PUBLISHING CLASS

| tags: Arnhem, Utrecht

Monday May 12

ASSIGNMENT & FINAL PRODUCTION SCHEDULE
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE BOOK: Publisher’s Workshop: Practical Issues, a Checklist

In the final stages of producing a serial publication, one is met with a stream of practical questions that need to be addressed, both for the first issue, and for those to come. Responding to this year’s theme for Publishing Class—generating or being involved in a community in print—you, for the most part, have become not solely the artists, designers, and/or writers behind your publications, but in many respects the publishers themselves. To this end we’ve created a short checklist touching on a number of issues that are important to qualifying your stakes in terms of the publication’s distribution, circulation, and afterlife—from the perspective of you as publisher:

Publisher’s Workshop: Practical Issues, a Checklist

·      Copyright: creative commons and copyleft

·      Circulation: unexpected paths as well as regular routes that remain relevant

·      Saleability: the means of distribution, and the conditions for something to be free and how it finds readers / listeners / viewers

·      Framework: considering the wider system(s) in which your publication appears, how the method and form of your publication works towards its continuation

·      Sustainability: creating a structure for the future of the publication

·      Self-reflexivity and authorship: how your practices, decisions, (shifting) positions as writer / publisher / author / artist / designer play into the final phase in your collaboration and the process of going public

We're proposing that you consider practically—even if still in an abstract way, not as a form of "wishful thinking"—these issues, and discuss them collectively. We'll introduce these points one by one, providing recent examples as to how one might approach them as questions, or sharing ways to face them that can inform your own decision-making processes. We will then workshop your ideas, ideas that will likely be indebted to your content in some way, having had the community you hope to address in mind throughout the process, and this in turn in some respect driving your content and follow-through. As such, it would be immensely helpful if you have a bit of a think on the checklist items and how they relate to your publication, that initial and possibly changed audience you envisioned, and where, indeed, you want your publication to go, how it might travel, and to whom. 

Monday 12 MAY THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE BOOK: Publisher’s Workshop: Practical Issues, a Checklist

Present: Janine Armin, Anniek Brattinga, Benjamin Thorel & Yolande van der Heide

13:00-14:00    Communal lunch prepared together at WT

14:00-18:30    Editorial workshop

 18:30-19:30    Dinner at DAI

 19:30-21:00    Work session with designer & artists at DAI

Tuesday 13 MAY FACE TO FACE

 Present: Benjamin Thorel, Janine Armin & Yolande van der Heide, Anniek Brattinga

10:00-18:00    A dummy containing your near final content should to be brought to the seminar

Monday April 7

With assignment from Benjamin Thorel. *See This Is Not A Test below

Present: Anniek Brattinga, Maureen Mooren, Janine Armin, Yolande van der Heide

14:00*                        Skype meeting with Benjamin Thorel

14:30-18:30**           Tutorials with Maureen Mooren per duo:

18:300-19:00            Dinner

19:30-21:00  Work session at WT  continues

This is not a test - An assignment by Benjamin Thorel

Instead of focusing on the realization of the publication you're making as such, we'd like you to take one step to the side. 

Each team is going to work during the whole day on the making of an "alternative version" of your periodical, in the cheapest, simplest, rudest way possible: as a zine. 

In the course of the creation of any publication, intermediary steps are required: getting a dummy, trying a first spread, the possible covers. Imagining a book is a collaborative process that requires "reality checks", so that ideas, concepts get more precise, and the relation to the reader becomes material.

This assignment gets into this movement, but gives it a twist. 

With nothing more than the laser printers that are available in the schools and offices you're working with, the paper they have, the binding facilities you can handle (long-arm staples, sewing, …), the tools you can shape your contents with, you'll have to be able to make, in one day, a prototype of a ready-to-print, easy-to-share, from the computer to the reader.

 The zine is a form that has a long history in relation to specific communities, in social, political, cultural, or art contexts. Cheap, easy to make and reproduce, they can meet a wide and attentive audience while relying on distribution networks autonomous from markets. In the context of the punk and the riot grrrl movements, zines were the most favored way for bands and fans to communicate, find each other, exchange info on records and concerts, and make it really possible for the audience to become producers, based on a shared independent ethics and will to escape the normal. In the "pre-Internet" era, before the routine of blogs and profile updates, shaping one's expression in print was needed. 

Like Missy Elliott said: "This is not a test." Shaping your ideas, the material you've gathered, texts you wrote or had written, pictures and other elements, with printers and papers at hand, is a way to consider what's essential in the project—what can't be compromised, what can be reshaped, what may not work, what needs further elaboration—and what gestures, practices, social spaces it creates.

It's a one-day project, in which improvisation and amateurism may be needed. The "zine" version of your publication will bear with mistakes, approximations, and mistakes; but it will already need you to consider the need for a title, the name of authors, the role of the colophon, etc. In the making of such an "alternative version" of your publication project, you have to take into account, collaboratively, technical and pragmatic limits, but also how they can be creative; how the manipulation of the materiality of the publication process allows possibilities and accidents, expertise, and bricolage to shape the ideas into print. 

Monday March 10

For this week’s gatherings with artist Ricardo Basbaum and designer, artist, writer, and editor Will Holder we function as a “check in” whereby your process of developing the “form and content” of your magazine is workshopped.

Present: Ricardo Basbaum, Will Holder, Yolande van der Heide.

14:00-18:00 Seminar: Diagram as a Tool as Conversation

Basbaum and Holder briefly introduce their individual work, indicating the use of conversation to map out and produce language around and as cultural objects. Through doing this they point out two practical distinctions that have inspired their current work on the publication Diagram as a Tool as Conversation (Casco and Sternberg Press, forthcoming).

 After a short break, Holder screens Harun Farocki's Schnittstelle (1995) as a means for the group to discuss reading & writing at the site of production. Some issues concerning voice, body, and space are also addressed through Vito Acconci's Home Movies (1973), briefly introduced by Basbaum.

18:00-19:00 Dinner at Werkplaats Typografie, Agnietenplaats 2, 6822 JD Arnhem, Netherlands

19:00-22:00 Work session with presentations by designers

Tuesday 11 February, 10:00-17:00 - Face to face meetings with Will Holder

Monday February 10

14:00-15:00 Shop talk Benjamin Thorel introduces his practice as a curator, critic, and member of castillo/corrales, the cooperatively run and non-profit art venue based in Belleville, Paris. Next to its exhibition space castillo/corrales also hosts the bookshop Section 7 and publishing house Paraguay Press which puts forth the illustrious serial book The Social Life of the Book, a self-described "collection of commissioned texts dealing with books, and how they engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations." It brings together artists, publishers, writers, designers, booksellers, etc. who consider books less as finished objects or forms and more for their disruptive potential and ability to produce new relationships, new publics, and new meanings.

15:00-16:00 Film screening Sonsbeek buiten de perken [Sonsbeek Out of Bounds or freely as: "Sonsbeek Let Loose] (1971), 47:50 min by Jef Cornelis captures the period of land art, conceptual art, process art, minimal art, performance, and video in the Netherlands and the conflicts (different opposing voices from artists of the BBK national artists' association, participating artists, exhibition organizers, local politicians etc.) that developed around this exhibition, questioning the public value of art, especially outside the confines of the exhibition space.

16:00-18:00 Park talk Stroll to Werkplaats Typografie by way of Sonsbeek Park, (Zijpendaal, Arnhem) where we will collect inspiration materials that relate to your publication.

18:00-19:00 Dinner Werkplaats Typografie, Agnietenplaats 2

19:00-22:00 Work session With design proposals from the designers. Please see the assignment below to help prepare for this session.

Tuesday 11 Feb 10:00-17:00

Face to face meetings with Benjamin Thorel. Be prepared to discuss your "magazine brief". See and prepare the assignment.

 

Monday January 6

14:00-18:30 Little Messages

Present: David Senior, Yolande van der Heide, and Janine Armin

This month's seminar is lead by bibliographer David Senior who discusses his practice as manager of the artists' books and general holdings collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Library in New York City. The three-part lecture includes a condensed history of artists' publications in relation to David's daily activities in terms of collecting, promoting, and documenting materials for the MoMA collection. David also reflects on his other editorial projects, the MoMA Library tumblr being one, so as to address various modes of dissemination in publishing. Following the discussion, part two hones in on three MoMA exhibition projects: Scenes from Zagreb (2011), Millennium Magazines (2012), and the most recent, Please Come to the Show (2013). In closing, David discusses contemporary publishing projects such as Primary Information, LTTR, Bulletins of the Serving Library, and Veneer.

18:30-19:30 dinner at Werkplaats Typografie (Agnietenplaats 2)

19:30-21:00 Work session with Werkplaats Typografie. The evening unfolds as a feedback session with critique and design sketches from Werkplaats Typografie designers based on the content of the DAI artists' proposals. David Senior facilitates the evening. Please be prepared to briefly introduce your proposals with background information and any relevant support material. 

Tuesday January 7

10:00-18:00 Face-to-Face Meetings Present: David Senior, Yolande van der Heide, and Janine Armin The whole day is committed to individual meetings. Please be prepared to talk about your ideas for the "magazine" and bring along any appropriate materials for the discussion. The DAI provides the schedule for the meetings.

20:00-22:00 Public lecture with David Senior and Fucking Good Art Casco together with the DAI warmly invite you to greet the New Year with a public panel featuring Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma — editors of the traveling artists' magazine Fucking Good Art — who discuss their editorial methods and strategies. Immediately afterward is a presentation by David Senior titled Access to Tools: Pub­lic­a­tions from the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), 1968 – 1974 at MoMA. In exploring WEC, a publication that helped realize its editor Stewart Brand's belief that a magazine can "create a community meeting-place in print," David also offers his insight into, among other magazine-oriented projects, this year's WEC-inspired exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the presentation at MoMA of artists' magazines published since 2000, Millennium Magazines. Casco's small collection of Whole Earth Catalogs are on display during the discussion. Please bring your own copy along for comparison and to potentially loan to the traveling display, which will be on view at the DAI, Casco, and the Rietveld library. Please contact Yolande van der Heide (yolande@cascoprojects.org) for more information. Publishing Class portable bookshelf From 6 to 10 January, a mobile Publishing Class bookshelf (design by Mathew Kneebone, Werkplaats Typografie) travels to different public art and publishing events, namely the DAI, Stedelijk Museum, Print Room, The Rietveld Library, San Serriffe Amsterdam, and Casco. For a sneak peak at the booklist and the prices visit the Casco online bookshop here. Publishing Class is an imprint of DAI Publications, a collection of artists' books jointly published by the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in collaboration with the Werkplaats Typografie.

Monday November 25

14:00-18:30 Magazine: an undecidable draft

Present: Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai with Binna Choi and Yolande van der Heide

This month's seminar is lead by the editors of Farsi- English magazine Pages who guide us through their practice, specifically with regards to their editorial methods. The seminar is aimed at developing your proposals for your respective "magazines". Some additional preparation is required before our gathering, Nasrin and Babak explain: "The seminar will be in two parts. During the first part we will talk about Pages magazine by looking into the editorial approach in the past and recent issues and their relationship to our practice as a whole. More specifically to show how editing (to materialize, arrange, and narrate content) can be an undecidable process in which one can continuously reimagine the magazine as a space of practice. We will also talk about some works, which have supplemented the editorial ideas of the magazine.

The second part of the afternoon is planned as a two-hour workshop.

19:30-21:00 Matchmaking

Present: Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, with Binna Choi and Yolande van der Heide, Werkplaats Typografie and Anniek Brattinga from Werkplaats During the evening session, we will get acquainted with each other's art and design practices by interviewing one another spontaneously. DAI artists and Werkplaats Typografie designers will give five-minute interviews about each others' (studio) practices. Please be prepared to talk about your practice and your intentions for the "magazine".

Tuesday November 26

Face to Face meetings with Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai

Monday October 14

14:00-17:00 Introductory meeting and talk with Gwen Allen 

Gwen Allen gives a lecture on the history of artists' magazines, providing a broad overview of a diverse range of publications and different ways of conceptualizing what it means to publish (literally, "to make public.") She closely analyzes the distinct materiality and temporality of printed matter, and discusses the social processes and relationships magazines embody: their movement across time and space; their performative potential; and how they have fostered alternative forms of communication and community. Q&A will follow.

17:00-18:30 Workshop part I The lecture is followed by a workshop in which students have the chance to think more specifically and concretely about how these ideas might be put into practice today. Why and how does one begin a serial publication? We talk about the different kinds of decisions (editorial statements, cover design, relationship between form and content, circulation and distribution) that inform a magazine's significance. We also look closely at historical and contemporary case studies and think about the lessons they might offer in publishing as an artistic practice.

19:30-21:00 Workshop part II The workshop will continue on after dinner

Tuesday October 15

Face to Face meetings with Gwen Allen and Yolande van der Heide