Singed bible from the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, in Rome.
Printer's devils
One publishes to find comrades! So says André Breton. The researchers in the current cycle of the research centre — Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens — are ending their trajectories at a.pass with a block focused on publishing and the myriad of relations implied in setting something to print. Publishing is rarely something that concludes a confined process of solitary thought. It is a social process (1) that — abstractly and manifestly — involves collaboration all along the way, sometimes with fellow interlocutors, sometimes with an editor or designer at the other end of the table, sometimes with abstract ideas of what readership might entail. Rather than aiming for a book or for printed matter as a finite goal, we will take publishing as a pretext to build relationships that last over time (2). How can a publication be set up as an ongoing gesture (3), a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance?
This block is organized along weekly Tuesdays, alternating between an editorial-curatorial approach and a technical-dramaturgical help-desk. During the editorial-curatorial meetings we work on a collective publication and address broader concerns around publishing (commonplace books, performative publishing, the interplay between analogue and digital publishing, orality and transcription, co-writing, the power of address, self-writing, ventriloquism, reading as writing, distribution). Help-desk Tuesdays are more loosely structured around practical needs of the collective and individual publications. How did you do this? How would you do that?
The researchers' collective publication process is hosted by madewitholga.be, a virtual residency space, designed for research and experimentation. It is the sister-space of oralsite.be, a platform for digital artist publications, initiated by Sarma. The collective publication takes a start as a collective commonplace (4) book, an inventory of what was noteworthy during the shared research time at a.pass. How did epiphanic thoughts, ideas or observations materialize in notebooks, notepads, post-its, letters, etc; what kind of publicness is enacted from the very outset of noting something down; and what operations or translations can we perform to enhance readability (5)?
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NOTES Breg
(1) what are the conditions and values for this social process on the level of the RC? (2) pretext to build relationships between who? (3) how can the architecture of an online archive enhance this ongoingness? (question for me) (4) what is our/my engagement to this commonplace? (5) and how does its architecture facilitate readability?
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Throughout the previous blocks the researchers have been assisted, respectively by Vladimir Miller and Nicolas Galeazzi. The upcoming three months are organized by Kristien Van den Brande, in collaboration with the researchers.
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Bios of everyone?