Structure

During each DAI week, a guest artist will partake in studio visits or face to face meetings and a seminar, and present a public talk in response to the proposition: 'Imagine a room (drawing from your concerns and vision) in the scope of your practice. Use this room to discern a speculative method and a mode for producing a theory around the question of living together.'

DAI week:

Day 1 ( always on a Thursday): Speculating Aloud
Face-to-face meetings whereby students present their individual writing.
Public talk or presentation by a guest in response to the room proposal (open to the public).

Day 2 ( always on a Friday) : Why I Write
Seminar on the ideas and methods of speculative thinking and writing. Collective writing exercise whereby students will develop a single story line together.

Outside of the DAI week: occasional workshops at Casco (open to the public).

Homework

Parallel research and an ongoing, informal publishing exercise by the participants are crucial for the DAI week meetings and to ensure the class makes sense to the students' own practices.

Collecting artists' writings

Students will be required to collect artists' (speculative) writing throughout the course of the year, enabling them to study other's writing and build an archive of references. Material gathered this way will also serve as possible content for the final publication.

Social media publishing

In parallel to the DAI week programme and occasional workshops, students will exchange their thoughts, materials and progress through social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook). Here, we plan to address a question at the core of publishing—what is the purpose of making things public?—through a confrontation with social media as the dominant medium of contemporary information circulation. We aim to explore a non-purist approach to publishing, deploying a range of mediums, digital and non-digital, to expose different forms of knowledge and writing, while also learning to control their demands for time and attention.

Outcome

- Publication of a common book (September 2013)
- Collective writing
- Individual writing (and non-writing)
- Experiments in social media
- Collection of artists' (speculative) writing- Collection of artists' (speculative) writing

Publishing Class Q & A

Q: Will the monthly guests define the themes each month; will they give an actual (writing) assignment?

A: No, the guests will give feedback on the collective text as it's generated over time. They will also give feedback on your individual writing (i.e. outside the collective). The participants can take inspiration from the public lecture theme, given by the guest.

Q: Do I have to take part in the collective writing process?
A: Yes, you are obliged to take part in the collective writing process. However, you are also asked to develop your own writing, in light of your own practice.

Q: Will we be guided and provided with tools for collective writing?
A: In the context of the occasional workshops, there will be a workshop led by Tea Hvala, a journalist and art critic, living and working in Ljubljana. Hvala facilitated a sci-fi collective writing exercise during Casco's The Grand Domestic Revolution Futurist Writing School in February 2012. Together, you can figure out methods for the collective writing process. During the entire collective writing process, self-invention and mutual learning will prove crucial.

Q: Will we each have a spread in the book or will we work on one singular text?
A: The class encourages both collective and individual writing processes. The final publication should be able to accommodate both types of content but the order and layout for these forms should be thought of alongside the design development of the book.

Q: Will we collaborate with designers other than the WT students? Or could we end up not collaborating with any designer at all?
A: Collaboration with designers should be considered as the given context for the class, but the way you chose to collaborate is contingent on your encounters and efforts, and a few institutional factors.

Q: What is the agency of the editor for the collective text?
A: The whole process will be overseen and coordinated by the managing editor Yolande van der Heide. All of the participating writers should take part in deciding on the content and on developing the process in terms of writing and publishing the final text.

Q: Who's the editor of the book in general?
A: We foresee the editorial board consisting of Binna Choi, Yolande van der Heide and the Publishing Class students.

Q: What community do you imagine will form around the book in the end? Who will these "new" theories serve?
A: This is to be imagined and determined by the participants. At this moment, we can speculate that the book could address young artists and designers as well as international professionals in art and culture who are concerned with publishing practices. In terms of the subject of artistic perspectives on how we live together, we may aim to address a much wider audience, the general reader, and enter into a broader publishing market.

Q: What if the exercise "fails" or how will we avoid succumbing to the pressures of developing a product?
A: It depends on the definition of failure. By any means, we don't perceive a situation of "failure." Adaptations and improvisations during the process will be key, with the aim of publishing a meaningful work, whatever the concrete outcome turns out to be.

The pressure of publishing in common will not be taken for granted: how to tackle and transform the pressure into other forms of energy is our task—this falls within the scope of the question of how to live together.

Q: How will we present the final publishing work?
A: It will be presented at the Dutch Art Institute, New York Art Book Fair and Casco, but other distribution ideas can be developed during the working process.