CCAP Research Community

I was supposed to go to Documenta12 this week, for a week of discussions on magazine publishing curated by Nat Muller and Alessandro Ludovico, of Neural. I couldn’t make it because I was injured, but of course these days I can read a lot of the presentations before they’re given, and listen to podcasts afterwards.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about publishing as a crucial component of dynamic media - and also as a register of a changes in practices and concepts involving dynamic media. I’ve blogged elsewhere about some of this, and responded to Nat Muller and Alessandro’s interesting introductions to the issues, and there’s some good material on the European LabforCulture site (another discovery courtesy of Documenta12).

Something that I found very interesting however, towards the last third of the podcast “How to Survive the Paper Industry”, which can be downloaded from here, was Simon Worthington of MetaMute’s detailed discussion of Open Source publishing, print on demand, a complete use of open source applications for everything involved with publication, including for example graphic design, and networked distribution. MetaMute’s initiative in all these areas is OpenMute - interesting also when we consider developing our own form of publishing for this project.

General changes in forms of publishing are occurring across a lot of registers - online and offline, publishing as increasingly cross or inter-media, the different social and commercial arrangements implied (from the problems of the music industry - in which it is now clear that new forms of publishing and distribution, music industry woes aside, have led to a massive increase in diversity of music, and a new health to the live music scene - to the massive transformations now making the print/pixel publishing side of things very interesting). They also arguably make not only for new social forms, but for a new kind of social (so are crucial to consider both in terms of social and artistic innovation). So we need to think about publishing increasingly - especially as more things, processes and events become publishable - imagine open source publishable VR environments and elements, or the publishing of genetic elements … or just of new technics - this is my new saying - “clone and publish your technics for social innnovation”.

To some extent the Dynamic Media project is a collaborative/cooperative publishing project.