AND Publishing is concerned with the social, cultural, and political implications of publishing and going public in the wider sense. They explored piracy as cultural strategies, investigated informal forms of book distribution, maintain reading groups, and engage in various activities around books, reading, publishing, and knowledge strategies in general. They work on the premises of publishing as an artistic strategy, and with a strong background in feminist thinking.

https://www.andpublishing.org

Self-description:

AND is a publishing activity based in London. Having started in 2009 to explore the immediacy and social possibilities of print on demand – AND can be described today as a multiplicity of alliances that don’t fit together smoothly. We collaborate with people and institutions. We develop informal distributions networks and explore the social agency of cultural piracy (the Piracy Project, with Andrea Francke). We are invested in feminist radical pedagogy (Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy? Valand Academy working group), and publish pocket manuals (Teaching for people who prefer not to teach, with Mirjam Bayerdörfer). We build informal support structures, re-distribute budgets, commission work, and (re-)publish material which is difficult to find. We create reading rooms (Library of Omissions and Inclusions), share a studio, provide resources and advice, as well as access to skills, means of production and distribution. We’re having conversations and debates, conflicts, and negotiations – online, offline, and in print.

Therefore, we started recently to learn how to box and unbox.

Why do we publish? How do we publish? For whom do we publish? What does it mean to understand our work not as a ‘noun’, but as a ‘verb’? Where do we put the many things we’re doing, that don’t fit into boxes? What’s the problem with categorization? How do we resist the demand for individual authorship? Why do we NOT want a unified face? How can we subvert the social pressure to produce faces? How do you ‘work politically’ instead of making work ‘about politics’? What’s the problem with writing a colophon in the book? How do we negotiate with institutional bodies? Why would we go on a residency when we struggle to pay rent at home? Where can we store our boxes? How long does it take to travel to Stockholm from London by train? Why do we all speak English? Why is what we are doing called research or education and not art? Where did we meet? What happens if we don’t work together anymore? Who has invited us and why? How are we spending the budget? Do we want to stay in a two-bedroom or a one-bedroom apartment? Do you want tea? Have you read the S.C.U.B manifesto? What’s the Wif password? Which objects didn’t we bring because we were worried they might get stolen? How do we make this residency visible? Who has the time to engage? What can we make public? When does the residency end? Who would be our ideal boxing teacher? What happens if we hurt ourselves? Who gives in? Who compromises? Who accommodates? Who cares? Who edits? Who organizes? Who translates? Do we need a new, less tired, and exclusive language to talk about all of this? And how do you document laughter?

Further resources and texts:

The Piracy Project, and the collection’s searchable online catalog
The Piracy Project, interview by Cornelia Sollfrank, Giving what you don’t have.
Let’s Mobilize: What is Feminist Pedagogy?, Valand Academy, U. Of Gothenburg
Library Underground – a reading list for a coming community, in “Publishing as Artistic Practice”, ed Annette Gilbert, Sternberg Press 2016
The Impermanent Book, Rhizome, 2012
One Publishes to Find Comrades, in Visual Event, ed. Oliver Klimpel, Spector Books Leipzig 2014

Interview

The Micropolitics of Publishing. Interview with Eva Weinmayr
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 15 September 2018

Copyright addresses the artwork as property, but as works of art it belongs as well to the cultural sphere, which has since the Renaissance become to be seen as a public good. And indeed, the role of copyright has been for a long time to balance these two interests. The digital has challenged a basic assumption about the nature of goods: digital goods are not scarce anymore, because they can be copied without difference to the original. This has changed a lot for both the cultural sphere, where cultural goods circulate with a speed and reach unknown before, but also for copyright, which is turning to hard- and software in consumer electronics to keep the digital goods controllable, all the while new powerful cultural industries of networked services are reorganizing the ways we access and consume digital cultural goods.

How do artists deal with these dynamics? In my talk, I will discuss digital and digitally informed artistic practises dealing with this two-sided nature of cultural production and distribution, and explore the aesthetic consequences of these strategies.

Eva Weinmayr is an artist, designer, educator, and researcher based in London. Her long-standing engagement with digital and print publishing includes projects such as The Piracy Project, AND Publishing and other practice experiments that are all based on the idea of alternative knowledge production and the exploration of the agency of books.

Interview conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, September 15, 2018, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).

 

Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber are two artists and programmers who developed the movie database 0xdb and its underlying software pan.do/ra. The more than 15,000 films in the database are objects that cover films hard to find online. 0xbd is not just a database for films but treats film as a veritable digital object, which allows new ways of dealing with films.

The project offers a number of special features such as the visualization of the timeline, time-based annotations, additional information and interlinking with other objects and information, and allows for in-depth search. The project stands in the tradition of autonomous archives and other critical media practices and has collaborated with artists and political activists worldwide. The software, as well as the movies, are available for free.

Interview conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, October 22, 2017, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).

 

Dušan Barok is a researcher, artist and cultural activist based in Amsterdam. His practice involves networked media, participatory events, and experimental publishing, and he runs and edits Monoskop. Monoskop is a media wiki that evolved from linking and contextualizing information on Eastern European experimental and media arts to host rele­­­vant files, such as books, texts, documents, and media files, and thus became a publishing initiative in its own right.

Due to its constant growth, Monoskop has transformed from a special interest archive to become a significant cultural resource. Today the wiki comprises of 6,744 entries and 13,616 documents, and the related WordPress log introduces new publications on a regular basis. Increasingly, Monoskop also triggers off­line events, frequently with cultural institutions that have come to appreciate the unique resources of this autonomous archive.

Interview conducted by Felix Stalder, October 22, 2017, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).