Experimental publishing and alternative networked cultures

The emergence of experimental post-digital publishing over the past decade has opened up new modes and methods of design practice that have allowed for extended relationships between social and media environments. This panel discussion draws on historical as well as contemporary references to examine such approaches through a range of perspectives, spanning the fields of art, graphic design, digital media and software development. The projects and practices discussed in the presentations and subsequent Q&A will consider the shift away from fixed to more fluid forms of publication and acts of publishing that are contingent upon networked, interactive and hybrid (digital/analog) contexts. Presentations will examine the links between conceptual and performance art practices from the 1960s, which fed into critical debates in art and design discourse – vis-a-vis the role of the active audience/reader/user – emerging in the 1980s and ‘90s with the broader availability of desktop computing and networked communications. Alongside these developments, a thriving landscape of grassroots publishing and alternative networked social relations, with roots in 1960s counterculture, continues to disrupt and re-examine conventions of authorship, copyright, design, dissemination and reception. Looking at practices, processes and projects that embrace and reflect back on a variety of strategies including collaboration, participation and anonymity, as well as forms that can be permanent or transient, provisional and iterative, in nature, this event proposes the need for new, cross-disciplinary vocabularies to enter traditional discourses relating to publishing as practice.

Convened by Ruth Blacksell and Lozana Rossenova with contributions from Karen Di Franco, Aymeric Mansoux, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak.

Event hosted by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading

Credits: The image background is based on a capture from a 1988 Macintosh operating system booting up The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, presented via software emulation in the Internet Archive