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            pdftitle={Hybrid Publishing: Between Print and Electronic, Art and Research},
            pdfauthor={Florian Cramer, reader, Willem de Kooning Academy},
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\title{Hybrid Publishing: Between Print and Electronic, Art and Research}
\author{Florian Cramer, reader, Willem de Kooning Academy}
\date{}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

While always having been closely related, ``research'' and
``publishing'' currently undergo changes. They turn from once firmly
established disciplines to experimental practices that not only concern
their methods and subject matters, and but also their very definitions.
This is related to paradigm shifts in culture and technology:
digitization and electronic media technology have disrupted publishing,
but they also affect the (digital) humanities. Globalization questions
the Western canon and the traditional divide between the arts and
research which concerns the traditional textbook form of academic
knowledge. As a result, both ``research'' and ``publishing'' have become
questions rather than answers. At Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA), a
cross-departmental Hybrid Publishing lab for art and design research
publications has been established in 2015, and an international Master
program Experimental Publishing in 2016 at WdKA's Piet Zwart Institute.
The program is to realize new, experimental forms of publications
simultaneously in multiple media, combine them with new, experimental
forms of art and design research - and, eventually, to extend it to the
Rotterdam Arts and Science Lab.

\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{\linethickness}\end{center}

\hypertarget{hybridity-of-art-and-research}{%
\section{Hybridity of art and
research}\label{hybridity-of-art-and-research}}

WdKA's research into new forms of publishing in the digital age began in
2009 with the conference \emph{print / pixel} that brought together
artists, designers, software engineers, small and large book and
newspaper publishers as well as researchers from the Netherlands,
Belgium, Germany, Italy and the United States to discuss the impact of
electronic publishing (including e-books) on their future work.
Alessandro Ludovico, editor and publisher of the Italian new media arts
magazine \emph{Neural}, came as a fellow to WdKA's research program
(lectoraat). The question for everyone was: What will be the future of
publishing media and editorial design if our common, seemingly
paradoxical observation is true that (a) the digital revolution is real,
while (b) print and paper will not go away. This resulted in Ludovico's
book \emph{Post-Digital Print}\footnote{(Ludovico)} which our research
programme published in collaboration with the contemporary art space and
book publisher Onomatopee in 2012. (Shortly after, it appeared in a
second edition, in French, Italian and Korean translations and has its
own Wikipedia article.) In the book, Ludovico argued that the death of
print had been predicted since the 19th century, but never happened. He
therefore focused on ``post-digital'' projects that combined digital and
print or transcended their opposition.

The discussion of new technologies and their impact on publishing, art
and design was not new. In a manifesto published in Kurt Schwitters'
experimental periodical \emph{MERZ} in 1923, the Russian constructivist
El Lissitzky sketched, in eight bullet points, a program for the ``new
book'': Among others, it should be designed as a ``book-space'' that
gives ``reality to a new optics''. Instead of just giving a new look to
old content, the ``new book demands a new author''. The manifesto
concludes with a demand that the ``printed sheet {[}\ldots{}{]} must be
transcended: THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY''.\footnote{(Lissitzky), 359} While
this electro-library remained a speculative vision for Lissitzky, his
book designs from that time anticipate many principles of what today is
called \emph{new media}. In the same year, he designed Vladimir
Mayakovsky's poetry volume \emph{For the Voice} as book where each poem
is typeset as a piece of visual poetry in which the lines between
typography and visual art are blurred. On top of that, each individual
poem is represented by a pictogram on an index pane on the right side of
the book (whose pages are cut open like those of an address book). This
design effectively turns the print book into a database with an
icon-based graphical user interface as it had been nominally invented by
Xerox in the 1970s and popularized by Apple with the Macintosh in the
1980s.

Still in 1923, Lissitzky met Piet Zwart, who next to his work as a
commercial designer taught at the forerunner of today's Willem de
Kooning Academy. (Zwart became notorious at the school for his demand to
shut down ``the fine art painting program'' in favor of ``synthetic and
visual drawing, advertising, modern reproduction technologies,
typography, photography and its visual possibilities, film, and the use
of colour in architecture and in the urban space''.\footnote{Piet Zwart,
  Nederlandsche ambachts- en nijverheidskunst, in: Het Vaderland, May
  31, 1928} This lead to the school ending his contract in 1930.)
Lissitzky's, Schwitters' and Zwart's graphic designs were prominently
featured in Jan Tschichold's 1928 book \emph{The New Typography}.
Similar in format and style to the \emph{Bauhausbücher} (Bauhaus books)
including Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's \emph{Painting, Photography, Film} from
1925, Tschichold's book became the classic work on 20th century
modernist type and graphic design.

In their new form and content, the \emph{Bauhausbücher} marked a high
point of artistic research publications in the 20th century. The Danish
Cobra painter and Situationist Asger Jorn matchingly coined the term
``artistic research'' in his 1957 \emph{Notes on the Formation of an
Imaginist Bauhaus} when he wrote: ``Artistic research is identical to
`human science,' which for us means `concerned' {[}i.e.~engaged{]}
science, not purely historical science. This research should be carried
out by artists with the assistance of scientists''.\footnote{Asger Jorn,
  Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus, in: Asger Jorn,
  Against Functionalism, 1957,
  \url{http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/bauhaus.htm}} Jorn's own
experimental-artistic research publications include a
``psychogeographic'' atlantes of Copenhagen and Paris which he wrote in
collaboration with Guy Debord: They contain subjective instead of
scientific cartographies, with torn-apart maps, drops of paint and
collages of materials found in the street. (These psychogeographies
later influenced Rem Koolhaas' architectural urbanism.)

Moholy-Nagy's books were a major influence on Marshall McLuhan's media
theory of the 1960s. McLuhan remains one of the few humanities scholars
who engaged in artistic research and experimental publishing as part of
his work as a scholar: First, with \emph{Counterblast}, a riff on
Wyndham Lewis 1915 Vorticist \emph{BLAST} magazine produced in two
versions in 1954 and 1969, secondly with \emph{The Medium is the
Massage}, his collaboration with the graphic designer Quentin Fiore from
1967, in which a typing error (``massage'' instead of ``message'') in
the editorial process ended up becoming the title. The few other
historical examples of academic publishing that transgresses the
boundaries of scholarship and visual art and design include Jacques
Derrida's experimentally written, non-linear, multi-column philosophical
essay \emph{Glas} (1974) and the book \emph{Diagrammatic Writing} (2013)
by Johanna Drucker who is both an accomplished contemporary artist
making artists' books and a humanities scholar; to a lesser extent also
\emph{The Telephone Book} (1989) by media theoretician Avital Ronell (in
cooperation with the graphic designer Richard Eckersley) and the
collaboration of scholar N. Katherine Hayles and graphic designer Anne
Burdick in the small book \emph{Writing Machines} (2002).

Conversely, scholarship has migrated into audiovisual media to reach
wider audiences and find more accessible forms, an approach practiced in
British culture cultural studies in American postcolonial studies, such
as in John Berger's BBC tv program \emph{Ways of Seeing} (1972) and
Henry Louis Gates with \emph{African American Lives} (2006). (The recent
explosion of racist and conspiracy theory-mongering pseudo-science on
YouTube and other social media indicates the need for scholars and
researchers to become more visible in these media.)

On closer inspection, however, and with the exception of
\emph{Diagrammatic Writing}, these books qualify as `creative
scholarship' rather than `artistic research' in Jorn's sense: The
hierarchy and the respective roles of writer/scholar and visual
designer/artist are not removed, but just softened through more
dialogue. What got lost, too, in the take-up of 1920s avant-garde
concept into experimental forms of scholarly publishing after the Second
World War was Lissitzky's speculative vision of the ``electro-library''.
It was continued - likely without any awareness of Lissitzky and
initially without the involvement of artists and designers - in
information science and computer engineering, such as in the 1940s
``Memex'' architecture of interlinked microfilm documents by American
presidential advisor Vannevar Bush which influenced Theodor Holm
Nelson's 1963 concept of electronic ``hypertext''.\footnote{With Paul
  Otlet's index card-based information systems created in Belgium
  between 1895 to 1934 as forerunners of modern search engines.} More
recently, the idea of extensive ``electro-libraries'' has mostly been
realized in projects like the Internet Archive (archive.org) and the
artist-run projects UbuWeb, Aaaaarg and Monoskop (the latter is
maintained by Piet Zwart Institute graduate Dušan Barok) that provide
vast repositories of digitized, freely downloadable modern and
contemporary art and philosophy books as well as audiovisual media, and
serve as the unofficial research libraries of art schools and
non-traditional academia around the globe.

In the same spirit, Yoana Buzova, Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, Max
Dovey, Michaela Lakova and Roel Roscam Abbing developed - when they were
still students at Piet Zwart Institue - the inexpensive, cigarette
box-size server `Bibliotecha' which can be brought anywhere, plugged
into an electricity outlet and serve a library of down- and uploadable
electronic books via its own wireless network, without an Internet
connection.

\hypertarget{hybridity-of-print-and-electronic}{%
\section{Hybridity of print and
electronic}\label{hybridity-of-print-and-electronic}}

This split between experimental print publishing (including the vast
tradition of artists' self-made books and multiples since the 1960s) and
experimental electronic publishing is epitomized in the very theory of
``new media'' - which has become a standard disciplinary term,
particularly in the anglophone humanities. Its arguably most canonical
definition can be found in \emph{The Language of New Media} (2002) by
Lev Manovich (who was a research fellow at WdKA's Piet Zwart Institute
in 2005) where five criteria are given: ``modularity'', ``numerical
representation'' (i.e.~digitality), ``automation''
(i.e.~programmability), ``variability'', ``transcoding''\footnote{(Manovich,
  27-48)}. ``Modularity'' means the assemblage of different types of
media to a whole whose parts remain independent (such as embedded images
and videos on a website); ``variability'' describes the fact that a
``new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but
something that can exist in different, potentially infinite
versions'',\footnote{(Manovich, 36)} ``transcoding'' the technical and
figurative translation of data into different media and representations.

In Manovich's theory and its larger application in arts and humanities,
``new media'' is thus practically synonymous with digital
media.\footnote{The term ``digital media'' is technically incorrect,
  since only information can be digital, not the medium/carrier of its
  storage or transmission. I use this colloquial term nevertheless, for
  the sake of making the text easier to read.} When revisiting
Lissitzky's design of Mayakovsky's poetry volume with Manovich, it is
nevertheless striking that the book meets most criteria of ``new
media'': It is modular in its use of icons as a navigational interface,
variable in the fact that the same poetry volume has been reprinted in
numerous editions and typographic designs, and its very title - ``For
the Voice'' - indicates that it is all about transcoding print to
speech. It even fits the criterion of numerical representation to the
degree that it is structured by countable entities in an index and
written in the countable code of the alphabet (since even the visual
shapes were typeset with the Gutenberg technology of movable lead type
from a letter case).

Conversely, the issue of what is ``new media'' can be confused in work
that is based on electronic computer technology. A good example is
\emph{56 Broken Kindle Screens}, a print-on-demand book designed by
Silvio Lorusso (now a teacher and researcher at WdKA) and Sebastian
Schmieg as part of their masters studies at Piet Zwart Institute in
2012. Consisting of nothing but found photographs of broken screens of
Amazon's Kindle e-book reading device reprinted full-size on its pages,
this book received major media attention when it came out. Effectively,
it is a second-order remediation or, in Manovich's terminology,
transcoding: the e-book, which originally was a remediation from print
to digital, is remediated back to print, all the while preserving the
hardware, as a romantic ruin, rather than its software interface. This
work technically checks all boxes of ``new media'' according to
Manovich. At the same time, only one of those criteria is irrelevant for
the work, with its emphasis of the materiality (versus the marketing
pretension of dematerialization) of the Kindle device as well as of the
paper book.\footnote{One of the few publishing houses specializing in
  experimental, hybrid analog/digital editions is \emph{Badlands
  Unlimited} which was founded in 2010 by American contemporary artist
  Paul Chan. Its program contains e-books, print books and even objects
  such as billboards and knitted signs. In 2010, it published \emph{The
  University of Reading}, the PhD thesis of Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, a
  co-founder of the art/design/theory publishing collective Dexter
  Sinister (which also involved Piet Zwart Institute research tutor
  Steve Rushton), as a set of files. This is a rare example of
  university scholarship intersecting with hybrid publishing, although
  the form chosen for this publication was chosen to reflect the design
  constraints of academic publishing: ``For better or worse, it looks
  like what it is -- a very long semi-academic, black-and-white A4
  document built in Microsoft Word that complies with university house
  style''.
  (https://badlandsunlimited.com/works/form-as-a-way-of-thinking-practice-based-phd-written-by-stuart-bailey-for-the-university-of-reading-2010-14)}
This is just one example of hybrid analog/digital publishing
experiments; Lorusso maintains a database of comparable work by
international artists and designers on his website \emph{Post-Digital
Publishing Archive}.

The more general conclusion to be drawn from these and other
contemporary art and design practices (including, for example, today's
experimental music and film as it is presented in Rotterdam at arts
venues like WORM and De Player) is that the distinction of ``old'' and
``new'' media is no longer clear-cut and often fails taxonomies such as
those of Manovich. After Ludovico's book, a series of articles and books
were written in the WdKA research program which investigated the
``post-digital'' condition after new media.\footnote{(Cramer),
  (Nordeman), (Vanhoe), (Wu).} This has been internationally taken up,
among others, by art festivals such as transmediale in Berlin and in
university media studies.\footnote{(Berry).}

In the more hands-on realm of the publishing industry, hybrid print and
electronic publishing is called ``multi-channel publishing'' and is
based on the concept of automatic transcoding/remediation of a
publication from one source file into multiple formats such as print
book, e-book, websites and mobile applications. The idea is to save
costs and have one single, integrated design process for all these media
instead of designing for each medium individually and from scratch. This
subject was picked up in joint, externally funded research project of
the Institute of Network Culture at the Amsterdam University of Applied
Science and the research department of Willem de Kooning Academy from
2013 to 2015. In collaboration with the small and medium-size art and
design book publishers NAi 010, Valiz and BIS and three graphic design
bureaus staffed by WdKA alumni, alternative editorial and design
workflows were investigated that abandoned the established
Microsoft/Adobe tool chain in favor of distributed authoring systems
originally invented for software development, simple markup languages
and algorithmic document format translation.

In comparison to the complex content management and document engineering
systems used in large publishing houses, the solutions developed in this
project were rather simple, low-tech, based on available Open Source
software and meant to be used by small publishers who cannot hire IT
specialists. These techniques and workflows were documented and
explained in an Open Access handbook \emph{From Print to Ebooks: a
Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts}. This toolkit was recursive -
made with the very means and methods that it describes. In 2018,
Amsterdam University of Applied Science and WdKA received research
funding for a four-year follow-up project that tackles the inherent
conflict of editorial publishing: How to make editorial and design
workflows for hybrid electronic and print publications more
time-efficient without sacrificing quality if content and design.

\hypertarget{publishing-wdkas-art-and-design-research}{%
\section{Publishing WdKA's art and design
research}\label{publishing-wdkas-art-and-design-research}}

After the first Hybrid Publishing research project had ended, the WdKA
teachers and researchers involved (Kimmy Spreeuwenberg, Silvio Lorusso,
Amy Wu, André Castro, Loes Sikkes, Michael Murtaugh and myself) and a
group of senior lecturers and educational managers (Renee Turner, Aldje
van Meer, Roger Teeuwen) decided that its lessons needed to be applied
to WdKA: literally, to the graphic and media design curriculum of
Bachelors and Masters, and to research within WdKA. \emph{WdKA Hybrid
Publishing} was founded as an in-house think-tank and ``platform for
publishing research, while simultaneously conducting research through
making, prototyping and incorporating iterative design
processes''.\footnote{(Willem de Kooning Academy).} If one reads the
statement carefully, then ``publishing research'' can both mean to
\emph{publish research} and to practice \emph{publishing as research}.

This ambiguity precisely describes the work of the platform. A first
major project was a publication series linked to the \emph{Beyond
Social} symposia of WdKA's Social Practices curriculum (that focus on
social design and art as activist intervention). Media Design and Hybrid
Publishing tutor André Castro programmed a system that could
automatically and dynamically translate the contents of a collaborative
authoring Wiki into the fully designed website beyond-social.org, which
conversely contains computer programming that dynamically formats its
pages for print.

With the launch of WdKA Hybrid Publishing, the school created an annual
research award for outstanding B.A. graduation projects. This award is
not a thesis prize, but based on a jury's assessment of a student's
art/design graduation project and thesis as one comprehensive piece of
research. (The jury consists of external experts, including Erasmus
University scholars who are part of RASL.) The prize-winning research is
published both electronically and in a tangible medium (which can be
print or something else) through WdKA Hybrid Publishing. This itself is
an editorial research process into suitable media, forms of
visualization and materialization, and writing that takes up to a year.

For Lou Muuse's 2015 graduation project \emph{Retour Afzender}, the
existing website was complemented by an experimentally designed book
meant to provide the ``stable medium of print {[}\ldots{}{]} as a
long-term archive where the medium of the website will be unstable and
impermanent by its technical nature''.\footnote{(https://www.wdka.nl/work/retour-afzender-return-sender)}
Website and book investigate the Dutch asylum system as a system
designed to expel asylum seekers, using Muuse's undercover
photojournalism in shelters as the main evidence. The book is split into
several, individually bound folders-within-a-book that mimic the
bureaucratic paperwork of an asylum procedure, and are bound in the
material of the Chinese-made plastic travel bags that are widely known
as the suitcases of the poor.

Recent Hybrid publications include Daisy Thijssen's \emph{Meat Market},
a critical design investigation of the consumption and packaging of meat
(which removes awareness of the dead animal) in the form of a
glaring-red supermarket flyer, and Jade Ruijzenaar's \emph{Crangon
Crangon}, a research into the inner workings of the shrimp industry and
its waste of resources that involved reuse of thrown-away shrimp shells
as ceramic glazing. When the electronic versions of these publications
were developed, it turned out that the standard e-book formats could
insufficiently accommodate visual research. This issue had been noted in
the research project with Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences as
well. But hopes that the technology would eventually improve, were
disappointed. Through our participation in international conferences on
electronic publishing, we also learned that the mainstream publishing
industry had consolidated e-books as pure, undesigned, flat text media
for genre fiction while multimedia e-books had failed in the
(conservative) book market and could only be marketed as computer games.

Consequently, the WdKA Hybrid Publishing group thought up a new format
for audiovisual electronic book-like publications on the basis of HTML
files that contained all embedded images - potentially also video and
audio - in their source code and thus could be downloaded and stored as
single files and be viewed and read on any device with a web browser,
even without an Internet connection. (These publications are available
at http://hp.researchawards.wdka.nl. Their design is more extensively
explained in the first downloadable e-book, \emph{Command+S This
Publication} by Silvio Lorusso and Niels Vrijdag.)

A major future ambition for WdKA Hybrid Publishing is to interweave
artistic research within RASL with experimental and hybrid publications
- but not act as a design bureau, but as research partners. Examples of
contemporary art that transgresses the boundaries between visual art,
visual culture research, essayism and theory have gained prominence in
the last couple of years: for example, the video works of John Akomfrah
and Hito Steyerl or Adrian Piper's work between conceptual art, academic
philosophy and social critique. The question remains whether they may
conversely inspire new forms and non-traditional media in academic
scholarship that continue where McLuhan, Derrida and others left off.
The same applies to more empirical forms of research with its increasing
reliance on visualization and integration of data that traditional
papers and textbooks cannot provide.

New opportunities and possibilities also result from Open Access which
the Netherlands wants to establish as the norm of academic research
publishing within only few years. It means that research publishing has
to fundamentally rethink its models of authorship, distribution and
presentation.\footnote{(Hall and Adema)} In the best case, this could
make today's underground libraries of UbuWeb, Aaaaarg, Monoskop the new
official libraries and give birth to new types of hybrid
scholars-artists-librarians. Clearly, the renewal of publishing has to
come from art and critical research, as it no longer happens in a
conservative industry that, for the most part, is occupied with mourning
its losses.

Conversely, there is a question for the arts: If their legitimation
through the Western cultural canon is no longer tenable, if contemporary
art becomes too corrupted by the art market to still be credible as a
critical practice, if visual culture from outside the art and design
discourse becomes more influential for culture at large, what will
remain of the arts? Would it be an option to rethink them as publishing
in the literal sense of the word?

\hypertarget{references}{%
\section{References}\label{references}}

\end{document}
