of Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org). More
details are available on his website http://www.garyhall.info.
THE POLITICAL NATURE OF THE BOOK: ON ARTISTS’ BOOKS AND
RADICAL OPEN ACCESS
Janneke Adema and Gary Hall
INTRODUCTION
The medium of the book plays a double role in art and academia, functioning not only
as a material object but also as a concept-laden metaphor. Since it is a medium
through which an alternative future for art, academia and even society can be enacted
and imagined, materially and conceptually, we can even go so far as to say that, in its
ontological instability with regard to what it is and what it conveys, the book serves a
political function. In short, the book can be ‘rethought to serve new ends’. 1 At the
same time, the medium of the book remains subject to a number of constraints: in
terms of its material form, structure, characteristics and dimensions; and also in terms
of the political economies, institutions and practices in which it is historically
embedded. Consequently, if it is to continue to be able to serve ‘new ends’ as a
medium through which politics itsel
ility and authority – on
which so much of the academic institution rests.
In the light of the above, our argument in this essay is that some of these more
potentially radical, experimental developments in open access book publishing can be
related on the level of political and cultural significance to transformations undergone
in a previous era by the artist’s book. As a consequence, the history of the latter can
help us to explore in more depth and detail than would otherwise be possible the
relation in open access between experimenting with the medium of the book on a
4
material and conceptual level on the one hand, and enacting political alternatives in a
broader sense on the other. Within the specific context of 1960s and 1970s
counterculture, the artist’s book was arguably able to fill a certain political void,
providing a means of democratising and subverting existing institutions by
distributing an increasingly cheap and accessible medium (the book), and in the
process using this medium in order to reimagine what art is and how it can be
accessed and viewed. While artists grasped and worked through that relation between
the political, conceptual and material aspects of the book several decades ago, thanks
to the emergence of open access online journals, archives, blogs, wikis and free textsharing networks one of the main places in which this relation is being explored today
is indeed in the realm of academic publishing. 2
In order to begin thinking through some of the developments in publishing that are
currently being delved into under the banner of open access, then, let us pause for a
moment to reflect on some of the general characteristics of those earlier experiments
with the medium of the book that were performed by artists. Listed below are six key
areas in which artists’ books can be said to offer guidance for academic publishing in
the digital age, not just on a pragmatic level but on a conceptual and political level
too.
1) The Circumvention of Established Institutions
2
The relation in academic publishing between the political, conceptual and material aspects
of the book has of course been investigated at certain points in the past, albeit to varying
degrees and extents. For one example, see the ‘Working Papers’ and other forms of stencilled
gray literature that were produced and distributed by the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, as discussed by Ted Striphas and
Mark Hayward in their contribution to this issue.
5
According to the art theorist Lucy Lippard, the main reason the book has proved to be
so attractive as an artistic medium has to do with the fact that artists’ books
establishing
not-for-profit, scholar-led, open access journals and presses). The main goal of these
independent (and often non-commercial) publisher-printer-artist collectives was to
make experimental, innovative work (rather than generate a profit), and to promote
ephemeral art works, which were often ignored by mainstream, mostly marketorientated institutions. 7 Artists’ books thus fitted in well with the mythology Johanna
Drucker describes as surrounding ‘activist artists’, and especially with the idea of the
book as a tool of independent activist thought. 8
2) The Relationship with Conceptual and Processual Art
In the context of this history of the artist’s book, one particularly significant
conceptual challenge to the gallery system came with the use of the book as a
platform for exhibiting original work (itself an extension of André Malraux’s idea of
the museum without walls). Curator Seth Siegelaub was among the first to publish his
artists – as opposed to exhibiting them – thus becoming, according to Germano
5
Hendricks and Moore, ‘The Page as Alternative Space: 1950 to 1969’, in Lyons (ed),
Artists’ Books, p87.
6
Pavel Büchler, ‘Books as Books’, in Jane Rolo and Ian Hunt (eds), Book Works: a Partial
History and Sourcebook, London: Book Works, 1996.
7
Clive Phillpot,
y with the question of what constituted art and an
art object. This reflexivity of the book with regard to its own nature is one of the key
characteristics that make a book an artist’s book, and enable it to have political
potential in that it can be ‘rethought to serve new ends’. Much the same can be said
with respect to the relation between the book and scholarly communication: witness
the way reflection on the material nature of the book in the digital age has led to
questions being raised regarding how we structure scholarly communication and
practice scholarship more generally.
5) Conceptual Experimentation: Problematising the Concept and Form of the Book
Another key to understanding artists’ books and their history lies with the way the
radical change in printing technologies after World War II led to the reassessment of
the book form itself, and in particular, of the specific nature of the book’s materiality,
16
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, p72.
10
of the very idea of the book, and of the notions and practices underlying the book’s
various uses.
When it came to reevaluating the materiality of the book, many experiments with
artists’ books tried to esca
(1994).
30
Stewart Cauley, ‘Bookworks for the ’90s’, Afterimage, 25, 6, May/June (1998).
31
Stefan Klima, Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature, Granary Books, New
York, 1998, pp54-60.
32
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, p78.
15
Following Abigail Solomon-Godeau, this process of commercialisation and
incorporation – or, as she calls it, ‘the near-total assimilation’ of art practice
(Solomon-Godeau focuses specifically on postmodern photography) and critique into
the discourses it professed to challenge – can be positioned as part of a general
tendency in conceptual and postmodern ‘critical art practices’. It is a development that
can be connected to the changing art markets of the time and viewed in terms of a
broader social and cultural shift to Reaganomics. For Solomon-Godeau, however, the
problem lay not only in changes to the art market, but in critical art practices and art
critique too, which in many ways were not robust enough to keep on reinventing
themselves. Nonetheless, even if they have become incorporated into the art market
and the commodity system, Solomon-Godeau argues that it is still possible for art
practices and institutional crit
y open peer-review procedures (such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s
Planned Obsolescence, which uses the CommentPress Wordpress plugin to enable
comments to appear alongside the main body of the text), wikis (e.g. Open
24
Humanities Press’ two series of Liquid and Living Books) and blogs (such as those
created using the Anthologize app developed at George Mason University). 46 These
enable varying degrees of what Peter Suber calls ‘author-side openness’ when it
comes to reviewing, editing, changing, updating and re-using content, including
creating derivative works. Such practices pose a conceptual challenge to some of the
more limited interpretations of open access (what has at times been dubbed ‘weak
open access’), 47 and can on occasion even constitute a radical test of the integrity and
identity of a given work, not least by enabling different versions to exist
simultaneously. In an academic context this raises questions of both a practical and
theoretical nature that have the potential to open up a space for reimagining what
counts as scholarship and research, and of how it can be responded to and accessed:
not just which version of a work is to be cited and preserved, and who i
d
a work actually is, and where any authority and stability that might be associated with
such concepts can now be said to reside.
It is interesting then that, although they can be positioned as constituting two of the
major driving forces behind the recent upsurge in the current interest in open access
book publishing, as ‘projects’, the at times more obviously or overtly ‘political’ (be it
liberal-democratic, neoliberal or otherwise) project of using digital media and the
Internet to create wider access to book-based research on the one hand, and
experimenting—as part of the more conceptual, experimental aspects of open access
book publishing—with the form of the book (a combination of which we identified as
46
See http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence;
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/; http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/; http://anthologize.org/.
47
See Peter Suber, SPARC OA newsletter, issue 155, March 2, 2011:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-11.htm
25
being essential components of the experimental and political potential of artists’
books) and the way our dominant system of scholarly communication currently
operates on t
, there was a corresponding
increase in access to the means of production and distribution of books. This in turn
led to the emergence of new possibilities and roles that the book could be put to in an
art context, which included democratizing art and critiquing the status quo of the
gallery system. But these changes to the materiality and distribution of the codex
book in particular – as an artistic product as well as a medium – were integrally linked
with questions concerning the nature of both art and the book as such. Book artists
and theorists thus became more and more engaged in the conceptual and practical
exploration of the materiality of the book. In the end, however, the promise of
technological innovation which underpinned the changes with respect to the
production and distribution of artists’ books in the 1960s and 1970s was not enough
to generate any kind of sustainable (albeit repeatedly reviewed, refashioned and
renewed) challenge within the art world over the longer term.
The artist’s book of the 1960s and 1970s therefore clearly had the potential to bring
about a degree of transformation, yet it was unable to elude the cultural practices,
institutions and the market mechanisms that enveloped it for long (including those
developments in financialisation and the art market Solomon-Godeau connects to the
shift to Reaganomics). Consequently, instead of criticising or subverting the
31
established systems of publication and distribution, the artist’s book ended up being
largely integrated into them. 56 Throughout the course of this article we have argued
that its conceptual and material promise notwithstanding, there is a danger of
something similar happening to open access publishing today. Take the way open
access has increasingly come to be adopted by commercial publishers. If one of the
motivating factors behind at least some aspects of the open access movement – not
just the aforementioned open access book publishers in the HSS, but the likes of
PLoS, too – has been to stand up against, and even offer an alternative to, the large,
profit-led firms that have come to dominate the field of academic publishing, recent
years have seen many such commercial pub
ence to the research of Peter Murray Rust in Sigi Jöttkandt, ‘No-fee OA
Journals in the Humanities’.
61
Nicholas Knouf, ‘The JJPS Extension: Presenting Academic Performance Information’,
Journal of Journal Performance Studies, 1 (2010).
33
from a reading of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. For Balibar, the problem
with much of the discourse surrounding democracy is that it perceives the latter as a
model that can be implemented in different contexts (in China or the Middle East, for
instance). He sees discourses of this kind as running two risks in particular. First of
all, in conceptualizing democracy as a model there is a danger of it becoming a
homogenizing force, masking differences and inequalities. Second, when positioned
as a model or a project, democracy also runs the risk of becoming a dominating force
– yet another political regime that takes control and power. According to Balibar, a
more interesting and radical notion of democracy involves focusing on the process of
the democratisation of democracy itself, thus turning democracy into a form of
continuous struggle (or struggles) – or, perhaps better, continuous critical selfreflection. Democracy here is not an e
? And can we perhaps locate what some perceive as the
failure of artists’ books to contribute significantly to such a critical struggle after the
1970s to the fact that ultimately they became (incorporated in) dominant institutional
settings themselves – a state of affairs brought about in part by their inability to
address issues of access, experimentation and self-reflexivity in an ongoing critical
manner?
62
Etienne Balibar, ‘Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance
for Citizenship’, Rethinking Marxism, 20 (2008).
34
Certainly, one of the advantages of conceptualizing open access as a process of
struggle rather than as a model to be implemented would be that doing so would
create more space for radically different, conflicting, even incommensurable positions
within the larger movement, including those that are concerned with experimenting
critically with the form of the book and the way our system of scholarly
communication currently operates. As we have shown, such radical differences are
often played down in the interests of strategy. To be sure, open access can experience
what Richard Poynder refers to as a ‘bad tempered wrangles’ over relativel
ndon, Routledge, 2005, p11.
35
can be argued that the existence of such dissensus will help achieve this ambition.
After all, and as we know from another political philosopher, Chantal Mouffe, far
from placing democracy at risk, a certain degree of conflict and antagonism actually
constitutes the very possibility of democracy. 65 It seems to us that such a critical, selfreflexive, processual, non-goal oriented way of thinking about academic publishing
shares much with the mode of working of the artist - which is why we have argued
that open access today can draw productively on the kind of conceptual openness and
political energy that characterised experimentation with the medium of the book in
the art world of the 1960s and 1970s.
65
Mouffe, On the Political, p30.
36
conceptual in Barok 2014
the quote _information wants to be free_ , which is rarely quoted with its
wider context taken into account. Even factoids, numbers, can be carbon-quoted
but if taken out of the context their meaning can be shaped significantly. The
reason for aversion to follow a reference may well be that we are usually
pointed to begin reading another text from its beginning.
While this is exactly where the practices of linking as on the web and
referencing as in scholarly work may benefit from one another. The question is
_how_ to bring them closer together.
An approach I am going to propose requires a conceptual leap to something we
have not been taught.
For centuries, the primary format of the text has been the page, a vessel, a
medium, a frame containing text embedded between straight, less or more
explicit, horizontal and vertical borders. Even before the material of the
page such as papyrus and paper appeared, the text was already contained in
lines and columns, a structure which we have learnt to perceive as a grid. The
idea of the grid allows us to view text as being structured in lines and
pages, that are in turn in hand if something is to be referred to. Pages are
counted as the distance from
conceptual in Barok 2014
and the birth of
computational linguistic analysis, they were both initiated and realised by
priests.
During the World War II, Jesuit Father Roberto Busa began to look for machines
for the automation of the linguistic analysis of the 11 million-word Latin
corpus of Thomas Aquinas and related authors.
Working on his Ph.D. thesis on the concept of _praesens_ in Aquinas he
realised two things:
> "I realized first that a philological and lexicographical inquiry into the
verbal system of an author has t o precede and prepare for a doctrinal
interpretation of his works. Each writer expresses his conceptual system in
and through his verbal system, with the consequence that the reader who
masters this verbal system, using his own conceptual system, has to get an
insight into the writer's conceptual system. The reader should not simply
attach t o the words he reads the significance they have in his mind, but
should try t o find out what significance they had in the writer's mind.
Second, I realized that all functional or grammatical words (which in my mind
are not 'empty' at all but philosophically rich) manifest the deepest logic of
being which generates the basic structures of human discourse. It is .this
basic logic that allows the transfer from what the words mean today t o what
they meant to the writer.
>
> In the works of every philosopher there are two philosophies: the one which
conceptual in Constant 2009
d to the primacy of variation resisting the homogeneous drive of commercialised media spheres.
Excavating dreams of past geniuses, from Empedocles to Athanius
Kircher's cosmic machines and communication networks to Ernst florens Friedrich Chladni's visualisation of sound, Zielinski has been underlining the creative potential in an exercise of imagining media. In
this context, he defines in threefold the term ‘imaginary media' in his
chapter in the Book of Imaginary Media:
• Untimely media/apparatus/machines: “Media devised and designed
either much too late or much too early. . . ”
• Conceptual media/apparatus/machines: “Artefacts that were only
ever sketched as models. . . but never actually built.”
• Impossible media/apparatus/machines: “Imaginary media in the
true sense, by which I mean hermetic and hermeneutic machines. . .
they cannot actually be built, and whose implied meanings nonetheless have an impact on the factual world of media.”
A bit reminiscent of the baroque idea, variation is primary, claims
Zielinski. Whereas the capitalist orientated consumer media culture
is working towards a psychopathia medialis of homogenized media
technological environments, variant
lways happening
in the kitchen, in the bedroom, on the bus, using your mobile or
using your computer. Fernand Braudel speaks about this kind of ‘micro-histories', this sense of repetitive activity, which is done in many
trades and many lines, and that really is the deep unconscious history
of human activity. And arguably that's where the most interesting
developments happen, albeit in a very unsung, unseen, often almost
hidden way. It is this kind of deep collectivity, this profound sense of
micro-collaboration, which has often been tapped into this weekend.
Still, of course, the social and conceptual divisions persist, and
still, just as we have our celebrity chefs, so we have our celebrity
programmers and dominant corporate software developers. And just
as we have our forgotten and overlooked cooks, so we have people who
are dismissed, or even dismiss themselves, as ‘just computer users'.
The technological realities are such that people are often forced into
this role, with programmes that really are so fixed and closed that
almost nothing remains for the user to contribute. The structural
and social divisions remain, and are reproduced on gendered lines as
well.
In the 1940s, computer
trategies on and off line,
to explore their interests in the female
identity, critical resistance, representation and narrative archives.
Séverine Dusollier
Doctor in Law, Professor at the University of Namur (Belgium), Head of
the Department of Intellectual Property Rights at the Research Center for
Computer and Law of the University
of Namur, and Project Leader Creative Commons Belgium, Namur.
NL
EN
Leif Elggren (born 1950, Linköping,
Sweden) is a Swedish artist who lives
and works in Stockholm.
Active since the late 1970s, Leif
Elggren has become one of the most
constantly surprising conceptual artists
to work in the combined worlds of
audio and visual. A writer, visual
artist, stage performer and composer,
he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God,
on labels such as Ash International,
http://www.fundp.ac.be/universite/personnes
/page_view/01003580/
290
290
290
291
291
Touch, Radium and his own firework Edition. His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual
installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully
selected sound sources over a long
stretch of time and can range from
mesmerising quiet electronics to harsh
nois
x in Namen, en aan het Centre de Recherche
Informatique et Droit van de Universiteit van Namen. Zij is gespecialiseerd in het recht en de ethiek
Femke Snelting is a member of the
art and design collective De Geuzen
and of the experimental design agency
OSP.
NL
Michael Terry
http://www.ingimp.org/
Computer Scientist, University of Waterloo, Canada.
Carl Michael von Hausswolff
Von Hausswolff was born in 1956 in
Linkšping, Sweden.
He lives and
works in Stockholm. Since the end
of the 70s, von Hausswolff has been
working as a composer using the tape
recorder as his main instrument and
as a conceptual visual artist working with performance art, light- and
sound installations and photography.
His audio compositions from 1979 to
1992, constructed almost exclusively
from basic material taken from earlier audiovisual installations and performance works, essentially consist of
complex macromal drones with a surface of aesthetic elegance and beauty.
In later works, von Hausswolff retained the aesthetic elegance and the
drone, and added a purely isolationistic sonic condition to composing.
Marc Wathieu
http://www.erg.be/sdr/blog/
Marc Wathieu teaches at Erg (digital arts) and HEAJ (visual commu
conceptual in Constant 2015
is such a diversity
within typographic workflows, typesetting workflows ... that is akin to the
separation of form and content in HTML and CSS, but it’s not meant to be
... as problematic as that. I’m not sure if that is a real goal, or if that goal
is feasible or not. But it’s not meant to be drawing an artificial line, it’s just
meant to make things easier.
So by pulling apart historically grown elements, it becomes ... possibly modern?
Hypermodern?
Something for now and later.
Yes. Part of this idea, the trick ... This software is called ‘Subtext’ and at
this point it’s a conceptual project, but that will change pretty soon. Its
trick is this idea of separation instead of form and content, it’s translation
and effect. The parser itself has to be mutable, has to be able to pull in
the interface, print like decorations basically from a YAML configuration
file or some sort of equivalent. One of this configuration mechanisms that
was designed to be human readable and not machine readable. Like, well
both, striking that balance. Maybe we can get to that kind of ... talking
about agency a little bit. Its trick to really pull that out so that if you want
to ... for instance no
ms we run into, is
the fact that validation systems are really geared towards judging individuals.
And our type of practice is always multiple. It is always about things that
happen with many people. And it is really difficult to inspire students to
work that way, and at the same time know that at the end of the day, they’ll
be judged on what they produced as an individual. In traditional education
there is always a separation between teaching technology and practice. You
have, in different ways, you have the studio practice, and then you have the
workshops. And it is very difficult to make conceptual connections between
the two. We end up trying to make that happen, but it is clearly not made
for that. And then there is the problem of hierarchies between tutor and
student, that are hard to break in formal education, just because the setup is,
even in very informal situations, that someone comes to teach and someone
else comes to be taught. And there is no way to truly break that hierarchy,
because that is the way a school works. For years we are thinking about how
to do teaching differently or how to do learning differently, and last year, for
the first time, we organized a summer school.
conceptual in Constant 2016
his scientific
and philosophical challenge was Gottfried Leibniz. The German philosopher and
mathematician, a precursor of the field of symbolic logic, which developed later in the 20th
century, researched a method that reduced statements to minimum terms of meaning. He
investigated a language which “... will be the greatest instrument of reason,” for “when there
are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, and
see who is right”.[25] His inquiry was divided in two phases. The first one, analytic, the
characteristica universalis, was a universal conceptual language to express meanings, of which
we only know that it worked with prime numbers. The second one, synthetic, the calculus
ratiocinator, was the algebra that would allow operations between meanings, of which there is
even less evidence. The idea of calculus was clearly related to the infinitesimal calculus, a
fundamental development that Leibniz conceived in the field of mathematics, and which
Newton concurrently developed and popularized. Even though not much remains of
Leibniz's work on his algebra of thought, it was continued by mathematicians and logicians in
the 20th century. Most fam
a centre of
documentation, information, science and education, the complex should link the Union of
International Associations (UIA), which was founded by La Fontaine and Otlet in 1907,
and the League of Nations. “A material and moral representation of The greatest Society of
the nations (humanity);” an international city located on an extraterritorial area in Geneva.[16]
Despite their different backgrounds, they easily understood each other, since they “did
frequently use similar terms such as plan, analysis, classification, abstraction, standardization
and synthesis, not only to bring conceptual order into their disciplines and knowledge
organization, but also in human action.”[17] Moreover, the appearance of common terms in
their most significant publications is striking. Such as spirit, mankind, elements, work, system
and history, just to name a few. These circumstances led both Utopians to think the
Mundaneum as a system, rather than a singular central type of building; it was meant to
include as many resources in the development process as possible. Because the Mundaneum
is “an idea, an institution, a method, a material corpus of works and collections, a building, a
network,”[18] it had to be conceptualized as an “organic plan with the possibility to expand on
different scales with the multiplication of each part.”[19] The possibility of expansion and an
organic redistribution of elements adapted to new necessities and needs, is what guarantees
the system efficiency, namely by constantly integrating more resources. By designing and
standardizing forms of life up to the smallest element, modernism propagated a new form of
living which would ensure the utmost efficiency. Otlet supported and encouraged Le
Corbusier with his words: “The twentieth century is called upon to build a whole new
on humaine. »[17]
De plus, l'apparence des termes dans leurs publications les plus importantes est frappante.
Pour n'en nommer que quelques-uns : esprit, humanité, travail, système et histoire. Ces
circonstances ont conduit les deux utopistes à penser le Mundaneum comme un système
plutôt que comme un type de construction central singulier ; le processus de développement
cherchait à inclure autant de ressources que possible. Puisque « Le Mundaneum est une
Idée, une Institution, une Méthode, un Corps matériel de travaux et collections, un Édifice,
un Réseau. »[18] il devait être conceptualisé comme un « plan organique avec possibilité
d'expansion à différentes échelles grâce à la multiplication de chaque partie. »[19] La
possibilité d'expansion et la redistribution organique des éléments adaptées à de nouvelles
nécessités et besoins garantit l'efficacité du système, à savoir en intégrant plus de ressources
en permanence. En concevant et normalisant des formes de vie, même pour le plus petit
élément, le modernisme a propagé une nouvelle forme de vie qui garantirait l'efficacité
optimale. Paul Otlet a soutenu et encouragé Le Corbusier avec ces mots : « L
1920, le Musée international et les institutions créées par Paul Otlet et Henri
La Fontaine occupent une centaine de salles. L’ensemble sera désormais appelé
Palais Mondial ou Mundaneum. Dans les années 1920, Paul Otlet et Henri La
Fontaine mettront également sur pied l’Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum,
[2]
encyclopédie illustrée composée de tableaux sur planches mobiles.
Start at Parc du Cinquantenaire 11,
Brussels in front of the entrance of
what is now Autoworld.
In 1919, significantly delayed by World War I, the Musée international finally opened. The
project had been conceptualised by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine already ten years
earlier and was meant to be a mix between a documentation center, conference venue and
educational display. It occupied the left wing of the magnificent buildings erected in the Parc
Cinquantenaire for the Grand Concours International des Sciences et de l'industrie.
Museology merged with the International Institute of
From House, City, World, Nation,
Bibliography (IIB) which had its offices in the same
Globe:
building. The ever-expanding index card catalog had
The ever ambitious process of
already been accessible to the public since 1914
conceptual in Constant 2018
{.warning .descriptor} [How: The interwebs hosts
many projects that aim to produce software for observing software, (from
now on Software With Observatory Ambitions (SWOA)). A comparative
methodology can be produced by testing different SWOA to observe
software of interest. Example: use different sniffing software to
observe wireless networks, e.g., wireshark vs tcpdump vs SitMM.
Comparing SWOA reveals what is seen as worthy of observation (e.g., what
protocols, what space, which devices), the granularity of the
observation (e.g., how is the observation captured, in what detail), the
logo and conceptual framework of choice etc. This type of observation
may be turned into a service (See also: Something in the Middle Maybe
(SitMM)).]{.how .descriptor} [When: Ideally, SWOA can be used everywhere
and in every situation. In reality, institutions, laws and
administrators like to limit the use of SWOA on infrastructures to
people who are also administering these networks. Hence, we are
presented with the situation that the use of SWOA is condoned when it is
down by researchers and pen testers (e.g., they were hired) and shunned
when done by others (often subject to name calling as hackers or
attacke
conceptual in Dean, Dockray, Ludovico, Broekman, Thoburn & Vilensky 2013
g to hear from you about Neural in this regard, but also about your
art projects ‘Amazon Noir’ and ‘Face to Facebook’.
AL Neural started surrounded by the thrills of the rising global ‘telematic’
networks in 1993, reflecting an interest in intertwining culture and technology
with publishing (either cyberpunk science fiction, internet artworks, or hacker
technologies and practices) in both print and digital media. So, printing a
magazine about digital art and culture in that historical moment meant to
be surrounded by stimuli that pushed beyond the usual structural design
forms and conceptual paradigms of publishing. After almost two decades we
can recognise also that that time was the beginning of the most important
mutation of publishing, through its new networked, screen-based and real
time dimensions. And the printed page started also to have a different role
in the late 2000s, but this role is still to be extensively defined.
At that time, in the mid-1990s, Neural tried to experiment with publishing
through different perspectives. First, aesthetically: the page numbering was
strictly in binary numbers, just zeros and ones, even if the printer started to
complain that this was
physical embodiment of a complex Amazon.com
hacking action. It has been obtained exploiting the Amazon ‘Search Inside The Book’
tool. Take care because it’s an illegitimate and premature son born from the relationship
between Amazon and Copyright. It’s illegitimate because it’s an unauthorized print of a
copyright-protected book. And it’s premature because the gestation of this relationship’s
outcome is far from being mature.
We asked ourselves: what’s the difference between digitally scanning the text
of a book we already own, and obtaining it through Amazon Noir? In strictly
conceptual terms, there is no difference at all, other then the amount of time
we spent on the project. We wished to set up our own Amazon, definitively
circumventing the confusion of endless purchase-inducing stimuli. So we
stole the hidden and disjointed connections between the sentences of a text,
to reveal them for our own amusement and edification; we stole the digital
implementation of synaptic connections between memories (both human and
electronic) created by a giant online retailer in order to amuse and seduce us
into compulsive consumption; we were thieves of memory (in a McLuhanian
sense), ste
habits (in the sense that
we thought we could sway potential purchasers to support Mute by plying
them with ever more ‘appealing’ objects). Be that as it may, it did push us
to mine this liminal zone between paper and pixel that Sean evokes so well
- particularly, I’d say, in the late ’90s/early 2000s, when questions over the
relationship between the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ raged to nigh obsessional levels,
and magazines’ visual languages also grappled with their representation, or
integration.
Where we stand now, things are supposed to have stabilised somewhat.
The medial and conceptual hyper experimentation triggered by projected
‘digital futures’ has notionally died down, as mature social media and digital
publishing platforms are incorporated into our everyday lives, and the
behaviours associated with them normalised (the finger flicks associated with
the mobile or tablet touch screen, for example). Somewhere along the line you
asked about ePublishing. Well, things are very much up in the air on this front
currently, as independent publishers test the parameters and possibilities of
ePublishing while struggling to maintain commercial sustainability. Indeed, I
think the
conceptual in Dockray 2013
technology.
Now, when a program is in the midst of being executed, the computer's memory fills with data -but some of that is obsolete, no longer necessary for that program to run. If left alone, the memory
would become clogged, the program would crash, the computer might crash. It is the role of the
garbage collector to free up memory, deleting what is no longer in use. And here, I'm making the
analogy with flexible labor, workers being made redundant, and so on.
In Object-Oriented Programming, a programmer designs the software that she is writing around
“objects,” where each object is conceptually divided into “public” and “private” parts. The public
parts are accessible to other objects, but the private ones are hidden to the world outside the
boundaries of that object. It's a “black box” - a thing that can be known through its inputs and
outputs - even in total ignorance of its internal mechanisms. What difference does it make if the
code is written in one way versus an other .. if it behaves the same? As William James wrote, “If no
practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing,
and all dispute is idle.”
By merely
ior, the same inputs and outputs. Furthermore, this machine can be modified:
objects can be added and removed, changing but not destroying the machine; and it might be,
using Gerald Raunig’s appropriate term, “concatenated” with other machines.
Inevitably, this paradigm for describing the relationship between software objects spread outwards,
subsuming more of the universe outside of the immediate code. External programs, powerful
computers, banking institutions, people, and satellites have all been “encapsulated” and
“abstracted” into objects with inputs and outputs. Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness
and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people,
institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to
the demands of networked computation.. and the expanding field of objects are exactly those
entities integrated into such a network.
Consider a simple example of decentralized file-sharing: its diagram might represent an objectoriented piece of software, but here each object is a person-computer, shown in potential relation
to every other person-computer. Files might be se
conceptual in Fuller & Dockray 2011
o be republished or
reprinted imminently - but has been sort of invisible, out of print, until, by
surprise, it becomes much more visible within the art world or something.
**MF:** And it's also been interesting to see how the art world plays a role
in the reverberations of text which isn't the same as that in cultural theory
or philosophy. Certainly _Nights of Labour_ , something that is very close to
the role that cultural studies plays in the UK, but which (cultural studies)
has no real equivalent in France, so then, geographically and linguistically,
and therefore also in a certain sense conceptually, the life of a book
exhibits these weird delays and lags and accelerations, so that's a good
example. I'm interested in what role Aaaaarg plays in that kind of
proliferation, the kind of things that books do, where they go and how they
become manifest. So I think one of the things Aaaaarg does is to make books
active in different ways, to bring out a different kind of potential in
publishing.
**SD:** Yes, the debate has tended so far to get stuck in those three actors
because people tend to end up picking a pair and placing them in opposition to
one another, especially around intellectual p
hink, ‘I'm not sure
what it is', there's the sense that you can somehow redirect it.
**MF:** It's also interesting that projection itself can become a technical
feature so in a way the work of the imagination is done also through this kind
of tuning of the software structure. The governance that was handled by the
technical infrastructure actually elicits this kind of projection, elicits the
imagination in an interesting way.
**SD:** Yeah, yeah, I totally agree and, not to put too much emphasis on the
software, although I think that there's good reason to look at both the
software and the conceptual diagram of the school itself, but really in a way
it would grind to a halt if it weren't for the very traditional labour of
people - like an organising committee. In LA there's usually around eight of
us (now Jordan Biren, Solomon Bothwell, Vladada Gallegos, Liz Glynn, Naoko
Miyano, Caleb Waldorf, and me) who are deeply involved in making that
translation of these wishes - thrown onto the website that somehow attract the
other people - into actual classes.
**MF:** What does the committee do?
**SD:** Even that's hard to describe and that's what makes it hard to set up.
It's always very partic
conceptual in Giorgetta, Nicoletti & Adema 2015
this question would be ‘no’. Books are embodied
entities, which are materially established through their specific affordances
in relationship to their production, dissemination, reception and
preservation. This means that the specific materiality of the (digital) book
is partly an outcome of these ongoing processes. Katherine Hayles has argued
in this respect that materiality is an emergent property:
> In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of
physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay
between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the
interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality thus cannot be
specified in advance; rather, it occupies a borderland— or better, performs as
connective tissue—joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the user.
(2004: 72)
Similarly, Matthew Kirschenbaum points out that the preservation of digital
objects is:
> _logically inseparable_ from the act of their creation’ (…) ‘The lag between
creation and preservation collapses completely, since a digital object may
only ever be said to be preserved _if_ it is accessible, and each individual
access cr
conceptual in Goldsmith 2011
bly the entire [Cinema of
Transgression](http://www.ubu.com/film/transgression.html) series with films
by [Beth B](http://www.ubu.com/film/b.html) and [Richard
Kern](http://www.ubu.com/film/kern.html), a lecture by [Chris
Burden](http://www.ubu.com/film/burden.html), a bootleg version of [Robert
Smithson’s HOTEL PALENQUE](http://www.ubu.com/film/smithson.html), (1969) and
an astonishing [21-minute clip of Abbie Hoffman making gefilte
fish](http://www.ubu.com/film/hoffman.html) on Christmas Eve of 1973.
Other portions of the site include a vast repository of papers about audio,
performance, conceptual art, and poetry. There are large sections of artists
simply placed together under categories of Historical and Contemporary. And
then there is [/ubu Editions](http://www.ubu.com/ubu/), which offers full-
length PDFs of literature and poetry. Among the 73 titles, authors include Tim
Davis, Ron Silliman, Maurice Blanchot, Caroline Bergvall, Claude Simon, Jeremy
Sigler, Severo Sarduy, and Juliana Spahr. And finally there is a [Conceptual
Writing](http://ubu.com/concept/index.html) wing which highlights contemporary
trends in poetry as well as its historical precedents.
How does it all work? Most
conceptual in Hamerman 2015
e p2p libraries as
“fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians
practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities
rely on.” This civil disobedience is a politically motivated refutation of
intellectual property law and the orientation of information networks toward
venture capital and advertising. While the pirate libraries fulfill this
dissident function as a kind of experimental provocation, their content is
audience-specific rather than universal.
_[UbuWeb](http://www.ubuweb.com/resources/index.html)_ , founded in 1996 by
conceptual artist/ writer Kenneth Goldsmith, is the largest online archive of
avant-garde art resources. Its holdings include sound, video and text-based
works dating from the historical avant-garde era to today. While many of the
sites in the “pirate library” continuum source their content through
community-based or peer-to-peer models, UbuWeb focuses on making available out
of print, obscure or difficult to access artistic media, stating that
uploading such historical artifacts doesn’t detract from the physical value of
the work; rather, it enhances it. The website’s philosophy blends the utopi
conceptual in Liang 2012
and contested. A mirror for instance is
simultaneously a utopia (placeless place) even as it exists in reality. But
from the standpoint of the mirror you discover your absence as well. Foucault
remarks, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this
place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this
virtual point which is over there.”6
In _The Order of Things_ Foucault sought to investigate the conceptual space
which makes the order of knowledge possible; in his famed reading of Borges’s
Chinese encyclopedia he argues that the impossibility involved in the
encyclopedia consists less in the fantastical status of the animals and their
coexistence with real animals such as (d) sucking pigs and (e) sirens, but in
where they coexist and what “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination,
of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which
links each of those categories to all the others.” 7 Heterotopias destabilize
the ground from which we build order and in doing
conceptual in Ludovico 2013
h can be purely material - such as scribbled
notes, parts of the scanning person's hand, dried flowers - or typographical
or linguistic, or deleted or missing parts, all of them precisely annotated.
This small selection of illustrations of how physicality causes technology to
fail may be self-reflective, but it shows a particular aspect of a larger
development. In fact, industrial scanning is only one side of the coin. The
other is the private and personal digitization and sharing of books.
On the basis of brilliant open source tools like the DIY Bookscanner,3 there
are various technical and conceptual efforts to building specialist digital
libraries. _Monoskop_4 is exemplary: its creator Dusan Barok has transformed
his impressive personal collection of media (about contemporary art, culture
and politics, with a special focus on eastern Europe) into a common resource,
freely downloadable and regularly updated. It is a remarkably inspired
selection that can be shared regardless of possible copyright restrictions.
_Monoskop_ is an extreme and excellent example of a personal digital library
made public. But any small or big collection can be easily shared. Calibre5 is
an open source software th
conceptual in Marczewska, Adema, McDonald & Trettien 2018
the relationship
between the form of OA, the content published OA, and the
political project that informs both. Approaching OA as praxis,
then, is a tool for reshaping what constitutes the work of
publishing. What a commitment to open accessing, as opposed
to open access, makes possible, is a collective work against OA
as a tool of the neoliberal university and for OA as a poethical
form of publication: a fusion of making and doing, of OA as an
attitude and OA as form. But for poethical OA to become a
possibility, OA as praxis needs to emerge first.
To think about OA as praxis is to invite a conceptual shift
away from making publications OA and towards ‘doing OA’
as a complete project. OA seen as such ceases to exist as yet
another platform and emerges as an attitude that has the
potential to translate into forms of publishing best suited to
communicate it. This is not to suggest that OA should move
away from its preoccupation with the form and medium of
publishing altogether–the emergence of the so called postmedium condition in the arts, the glorification of generalised
‘doing’, and more recently, the popularity of related forms of
‘entrepreneurship’, all have their own probl
thods and theories informing our scholarship
and the media formats and graphic spaces we communicate
through. It involves scholars taking responsibility for the
practices and systems they are part of and often uncritically
repeat, but also for the potential they have to perform them
differently; to take risks, to take a wager on exploring other
communication forms and practices, or on a thinking that
breaks through formalisations of thought. Especially if as part
of our intra-actions with the world and today’s society we
can better reflect and perform its complexities. A scholarly
poethics, conceptualised as such, would include forms of
openness that do not simply repeat either established forms
22
Janneke Adema
The Poethics of Openness
23
References
This doesn’t mean that as part of
discussions on openness and open access,
openness has not often been perceived as
an intrinsic good, something we want to
achieve exactly because it is perceived as
an a priori good in itself, an ideal to strife
for in opposition to closedness (Tkacz
2014). A variant of this also exists, where
openness is simply perceived as ‘good’
because it opens up access to information,
without further explorin
conceptual in Mars & Medak 2019
onceptually close librarians came to the universal Turing machine
with the invention of the index card catalog did we center the
Public Library/Memory of the World around the idea of the catalog.
Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation (2005) taught us how end
users could become empowered to innovate and accordingly we
have built our public library as a distributed network of amateur
librarians acting as peers sharing their catalogs and books. Sven
Spieker’s The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (2008) showed us the
exciting hybrid meta-space between psychoanalysis, media theory,
and conceptual art one could encounter by visiting the world of
catalogs and archives. Understanding capitalism and schizophrenia would have been hard without Semiotext(e)’s translations of
Deleuze and Guattari, and remaining on the utopian path would
have been impossible if not for our reading of Cybernetic Revolutionaries (Medina 2011), Imagine No Possessions (Kiaer 2005), or Art
Power (Groys 2008).
Our Road into Schizophrenia, Commodity
Paradox, Political Strategy
Our vision for the Public Library/Memory of the World resonated
with many people. After the project initially gained a large number
53
54
conceptual in Mattern 2014
a’s Public Libraries_ (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991): 62.
4. David Weinberger, “[Library as Platform](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/future-of-libraries/by-david-weinberger/),” _Library Journal_ (September 4, 2012).
5. For more on “infrastructural ecologies,” see Reyner Banham, _Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies_ (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009 [1971]); Alan Latham, Derek McCormack, Kim McNamara and Donald McNeil, _Key Concepts in Urban Geography_ (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009): 32; Ming Xu and Josh P. Newell, “[Infrastructure Ecology: A Conceptual Mode for Understanding Urban Sustainability](http://css.snre.umich.edu/publication/infrastructure-ecology-conceptual-model-understanding-urban-sustainability),” Sixth International Conference of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) Proceedings, Berkeley, CA, June 7-10, 2011; Anu Ramaswami, Christopher Weible, Deborah Main, Tanya Heikkila, Saba Siddiki, Andrew Duvail, Andrew Pattison and Meghan Bernard, “A Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Systems Framework for Interdisciplinary Study of Sustainable City Systems,” _Journal of Industrial Ecology_ 16:6 (December 2012): 80
conceptual in Mars & Medak 2017
11 she co-founded the international artist collective Eastern
Surf, which has “organised, produced and participated in a number of projects
including exhibitions, performance, video, sculpture, publications and web based
work” (Eastern Surf, 2017). Ana's artwork critically deconstructs dominant social
readings of reality. It tests traditional roles of artists and viewers, giving the
observer an active part in creation of artwork, thus creating spaces of dialogue and
alternative learning experiences as platforms for emancipation and social
transformation. Grounded within a postdisciplinary conceptual framework, her
artistic practice is produced via research and expression in diverse media located at
the boundaries between reality and virtuality.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION
I have known Marcell Mars since student days, yet our professional paths have
crossed only sporadically. In 2013 I asked Marcell’s input about potential
interlocutors for this book, and he connected me to McKenzie Wark. In late 2015,
when we started working on our own conversation, Marcell involved Tomislav
Medak. Marcell’s and Tomislav’s recent works are closely related to arts, so I
requested Ana Kuzmanic’s input i
sts, activists and other cultural
workers.
This network was far from exclusively European. It was very well connected to
projects and initiatives from the United States such as Critical Art Ensemble,
Rhizome, and Thing.net, to projects in India such as Sarai, and to struggles of
Zapatistas in Chiapas. A significant feature of this loose network was its mutually
beneficial relationship with relevant European art festivals and institutions such as
Documenta (Kassel), Transmediale/HKW (Berlin) or Ars Electronica (Linz). As a
rule of thumb, critical new media and art could only be considered in a conceptual
setup of hybrid institutions, conferences, forums, festivals, (curated) exhibitions
and performances – and all of that at once! The Multimedia Institute was an active
part of that history, so it is hardly a surprise that the Public Library project took a
similar path of development and contextualization.
However, European hacker communities were rarely hanging out with critical
digital culture crowds. This is not the place to extensively present the historic
trajectory of different hacker communities, but risking a gross simplification here
is a very short genealogy. The earliest European ha
conceptual in Medak, Mars & WHW 2015
tiates discussions around
it. It also as a courseware extension to the self-organized education platform The Public School.17
16 Andrew Losowsky, “Library.nu, Book Downloading Site,
Targeted in Injunctions Requested by 17 Publishers,” Huffington Post, 15 February 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/2012/02/15/librarynu-book-downloading-injunction_
n_1280383.html.
17 “The Public School”, The Public School, n.d.,
https://www.thepublicschool.org/.
Public library (essay)
83
UbuWeb18 is the most significant and largest online
archive of avant-garde art; it was initiated and is lead
by conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith. UbuWeb,
although still informal, has grown into a relevant
and recognized critical institution of contemporary
art. Artists want to see their work in its catalog and
thus agree to a relationship with UbuWeb that has
no formal contractual obligations.
Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, culture, and media
technology, with a special focus on the avant-garde,
conceptual, and media arts of Eastern and Central
Europe; it was launched by Dušan Barok and others.
In the form of a blog Dušan uploads to Monoskop.
org/log an online catalog of curated titles (at the
moment numberi
conceptual in Sekulic 2015
e has to be porous enough to include people that
are not similar, to provide "a ground to build a public realm and give
opportunities for discussing and negotiating what is good for all, rather than
the idea of strengthening communities in their struggle to define their own
commons. Relating commons to groups of "similar" people bears the danger of
eventually creating closed communities. People may thus define themselves as
commoners by excluding others from their milieu, from their own privileged
commons." (Stavrides 2010). If learning carefully from digital commons, urban
commons need to be conceptualized on the basis of the public, with a self-
regulating community that is open for others to join. That socializes
knowledge and thus produces and reproduces the commons, creating a space for
political emancipation that is capable of judicial arguments for the
protection and extension of regulations that are counter-market oriented.
## References
Bailey, Saki (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic and Alexander de Cuveland.
Benkler, Yochai (2003): "The political economy of commons". _Upgrade_ IV, no.
3, 6-9, [www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf](http://www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
No
conceptual in Sollfrank 2018
look at UbuWeb and
the role an artistic approach can play in building cultural memory within the
neoliberal knowledge economy.
_UbuWeb—The Cultural Memory of the Avant-Garde_
Since Kenneth Goldsmith started Ubu in 1997 the site has become a major point
of reference for anyone interested in exploring twentieth-century avant-garde
art. The online archive provides free and unrestricted access to a remarkable
collection of thousands of artworks—among them almost 700 films and videos,
over 1000 sound art pieces, dozens of filmed dance productions, an
overwhelming amount of visual poetry and conceptual writing, critical
documents, but also musical scores, patents, electronic music resources, plus
an edition of vital new literature, the /ubu editions. Ubu contextualizes the
archived objects within curated sections and also provides framing academic
essays. Although it is a project run by Goldsmith without a budget, it has
built a reputation for making all the things available one would not find
elsewhere. The focus on “avant-garde” may seem a bit pretentious at first, but
when you look closer at the project, its operator and the philosophy behind
it, it becomes obvious how much sense this
n of original and copy.
Marginally, it is about the question of high-quality versus low-quality
copies. In reproducible media the value of an artwork cannot be based on its
originality any longer—the core criterion for sales and market value. This is
why many artists use the trick of high-resolution and limited edition, a kind
of distributed originality status for several authorized objects, which all
are not 100 percent original but still a bit more original than an arbitrary
unlimited edition. Leaving this whole discussion aside was a clear indication
that something else was at stake. The conceptual statement made by the
exhibition and its makers foregrounded the nature of the shadow library, which
visitors were able to experience when entering the gallery space. Instead of
viewing the artworks in the usual way—online—they had the opportunity to
physically immerse themselves in the cultural condition of proliferated acts
of copying, something that “affords their reconceptualization as a hybrid
creative-critical tool and an influential aesthetic category.”39
Appropriation and copying as longstanding methods of subversive artistic
production, where the reuse of existing material serves as a tool for
commentary, social critique, and a means of making a political statement, has
expanded here to the art of exhibition-making. The individual works serve to
illustrate a curatorial concept, thus radically shifting the avant-garde
gesture which copying used to be in the twentieth century, to breathe new life
in the “culture of collecting, organizing, curating, and sharing content.”
Organizing this conceptually concise exhibition was a brave and bold statement
by the art institution: The Onassis Cultural Centre, one of Athens’ most
prestigious cultural institutions, dared to adopt a resolutely political
stance for a—at least in juridical terms—questionable project, as Ubu lives
from the persistent denial of copyright. Neglecting the concerns of the
individual authors and artists for a moment was a necessary precondition in
order to make space for rethinking the future of cultural production.
________________
Special thanks to Eric Steinhauer and all the artists and amateur librarians
who a
conceptual in Sollfrank, Francke & Weinmayr 2013
ary, any self-made text and self-published copy could enter the
library. So it was raising really interesting questions about gatekeepers of
knowledge, and hierarchies and authorities.
[18:26]
On-line catalogue
[18:30]
E. W.: We created this online catalogue give to an overview of what we have in
the collection. We have a cover photograph and then we have a short text where
we try to frame and to describe the approach taken, like the strategy, what’s
been pirated and what was the strategy. [18:55] And this is quite a lot,
because it’s giving you the framework of it, the conceptual framework. But
it’s not giving you the book, and this is really important because lots of the
books couldn’t be digitised, because it’s exactly their material quality which
is important, and which makes the point. [19:17] So if I would… if I have a
project which is working about mediation, and then I put another layer of
mediation on top of it by scanning it, it just wouldn’t work anymore.
[19:29] The purpose of the online catalogue isn’t to give you insight into all
the books to make actually all the information available, it’s more to talk
about the approach taken and the q
conceptual in Sollfrank & Kleiner 2012
t manuals
that say, be a secret agent spy – isn't easy, and it tries to get this across,
that actually it's not nearly as easy to evade the economic and political
dimensions of our society as it should be. [37:45] Maybe it's better that we
politically fight to avoid having to share information only by hiding USB
sticks in public space, sticking around and acting like spies.
[37:57]
Thimbl
[38:02]
Thimbl is another work, and it is completely online. This work in some ways
has become a signature work for us, even though it doesn't really have any
physical presence. It's a purely conceptual work. [38:15] One of the arguments
that the Manifesto makes is that the Internet was a fully distributed social
media platform – that's what the Internet was, and then it was replaced,
because of capitalism and because of the economic logic of the market, with
centralised communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. [38:40] And
despite that, within the free software community and the hacker community,
there's the opposite myth, just like the copyright myth. There's this idea
that we are moving towards decentralised software. [38:54] You see people like
Eben Moglen making this point a l
conceptual in Sollfrank & Snelting 2014
ndividuals. And our type of practice is always
multiple, it’s always about, let’s say, things that happen with many people.
[23:17] And it’s really difficult to inspire students to work that way, and at
the same time know that at the end of the day, they will be judged on their
own, what they produce as an individual. So that’s one part. [23:31] In
traditional education there’s always like a separation between teaching
technology and practice. So you have, in different ways, let’s say, you have
the studio practice and then you have the workshops. And it’s very difficult
to make conceptual connections between the two, so we end up trying to make
that happen but it’s clearly not made for that. [24:02] And then there is the
problematics of the hierarchies between tutors and students, that are hard to
break in formal education, just because the set up is – even when it’s a very
informal situation – that someone comes to teach and someone else comes to be
taught. [24:28] And there’s no way to truly break that hierarchy because
that’s the way the school works. So since a year we’ve been starting to think
about how to do… Well, no, for years we’ve been thinking a
conceptual in Stalder 2018
of content ("raw
material"), have turned appropriation and recombination into general
methods of cultural production.[^64^](#c1-note-0064){#c1-note-0064a}
This phenomenon will be examined more closely in the next chapter.
Both the involvement of users in the production process and the methods
of appropriation and recombination are extremely information-intensive
and communication-intensive. Without the corresponding technological
infrastructure, neither could be achieved efficiently or on a large
scale. This was evident in the 1970s, when such approaches never made it
beyond subcultures and conceptual studies. With today\'s search engines,
every single user can trawl through an amount of information that, just
a generation ago, would have been unmanageable even by professional
archivists. A broad array of communication platforms (together with
flexible production capacities and efficient logistics) not only weakens
the contradiction between mass fabrication and personalization; it also
allows users to network directly with one another in order to develop
specialized knowledge together and thus to enable themselves to
intervene directly in design processes, both as []{#Page_40
type="pagebrea
and
viewpoints are dissolved. \[...\] Everything feudal and fixed goes up in
smoke, everything sacred is
profaned."[^41^](#c2-note-0041){#c2-note-0041a}
The defining feature of society, on the contrary, is that it frees the
individual from such multifarious relationships. Society, according to
Tönnies, separates its members from one another. Although they
coordinate their activity with others, they do so in order to pursue
partial, short-term, and personal goals. Not only are people separated,
but so too are different areas of life. In a market-oriented society,
for instance, the economy is conceptualized as an independent sphere. It
can therefore break away from social connections to be organized simply
by limited formal or legal obligations between actors who, beyond these
obligations, have nothing else to do with one another. Costs or benefits
that inadvertently affect people who are uninvolved in a given market
transaction are referred to by economists as "externalities," and market
participants do not need to care about these because they are strictly
pursuing their own private interests. One of the consequences of this
form of social relationship is a heightened social dynamic, for no
hours like slaves in the labour
of calculation which could be done by any peasant with the aid of a
machine."[^79^](#c2-note-0079){#c2-note-0079a} This vision already
contains a distinction between higher cognitive and interpretive
activities, which are regarded as being truly human, and lower processes
that involve pure execution and can therefore be mechanized. To this
end, Leibniz himself developed the first calculating machine, which
could carry out all four of the basic types of arithmetic. He was not
motivated to do this by the practical necessities of production and
business (although conceptually groundbreaking, Leibniz\'s calculating
machine remained, on account of its mechanical complexity, a unique item
and was never used).[^80^](#c2-note-0080){#c2-note-0080a} In the
estimation of the philosopher Sybille Krämer, calculating machines "were
rather speculative masterpieces of a century that, like none before it,
was infatuated by the idea of mechanizing 'intellectual'
processes."[^81^](#c2-note-0081){#c2-note-0081a} Long before machines
were implemented on a large scale to increase the efficiency of material
production, Leibniz had already speculated about using them to enhance
inte
re Likes on Your Instagram Photos," *WikiHow* (2016), online.
[50](#c2-note-0050a){#c2-note-0050} Jeremy Gilbert, *Democracy and
Collectivity in an Age of Individualism* (London: Pluto Books, 2013).
[51](#c2-note-0051a){#c2-note-0051} Diedrich Diederichsen,
*Eigenblutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation*
(Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008).
[52](#c2-note-0052a){#c2-note-0052} Harrison Rainie and Barry Wellman,
*Networked: The New Social Operating System* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012). The term is practical because it is easy to understand, but it is
also conceptually contradictory. An individual (an indivisible entity)
cannot be defined in terms of a distributed network. With a nod toward
Gilles Deleuze, the cumbersome but theoretically more precise term
"dividual" (the divisible) has also been used. See Gerald Raunig,
"Dividuen des Facebook: Das neue Begehren nach Selbstzerteilung," in
Oliver Leistert and Theo Röhle (eds), *Generation Facebook: Über das
Leben im Social Net* (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), pp. 145--59.
[53](#c2-note-0053a){#c2-note-0053} Jariu Saramäki et al., "Persistence
of Social Signatures in Human Communication," *Proceedings
ly, happens then? For the most part, these are unsolved questions.
On the other hand, because of the blending of work and leisure already
mentioned, as well as the general economization of social activity (as
is happening on social []{#Page_126 type="pagebreak" title="126"}mass
media and in the creative economy, for instance), it is hardly possible
now to draw a line between production and reproduction. Thus, this set
of concepts, which is strictly oriented toward economic production
alone, is more problematic than ever. My decision to use these concepts
is therefore limited to clarifying the conceptual transition from the
previous chapter to the chapter at hand. The concern of the last chapter
was to explain the forms that cultural processes have adopted under the
present conditions -- ubiquitous telecommunication, general expressivity
(referentiality), flexible cooperation (communality), and informational
automation (algorithmicity). In what follows, on the contrary, my focus
will turn to the political dynamics that have emerged from the
realization of "productive forces" as concrete "relations of production"
or, in more general terms, as social relations. Without claiming to be
comprehensi
le the latter is moving
toward a radical renewal of democracy by broadening the scope of
collective decision-making. Both cases involve more than just a few
minor changes to the existing order. Rather, both are ultimately leading
to a new political constellation beyond liberal representative
democracy.
:::
::: {.section}
Post-democracy {#c3-sec-0002}
--------------
The current dominant political development is the spread and
entrenchment of post-democracy. The term was coined in the middle of the
1990s by Jacques Rancière. "Post-democracy," as he defined it, "is the
government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy *after*
the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount and
dispute of the people."[^3^](#c3-note-0003){#c3-note-0003a} Rancière
argued that the immediate presence of the people (the demos) has been
abolished and replaced by processes of simulation and modeling such as
opinion polls, focus groups, and plans for various scenarios -- all
guided by technocrats. Thus, he believed that the character of political
processes has changed, namely from disputes about how we []{#Page_127
type="pagebreak" title="127"}ought to face a principally open future
conceptual in Stankievech 2016
tering an enormous brain” seems an
especially concise description. Indeed, for Saxl the librarian,
“the books remain a body of living thought as Warburg had
planned,”48 showing “the limits and contents of his scholarly
worlds.”49 Developed as a research tool to solve a particular
intellectual problem—and comparable on a number of levels
to exhibition-led inquiry—Aby Warburg’s organically structured, themed library is a three-dimensional instance of a library that performatively articulates and potentiates itself,
which is not yet to say exhibits, as both spatial occupation and
conceptual arrangement, where the order of things emerges
experimentally, and in changing versions, from the collection
and its unusual cataloging.50
47
48
49
50
Saxl speaks of “many tentative and personal excrescences” (“The History of
Warburg’s Library,” 331). When Warburg fell ill in 1920 with a subsequent fouryear absence, the library was continued by Saxl and Gertrud Bing, the new and
later closest assistant. Despite the many helpers, according to Saxl, Warburg always
remained the boss: “everything had the character of a private book collection, where
the master of the house had to se
conceptual in Thylstrup 2019
terms, that
is, those who are concerned with political categories, will glean little of
the real politics of mass digitization, since such politics at the margins
would escape this analytic matrix.67 Assemblage thinking, by contrast, allows
us to acknowledge the political mechanisms of mass digitization beyond
disciplinary regulatory models, in societies where “where forces … not
categories, clash.”68
As Ian Hacking and many others have noted, the capacious usage of the notion
of “politics” threatens to strip the word of meaning.69 But talk of a politics
of mass digitization is no conceptual gimmick, since what is taking place in
the construction and practice of mass digitization assemblages plainly is
political. The question, then, is how best to describe the politics at work in
mass digitization assemblages. The answer advanced by the present volume is to
think of the politics of mass digitization as “infrapolitics.”
The notion of infrapolitics has until now primarily and profoundly been
advanced as a concept of hidden dissent or contestation (Scott, 1990).70 This
volume suggests shifting the lens to focus on a different kind of
infrapolitics, however, one that not only tak
ination, where common standards allow more
effective coordination yet also entrap us in their pull for convergence.
Standardization is therefore a key technique of network power: on the one
hand, standardization is linked with globalization (and various neoliberal
regimes) and the attendant widespread contraction of the state, while on the
other hand, standardization implies a reconfiguration of everyday life.98
Standards allow for both minute data analytics and overarching political
systems that “govern at a distance.”99 Standardization understood in this way
is thus a mode of capturing, conceptualizing, and configuring reality, rather
than simply an economic instrument or lubricant. In a sense, standardization
could even be said to be habit forming: through standardization, “inventions
become commonplace, novelties become mundane, and the local becomes
universal.”100
To be sure, standardization has long been a crucial tool of world-making
power, spanning both the early and late-capitalist eras.101 “Standard time,”
as John Durham Peters notes, “is a sine qua non for international
capitalism.”102 Without the standardized infrastructure of time there would be
no global transpo
he other side of the English Channel,” favored
US-UK alliances over UK-Continental alliances “in search of European
patriotism for the adventure under way.”9
How can we understand Jeanneney’s framing of Google Books as an Anglo-Saxon
project and the function of this framing in his plea for a nation-based
digitization program? As historian Emile Chabal suggests, the concept of the
Anglo-Saxon mentality is a preeminently French construct that has a clear and
rich rhetorical function to strengthen the French self-understanding vis-à-vis
a stereotypical “other.”10 While fuzzy in its conceptual infrastructure, the
French rhetoric of the Anglo-Saxon is nevertheless “instinctively understood
by the vast majority of the French population” to denote “not simply a
socioeconomic vision loosely inspired by market liberalism and
multiculturalism” but also (and sometimes primarily) “an image of
individualism, enterprise, and atomization.”11 All these dimensions were at
play in Jeanneney’s anti-Google Books rhetoric. Indeed, Jeanneney suggested,
Google’s mass digitization project was not only Anglo-Saxon in its collecting
practices and organizational principles, but also in its
phere we
are already seeing territorial statements circulated in Europe on both
national and supranational scales, with potentially far-reaching implications
on both. Yet, there is little to suggest that the territorial sentiments will
reproduce sovereign spheres in practice. To the extent that reterritorializing
sentiments are circulated in globalizing networks, this chapter has sought to
counter both ideas about post sovereignty and pure nationalization, viewing
mass digitization instead through the lens of late-sovereignty. As this
chapter shows, the notion of late-sovereignty allows us to conceptualize mass
digitization programs, such as Europeana, as globalized phenomena couched
within the language of (supra)national sovereignty. In the age where rampant
nationalist movements sweep through globalized communication networks, this
approach feels all the more urgent and applicable not only to mass
digitization programs, but also to reterritorializing communication phenomena
more broadly. Only if we take the ways in which the nationalist imaginary
works in the infrastructural reality of late capitalism, can we begin to
account for the infrapolitics of the highly mediated new territorial
imag
us a productive framework for examining the highly complex
legal landscape of mass digitization. Rather than writing a chapter that
either supports or counters shadow libraries, the chapter seeks to chart the
complexity of the phenomenon and tease out its relevance for mass digitization
by framing it within what we might call an infrapolitics of parasitism.
In _The Parasite_ , a strange and fabulating book that brings together
information theory and cybernetics, physics, philosophy, economy, biology,
politics, and folk tales, French philosopher Michel Serres constructs an
argument about the conceptual figure of the parasite to explore the parasitic
nature of social relations. In a dizzying array of images and thought-
constructs, Serres argues against the idea of a balanced exchange of energy,
suggesting instead that our world is characterized by one parasite stealing
energy by feeding on another organism. For this purpose he reminds us of the
three meanings of parasite in the French language. In French, the term
parasite has three distinct, but related meanings. The first relates to one
organism feeding off another and giving nothing in return. Second, it refers
to the social concept of th
creative vis-à-vis the “bad” Asian pirate, citing for instance his statement
in his influential book _Free Culture_ that “All across the world, but
especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing
but take other people’s copyrighted content, copy it, and sell it. … This is
piracy plain and simple, … This piracy is wrong.” 59 Such statements, Kavita
Philip argues, frames the Asian pirate as external to order, whether it be the
order of Western law or neoliberalism.60
The postcolonial critique of CC’s Western normative discourse has instead
sought to conceptualize piracy, not as deviatory behavior in information
economies, but rather as an integral infrastructure endemic to globalized
information economies.61 This theoretical development offers valuable insights
for understanding the infrapolitics of shadow libraries. First of all, it
allows us to go beyond moral discussions of shadow libraries, and to pay
attention instead to the ways in which their infrastructures are built, how
they operate, and how they connect to other infrastructures. As Lawrence Liang
points out, if infrastructures traditionally belong to the domain of the
state, often in coop
fer
the user a sense of meaningful direction as well as a desire to keep browsing.
While digital collections are in principle no longer tethered to their
physical origins in spatial terms, we still encounter ideas about them in
spatialized terms, often using notions such as trails, paths, and alleyways to
visualize the spaces of digital collections.25 This form of spatialized logic
did not emerge with the mass digitization of cultural heritage collections,
however, but also resides at the heart of some of the most influential early
digital theories on the digital realm.26 These theorized and conceptualized
the web as a new form of architectural infrastructure, not only in material
terms (such as cables and servers) but also as a new experiential space.27 And
in this spatialized logic, the figure of the flaneur became a central
character. Thus, we saw in the 1990s the rise of a digital interpretation of
the flaneur, originally an emblematic figure of modern urban culture at the
turn of the twentieth century, in the form of the virtual flaneur or the
cyberflaneur. In 1994, German net artists Heiko Idensen and Matthias Krohn
paid homage to the urban figure, noting in a text that “the screen w
alpole coined the word serendipity in a letter
to Horace Mann in 1754, in which he explained his fascination with a Persian
fairy tale about three princes from the _Isle of Serendip_ _63_ who possess
superpowers of observation. In his letter, Walpole linked the contents of the
fantastical story to his view of how new discoveries are made: “As their
highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by “accidental
sagacity,” of things which they were not in quest of.” 64 And he proposed a
new word—“serendipity”—to describe this sublime talent for discovery.
Walpole’s conceptual invention did not immediately catch fire in common
parlance.65 But a few centuries after its invention, it suddenly took hold.
Who awakened the notion from its dormant state, and why? Sociologists Robert
K. Merton and Elinor Barber provided one influential answer in their own
enjoyable exploration of the word. As they note, serendipity had a particular
playful tone to it, expressing a sense that knowledge comes about not only
through sheer willpower and discipline, but also via pleasurable chance. This
almost hedonistic dimension made it incompatible with the serious ethos of the
nineteenth ce
conceptual in Weinmayr 2019
nts. In this hypothetical case, it is clear that the academic’s work has
become detached from the movements she now writes and talks about, and she no
doubt sees this. But there is good compensation for this uneasiness in the
form of professional validation, invitations that flatter, and most
importantly, an ease of the cycle of hourly paid or precarious nine-month
contracts.[12](ch11.xhtml#footnote-514)
Kelly’s and Fitzpatrick’s examples describe the paradoxes that the demand for
authorship creates for collective practices. But how can we actually escape
regimes of authorship that are conceptualised and economised as ‘cultural
capital’?
Academic authorship, after all, is the basis for employment, promotion, and
tenure. Also, arguably, artists who stop being ‘authors’ of their own work
would no longer be considered ‘artists’, because authorship is one of art’s
main framing devices. In the following I will discuss three artistic practices
that address this question — with, as we will see, very different
outcomes.[13](ch11.xhtml#footnote-513)
## Authorship Replaces Authorship?
In 2011, American artist Richard Prince spread a blanket on a sidewalk outside
Central Park
e going to buy my Catcher in the Rye, you were going to
have to pay twice as much as the one Barnes and Noble was selling from J. D.
Salinger. I know that sounds really kind of shallow and maybe that’s not the
best way to contribute to something, but in the book-collecting world you pay
a premium for really collectible books,’ he explained in an interview with
singer Kim Gordon.[18](ch11.xhtml#footnote-508)
As intended, the work quickly turned into a
collectible[19](ch11.xhtml#footnote-507) and attracted lots of applause from
members of the contemporary art world including, among others, conceptual
writer Kenneth Goldsmith, who described the work as a ‘terribly ballsy move’.
Prince was openly ‘pirating what is arguably the most valuable property in
American literature, practically begging the estate of Salinger to sue
him.’[20](ch11.xhtml#footnote-506)
## Who has the Power to Appropriate?
We need to examine Goldsmith’s appraisal more closely. What is this ‘ballsy
move’? And how does it relate to the asserted criticality of appropriation
artists in the late 1970s, a group of which Prince was part?
Prince rose to prominence in New York in the late 1970s, associated with th
xhtml#footnote-497) creates new meaning
and must therefore be interpreted as an ‘original’ authorial act.
Subsequently, this work has been validated by museums, galleries, collectors
and critics. From an economic perspective one can therefore argue that
Prince’s numerous solo exhibitions in prestigious museums, his sales figures,
and affiliation to commercial galleries are evidence that he has been ascribed
artistic authorship as well as authorial agency by the institutions of the art
world.[30](ch11.xhtml#footnote-496)
Coming back to Prince’s appropriation of Catcher in the Rye, his conceptual
gesture employs necessarily the very rhetoric and conceptual underpinnings of
legislation and jurisdiction that he seemingly
critiques.[31](ch11.xhtml#footnote-495) He declares ‘this is an artwork by
Richard Prince, © Richard Prince’ and asserts, via claiming copyright, the
concept of originality and creativity for his work. By this paradoxical
gesture, he seemingly replaces ‘authorship’ with authorship and ‘ownership’
with ownership. And by doing so, I argue, he reinforces its very concept.
The legal framework remains conceptual, theoretical and untested in this case.
But on another occasion, Prince’s authorship was tested in court — and
eventually legally confirmed to belong to him. This is crucial to my inquiry.
What are we to make of the fact that Prince, who challenges the copyright
doctrine in his gestures of appropriation, has been ascribed legitimate
authorship by courts who rule on copyright law? It seems paradoxical, because
as Elizabeth Wang rightly claims, ‘if appropriation is legitimized, the
political dimension of this act is excised’.[32](ch11.xhtml#footnote-494) And
Cornelia Sollfrank argues
e presented himself in his court deposition as an artist, who
‘do[es]n’t really have a message,’ and was not ‘trying to create anything with
a new meaning or a new message.’[50](ch11.xhtml#footnote-476) Nevertheless the
appeal court’s ruling transforms the ‘elusive artist not only into a subject,
but also into an [artist] author’[51](ch11.xhtml#footnote-475) — a status he
set out to challenge in the first place. Therefore Richard Prince’s ongoing
games[52](ch11.xhtml#footnote-474) might be entertaining or make us laugh, but
they stop short of effectively challenging the conceptualisation of
authorship, originality and property because they are assigned the very
properties that are denied to the authors whose works are copied. That is to
say, Prince’s performative toying with the law does not endanger his art’s
operability in the art world. On the contrary, it constructs and affirms his
reputation as a radical and saleable artist-author.
## De-Authoring
A very different approach to copyright law is demonstrated by American artist
Cady Noland, who employs the law to effectively endanger her art’s operability
in the art market. Noland is famously concerned with the
alue. Richard Prince’s stated intention is to double the
book’s price, and by attaching his name to Salinger’s book in a Duchampian
gesture, he turns it into a work of art authored and copyrighted by Prince.
Noland, on the contrary lowers the value of her artwork by removing her
signature and by asserting the artist-author’s (Noland) rights over the
dealer-owner’s (Jancou).[60](ch11.xhtml#footnote-466)
However, from a legal perspective I would argue that both Noland and Prince —
in their opposite approaches of removing and adding their signatures — affirm
authorship as it is conceptualised by the law.[61](ch11.xhtml#footnote-465)
After all ‘copyright law is a system to which the notion of the author appears
to be central — in defining the right owner, in defining the work, in defining
infringement.’[62](ch11.xhtml#footnote-464)
## Intellectual Property Obsession Running Amok?
Intellectual property — granted via copyright — has become one of the driving
forces of the creative economy, being exploited by corporations and
institutions of the so-called ‘creative industries’. In the governmental
imagination, creative workers are described as ‘model entrepr
fers to a relational
activity and re-imagines authorship not as proprietary and stable, but as a
dialogical and generative process. Here, as feminist legal scholar Carys Craig
claims, ‘authorship is not originative but participative; it is not internal
but interactive; it is not independent but interdependent. In short, a
dialogic account of authorship is equipped to appreciate the derivative,
collaborative, and communicative nature of authorial activity in a way that
the Romantic [individual genius] account never
can.’[84](ch11.xhtml#footnote-442)
Such a participatory and interdependent conceptualisation of authorship is
illustrated and tested in the Piracy Project’s research into reprinting,
modifying, emulating and commenting on published books. As such it revisits —
through material practice — Michel Foucault’s critical concept of the ‘author
function’ as the triggering of a discourse, rather than a proprietary
right.[85](ch11.xhtml#footnote-441)
This becomes clearer when we consider that digital print technologies, for
example through print on demand and desktop publishing, allow for a constant
re-printing and re-editing of existing files. The advent and widespread
a
slightly cropped. However, this pirate copy has two extra chapters. Somebody
has infiltrated the named author’s work and sneaked in two fictionalised
chapters about the author’s life. These extra chapters are well written, good
enough to blend in and not noticeable at first glance by the
reader.[90](ch11.xhtml#footnote-436)
The pirates cannot gain any cultural capital here, as the pirating author
remains an anonymous ghost. Equally there is no financial profit to be made,
as long as the pirate version is not pointed out to readers as an extended
version. Such act is also not framed as a conceptual gesture, as it is the
case with Prince’s Catcher in the Rye. It rather operates under the radar of
everyone, and moreover and importantly, any revelation of this intervention or
any claim of authorship would be counterproductive.
This example helps us to think through concepts of the authoritative text and
the stability of the book. Other cases in the Piracy Project find similar ways
to queer the category of authorship and the dominant modes of production and
dissemination.[91](ch11.xhtml#footnote-435) Our practice consists of
collecting; setting up temporary reading rooms to house the coll
of the Author in Literature and Law’, Modern Law Review, 57 (1994),
973–86 (p. 977)). ‘Authenticity is the pure expression, the expressivity, of
the artist, whose soul is mirrored in the work of art.’ (Cornelia Klinger,
‘Autonomy-Authenticity-Alterity: On the Aesthetic Ideology of Modernity’ in
Modernologies: Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism,
exhibition catalogue (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009),
pp. 26–28 (p. 29)) Moral rights are the personal rights of authors, which
cannot be surrendered fully to somebody else because they conceptualize
authorship as authentic extension of the subject. They are ‘rights of authors
and artists to be named in relation to the work and to control alterations of
the work.’ (Bently, ‘Copyright and the Death of the Author’, p. 977) In
contrast to copyright, moral rights are granted in perpetuity, and fall to the
estate of an artist after his or her death.
Anglo-American copyright, employed in Prince’s case, on the contrary builds
the concept of intellectual property mainly on economic and distribution
rights, against unauthorised copying, adaptation, distribution and display.
Copyright
‘Direct
Weekend’ and ‘Long Weekend’ at various art colleges in London involved
Precarious Workers Brigade, Carrot Workers, tax evasion campaigners, UK Uncut,
alternative media groups, feminist alliances, anti-poverty groups. See
Precarious Workers Brigade, ‘Fragments Toward an Understanding of a Week that
Changed Everything…’, e-flux 24 (April 2011),
[108](ch11.xhtml#footnote-418-backlink) Susan Kelly describes Felix Guattari’s
use of the term transversality ‘as a conceptual tool to open hitherto closed
logics and hierarchies and to experiment with relations of interdependency in
order to produce new assemblages and alliances […] and different forms of
(collective) subjectivity that break down oppositions between the individual
and the group.’ Susan Kelly, ‘The Transversal and the Invisible: How do You
Really Make a Work of Art that Is not a Work of Art?’, Transversal 1 (2005),
description of transversal activist practice: as ‘There is no longer any
artificially produced subject of
Open Book Publishers, Authors’ Guide, p. 19,
[114](ch11.xhtml#footnote-412-backlink) For a discussion of gender inequality
in recent scholarly publishing see Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper ‘Publication,
Power, Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing’, Critical Inquiry (21
July 2017),
[115](ch11.xhtml#footnote-411-backlink) See Gérard Genette’s discussion of the
‘pseudonym effect’ as conceptual device. He distinguishes between the reader
not knowing about the use of the pseudonym and the conceptual effect of the
reader having information about the use of a pseudonym. Gérard Genette,
Paratexts, Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[116](ch11.xhtml#footnote-410-backlink) The Neoist movement developed in
Canada, North America and Europe in the late 1970s. It selected one signature
name for multiple identities and authors, who published, performed and
exhibited under this joint name. It is different from a collective name, as
any person could sign her or his work with these joint names without revealing
the author’s identity. See letter exchanges between cultu
conceptual in WHW 2016
neoliberal rationale that shapes every
domain of our lives in accordance with a specific image of economics,1
as well as the problematic “embrace of localism and autonomy by much
of the left as the pure strategy”2 and the left’s inability to destabilize the
dominant world-view and reclaim the future.3 Consequently, art practices
increasingly venture into novel modes of operation that seek to “expand
our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows”.4 They not only
point to the problems but address them head on. By negotiating art’s autonomy and impact on the social, and by conceptualizing the whole edifice
of art as a social symptom, such practices attempt to do more than simply
squeeze novel ideas into exhausted artistic formats and endow them with
political content that produces “marks of distinction”,5 which capital then
exploits for the enhancement of its own reproduction.
The two projects visited in this text both work toward building truly
accessible public spaces. Public Library, launched by Marcell Mars and
Tomislav Medak in 2012, is an ongoing media and social project based on
ideas from the open-source software movement, while Autonomy Cube, by
artist Trevor
uild their autonomy on the dedi21
McKenzie Wark, “Metadata Punk”, in Public Library, pp. 113–117 (see n. 9).
“There is something political in the city air”
305
cation and effort of the collective body, without which they would not
exist, rendering this interdependence not as some consensual idyll of cooperation but as conflicting fields that create further information and experiences. By doing so, they question the traditional edifice of art in a way
that supports Peter Osborne’s claim that art is defined not by its aesthetic
or medium-based status, but by its poetics: “Postconceptual art articulates a post-aesthetic poetics.”22 This means going beyond criticality and
bringing into the world something defined not by its opposition to the real,
but by its creation of the fiction of a shared present, which, for Osborne,
is what makes art truly contemporary. And if projects like these become a
kind of political trophy for art institutions, the side the institutions choose
nevertheless affects the common sense of our future.
22
Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, p. 33.
306
What, How & for Whom / WHW
“There is something political in the city air”
307
Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.