Earlier this month I joined a cosy and inspiring gathering on “collective infrastructures for publishing” with Joana, Angela, Winnie, Mara, Cristina, Femke, Geoff, and many friends online and offline, old and new. I helped take notes in the group etherpad…

The event brought together many groups whose work I love and admire – including Varia, Systerserver, TITiPI, Constant, Hackers & Designers and In-grid. It felt like a special moment to have many of these groups in the same room at once.

The symposium served as a moment of collective reflection on what Femke called a “thick history of shared practice”, including - amongst other things - travelling feminist servers, feminist hacking and feminist networking, collective etherpads and etherdumps, wiki to print workflows, sysadmin colearning, radical referencing, networks of ones own, tentacular PDF publishing, artist run data centres, anti-patriarchal infrastructuring, trans*feminist strikes, shared servers and restarting rituals, “do it together” self-hosting clubs and co-learning sessions, alternative graphic design tools, chat-based publishing, wifi zines, decolonial licensing, bug reports as collective action, research as kinship, re-imagining “public interest” computational technologies – and much more.

The symposium was co-convened by the Open Book Futures Experimental Publishing Group and ServPub. The ServPub pilot is intended to open up space for co-learning and collaboration around interventionist publishing across academic, para-academic, activist and other spaces - which is not always easy.

Really looking forward to reading what follows from this gathering. 💜 A few pictures from the event are copied below, together with excerpts from the event page. 🍂

Some other groups and practices with overlapping affinities may also be found at these are.na boards on feminist methods, formats for making public and infrastructuring otherwise.

Collective Infrastructures for Publishing

With the participation of members of CC (creative crowds), Constant, Hackers & Designers, In-grid, OBF Experimental Publishing Group, SHAPE, Minor Compositions, noNames, Systerserver, TITiPI, Varia

[…]

Join us for a weekend gathering online and at Borough Road Gallery in London exploring the ongoing ‘ServPub’ experimental book pilot project, developed collaboratively by scholars, artists, designers, and technologists and supported by a grant provided in the context of the Open Book Futures (OBF) research project. ‘ServPub’ is a platform for research and practice around autonomous networks, affective infrastructures, and experimental publishing through artistic and feminist methods that expands the idea of books as networked objects. 

By sharing tentative insights into the challenges and potentials of experimenting with non-extractive, collaborative approaches to publishing during the ‘ServPub’ book pilot project, this event is aimed at authors, editors, publishers, developers, designers, and all those interested in experimenting with the forms, formats, workflows, and relationalities of academic and para-academic publishing. The symposium serves as a space to exchange and share knowledge on self-hosted infrastructures and feminist servers, to discuss software tools like wiki2print and VPN. It also offers an opportunity to engage with the joys and tensions that arise in collaborative and interventionist publishing efforts across the blurry and overlapping confines of academic, para-academic, activist, and hybrid spaces shaped by a critique of commercial and corporate publishing models. Together, we will discuss how non-extractive practices, radical referencing, and shared infrastructures can challenge the extraction of labour and knowledges, the competitive authorship models, and the productivity- and efficiency-driven editorial and publishing workflows that are prevalent in currently dominant scholarly publishing regimes.

[…]

Invited Collectives

Constant is a non-profit organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology. Constant is inspired by the principles of copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software while formulating its own critic towards it. Constant loves collective, digital, artistic and thoughtful practices. Constant organises transdisciplinary, open-ended worksessions. (Martino Morandi will represent Constant)

Hackers & Designers (H&D) is a conglomerate of practitioners from different fields and backgrounds (technology, design, art, and education) currently operating between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Brussels. H&D is organized in a cooperative fashion, distributing responsibility over finances and decision making. (Anja Groten will represent Hackers and Designers)

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. We convene communities to articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the ‘public interest’ might be when ‘public interest’ is always in-the-making. TITiPI functions as an infrastructure to establish new ways in which socio-technical practices and technologies might support the public interest. (Femke Snelting will represent TITiPI)

Varia is a Rotterdam based initiative, which started in 2017 from the need to open up their members’ practices and organise ad-hoc public or semi-public moments among different configurations; at its core it aims at developing critical understandings of the technologies that surround us. Varia experiments with tools for building physical and digital infrastructures in a collective way. (Cristina Cochior will represent Varia)

Who is Involved in ‘ServPub’?

noNames, a trans-local collective associated with Slade Art+Tech Research Lab, University College London, and CSNI, London South Bank University; SHAPE, Aarhus University, a research project focussed on digital citizenship; Minor Compositions, a publisher of books and media drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life; In-grid, a London-based trans*feminist collective of artists/educators/technologists working in and around digital infrastructure; Systerserver, an international collective run by feminists that offers internet-based FOSS tools to its network of feminists, queers and trans; Creative Crowds, a shared server for FLOSS publishing experiments to explore how different ways of working are shaped by (and shape) different realities.