THINKING THE POSTDIGITAL HYBRID: PUBLISHING ARCHIVE

PrintedWeb

Printed Web is an artists' publication devoted to web-to-print art and discourse, published by Paul Soulellis. The project began in 2014 as a way to present new work by artists included in Soulellis' Library of the Printed Web. Artists are invited to submit new or existing network-based work for the printed page. In the spirit of Seth Siegelaub, each issue is curated as a group exhibition for the printed page. Printed Web circulates primarily as print-on-demand publications, but also includes PDFs, ZIPs, GIFs, and server directories. More than 220 artists and writers have contributed to the project through issue #5. Individual issues are widely held in special artists' publications collections and libraries, including Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Center, and NY Public Library. The Library of the Printed Web was acquired earlier this year by The Museum of Modern Art Library. The mission of Library of the Printed Web is to provide an in-depth view of network culture, artistic practice, and the printed page. The collection is an important resource for the study of print-based experimental publishing in the early 21st century.

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Keywords:
web-to-print publications − web culture articulated as printed artifact

American Pshyco

Google reads our emails, garners information from our personal messages and uses that profiling strategy to select "relevant" ads. It then displays those ads on the screen next to the very emails from which the information was initially taken. American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis' violent, masochistic and gratuitous novel American Psycho through GMail, one page at a time. We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. In printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis' text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational Google ads. We were most curious how Google would handle the violence, racism and graphic language in American Psycho. In some instances the ads related to the content of the email, in others they were completely irrelevant, either out of time or out of place. In one scene, where first a dog and then a man are brutally murdered with a knife, Google supplied ample ads regarding knives and knife sharpeners. In another scene the ads disappeared altogether when the narrator makes a racial slur. Google's choice and use of standard ads unrelated to the content next to which they appeared offered an alternate window into how Google ads function − the ad for Crest Whitestrips Coupons appeared the highest number of times, next to both the most graphic and the most mundane sections of the book, leaving no clear logic as to how it was selected to appear. This "misreading" ultimately echoes the hollowness at the center of advertising and consumer culture, a theme explored in excess in American Psycho.

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Keywords:
hybrid programmability of software transformation in a book * algorithm, appropriation, authorship, context, distribution, erasure, language, mediation, process, reading, writing

OP003 : Digitization Kills the Image

The edition questions the relationship between technology and reproductive materials. It exhumes and diverts this distant childhood memory, this warning "Danger: le photocopillage tue le livre" ("Danger: photocopying kills the book") that we thought limited to classrooms and documentation centers. By 40 scans and the partial destruction of an image, the publication imposes a reflection on development of publishing methods, from printed book to the screen. I photocopied a traditional photography with a RICOH photocopier. I've picked some basic setups on the machine such as "copy in color","from a colored photography" then I've pressed on the button "copy" and this, several times in a row... I've been really surprised of the results while the papers were coming out. There is no image editing from me, it's the RICOH photocopier who made everything.

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Keywords:
digital, graphic design, materiality, photography, process, publishing

Elektrobiblioteka

The project consists of a 32 page book and accompanying website. Both forms may work as independent publications. Moreover, the book is provided with a built-in USB interface, which enables it to be connected to the computer. Together with the website it forms a publication that contains both printed and digital content (texts, illustrations, hyperlinks, source quotations, etc.). By turning book pages, a reader is able to navigate the website. The tactile sensors embedded in the illustrations let a user to activate additional animations. The attempt to connect features and mechanisms characteristic for print and digital media was aimed at comparing together the two different technologies and examining the possibility of their cooperation both from the designer's and the reader's perspective.

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Keywords:
teensy usb development board, conductive ink * augmentation, bookness, hybrid, online

Every Face in the Americans

Every Face in the Americans is a remake of The Americans by Robert Frank, in which only the faces algorithmically detected by the software iPhoto are preserved. The book is modeled as closely as possible after the 1977 edition of The Americans, from which the scans were made. As the amount of information we contend with multiplies daily, we rely increasingly on technology to help us keep up. Every face in The Americans is an examination of an encounter between one such technology, Apple Computer's iPhoto, and a seminal work of documentary photography, Robert Frank's The Americans. Such an encounter raises a wide range of questions regarding such topics as the implications of technology participating in the act of reading a text, the effect of digital processes on the idea of the document and the value of revisiting documentary works through the lens of the digital.

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Keywords:
algorithm, authorship, bookness, photography, process, reading

Greetings from the Internet

A set of 48 postcards showing pictures of found WiFi passwords taken by the artist during travels. Over the past years I've been collecting pictures of wifi passwords when ever I encountered them during travels. In many private and public places there is wireless Internet access available but to connect a password is required. "Is there Internet here?" Often wifi passwords are written or printed on little pieces of paper or on the chalk board behind the counter in the cafe etc. "What is the wifi password?" A lot of these codes are hand written which makes them very vulnerable to mis-spelling or mis-interpretation. Is this an upper case c? Is there a mistake in the code? Are you able to guess the right one? Wifi passwords represent an era of the moment of connection. A moment of human factor before we slowly drift into always connected with all devices where ever we are.

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Keywords:
collection, digital, online, preservation, writing

It's a Sketchbook

It's a Sketchbook shows a collection of new blank documents opened while starting a digital desktop or pad software, dealing with writing, drawing, painting or sketching. These print-screen pages show how computer technology relate to real sketch-book-look from very simple, empty looking pages to more well-equipped palettes of tools, offering to users many instruments and functions to make the creative process faster and less complicated. Looking at these screen-shots in a book give us a feeling we've never experienced before. Looking at them in a horizontal position with artboards surrounded by tens of functions then sometimes reducing the size of an artboard to a very small area. It can raise a question of when imitation of reality goes too far − sometimes you can recognize almost a real note-book look, containing a leather cover or a part of an o-wire binding. At the same time the publication is also illuminating an archive of software that we might have never used before. In fact it still deals with digital culture and the popular obsession and with having your own sketchbook to make notes or just to record your creativity in the exact moment.

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Keywords:
bookness, collection, digital, interface, materiality, skeuomorphism, writing

My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart

A book containing tweets and forum posts on the topic of hard-drive failures. We always seem to be looking for a new technical solution for knowledge and information storage. We hope there is one magical, final solution, one that will solve every issu But easy solutions create their own problems. The perceived view of the stable nature of digital information differs from reality. There are many points of failure, like old physical formats, lost or non functional machines, companies that go bankrupt, file formats with no support in the future, or changing user licenses. It seems that the more technical the technology gets, the more problems it creates.

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Keywords:
print on demand * collection, digital, language, materiality, obsolescence, preservation, progress, writing

Re-Editioned Texts: Heart of Darkness

Twelve different paperback copies of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, reprinted using text files downloaded from different online sources. As unique copies, the interior text is modified by the digitization of the novel - some include Google ads, mistakes, and mistranslations of the original. Conrad's 1899 novel was a layered narrative exploration of colonialism, a search for a shadowy figure in a "Heart of Darkness." By creating physical books from digital files, the text further becomes modified, adding a layer of distance, mistranslation, but perhaps also functions as an inadvertent rewriting.

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Keywords:
print on demand * appropriation, bookness, collection, digital, distribution, interface, materiality, public domain, writing

Five Years of Captured Captchas

Five Years of Captured Captchas is a series of five leporello books that span a total length of 90 meters, chronicling every single captcha that we have solved over the course of five years. At the end of 2011, while discussing the labor involved in such routinely performed tests, we decided to take a screenshot of all the captchas that we would pass. Doing so, we established a diary of our almost daily micro-labor and a stable archive of these ubiquitous techno-visual artifacts. Throughout the collection, it is possible to retrace the evolution of captchas: initially a technique to merely prevent spam, then a system employed by Google for the 'philanthropic' purpose of digitizing knowledge, later (indirectly) used as a method to improve Street View, and finally a means of teaching image recognition to AI software. Acknowledging that most of our work was done for Google, Five Years of Captured Captchas is also a quinquennial report that celebrates a fruitful collaboration with the company.

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Keywords:
hybrid, collection, digitizing, artificial intellegence, systems

Wikipedia Random Article Collection

Wikipedia Random Article Collection is a growing archive of zines inspired by content generated from Wikipedia's random article search function. By clicking once, participants use Wikipedia's random article search function to generate endless content. Each zine is inspired by and created from images and text found in the generated article, as well as any wikipedia worm-hole discovered.

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Keywords:
digital, article, software, discovering

Google Image Search

A continuing book project. These books are comprised of all the images provided by the Internet search machine Google in response to a certain term. Sources are not provided, yet the order of all the images is retained. In addition to the search results, the books also include the point in time when the search was undertaken. The project started in 2003 with the term "death row".

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Keywords:
collection, search, discovering, system

Anonymous Press

Anonymous Press is an experimental publishing platform streamlining the process of zine making. Feeding in a set of keywords, a user defines the topic upon which the content and the form of the publication is generated from the content found on Google Image Search. Publications are stored in a public library, where every item is printed on-demand. Anonymous Press (A-Π) is a self-sufficient publishing platform. Every publication by A-Π is a byproduct of an individual and a database, i.e. Google Image Search. Human author defines the topic, the content and the form is generated from the most relevant images found online. Each publication is added to a public library. Every item in the library can be printed on-demand and is available to everyone for a small fee covering shipping and production costs. Publications are sorted in a chronological order. A-Π does not own, nor is responsible for the content generated by its users.

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Keywords:
authorship, process, production

Tracking Letters_

Tracking Letters_ is made with a software application that records the timing of keyboard entry. Its primary use is as an email entry program. Using the software, I tracked a week's worth of my own emails, collecting them into this 168-page book. The 34 correspondences demonstrate the variances in speed, pauses and errors that occur when writing. The book refers to a journal or a small sketchbook, a form that holds the same level of intimacy as personal correspondences.

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Keywords:
authorship, interface, language, materiality, mediation, process, quantification, reading, time, writing

The SKOR Codex

The SKOR Codex is a printed book which will be sent to different locations on earth in the year 2012. It contains binary encoded image and sound files selected to portray the diversity of life and culture at the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), and is intended for any intelligent terrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find it. The files are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure via a transformation from magnetic transitions on a disk to ink on paper, safe for centuries. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded. La Société Anonyme noted that "the package will be encountered and the book decoded only if there will be advanced civilizations on earth in the far future. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about art on this planet." Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule and a statement rather than an attempt to preserve SKOR for future art historians.

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Keywords:
bookness, preservation, public domain