About...
Media Gifts is the website/blog of Gary Hall, a media theorist working on new media technologies, continental philosophy, art and politics. It provides details of his publications, talks and other activities, with a particular emphasis on work-in-progress.
Media gifts: the idea
My research includes a series of performative media projects or ‘media gifts’ which use media, both new and old, to actualise or creatively perform critical theory and philosophy. They are gifts in the sense they operate as part of what has come to be known as the academic gift economy whereby research is circulated for free rather than as intellectual property or market commodities that are bought and sold. They are performative in that they do not endeavour to provide a representation or critique of the world - or not just do so - as much as act in the world or intra-act with it. In other words, they are instances of media and mediation that endevour to produce the effects they name or things of which they speak, and that are engaged primarily through their actualization, enactment and performance. They are a way to practice an affirmative media theory or media philosophy, where analysis and critique are not abandoned but take more creative, inventive forms.
Operating at the intersections of art, media, politics and philosophy, the different gifts in the series each in their own way experiment with the potential media technologies hold for making affective, singular, ethical and political interventions in the ‘here’ and ‘now’. They include:
Culture Machine (1999, ongoing) - an open access journal of critical and cultural theory.
The open access archive CSeARCH (Cultural Studies e-Archive - launched 2006, retired 2012)
Open Humanities Press (founded 2006, launched 2008, ongoing)- the first open access publisher dedicated to critical and cultural theory.
The Liquid Books series (2008, ongoing) – a series, edited by Clare Birchall and myself, of digital ‘books’ users are able to remix, reformat, reversion, reuse, reinvent and republish.
Volume 1. New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader, a ‘liquid book’ edited by myself and Clare Birchall (and others) as a follow-up to the 2006 woodware volume, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory edited by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall
Volume 2. The Post-Corporate University, ‘curated’ by Davin Heckman
Volume 3. Technology and Cultural Form, openly written and edited by Joanna Zylinska and the students on the MA Digital Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. (Featured in Matthew Reisz, 'Title Fights', Times Higher Education, June 23, 2011.)
Volume 4. Wyrd to the Wiki: Lacunae Toward Wiki Ontologies, openly and collaboratively written by Shareriff (Trey Conner, University of South Florida) and mobius (Richard Doyle, Penn State University)
Volume 5. 'We're All Game Changers Now': Open Education - A Study in Disruption, only partially realised liquid book produced as part of a multi-part research project that also includes the 2014 volume from Rowman and Littlefield International, Open Education: A Study in Disruption. (An open access verion of the latter is available here.) Both books are co-authored by Coventry’s Open Media Group and Mute Publishing, this multi-part project being designed as a critical experiment with collaborative writing and concise, medium-length forms of shared attention.
Volume 6. Biomediaciones/Biomediations. Life as such doesn’t exist: it is always mediated by language, culture, technology and biology. It is these multiple mediations of life that form the theme of this liquid, living book, the sixth volume in the series, which has been collaboratively speed-edited in three hours at the Living Books workshop at the Festival of New Media Art and Video Transitio_MX 05 BIOMEDIATIONS (Biomediaciones) in Mexico City, September 2013.
Volume 7. After New Media: A Liquid Reader, a 'liquid reader' for the non-assessed, online and open access course 'After New Media' from Goldsmiths, University of London. Each section relates to a lecture on the After New Media course, with links highlighted in bold representing key reading. As with the After New Media course, the reader experiments with its own mediation as a form of pedagogy and seeks to intervene in and problematise the increasingly hegemonic, branded and top-down model of the MOOC (massive open online course).
Volume 8. Photomediations: An Open Reader, part of the online project Photomediations: An Open Book (see below), led by Joanna Zylinska. It contains academic, curatorial and mainstream open access essays on the dynamic relationship between photography and other media.
Volume 9. Really, We're Helping To Build This . . . Business: The Academia.edu Files, charts the debate over for-profit academic social networking sites (aka academic research sharing platforms) such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate and Mendeley. It features contributions from Gary Hall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Eileen Joy and Guy Geltner. Although it has initially been put together by Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, like all those titles in the Liquid Books series, The Academia.edu Files is open for anyone to add to, edit, reversion and comment upon.
Volume(n) 10. Eco-catástrofe y deconstrucción. Este volumen es una versión líquida del seminario Debates contemporáneos en Teoría Crítica, dentro del programa de maestría de 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos. La edición está a cargo de Gabriela Méndez Cota, Ana Cecilia Terrazas Valdés, Marco Antonio Alcalá Flores, Alejandro Ahumada y Diego Alejandro Corrales Caro.
This is a liquid version of the MA seminar on deconstructive environmental criticism at 17, Institute of Critical Studies in Mexico. Its purpose is to create and make available in Spanish some situated and creative translations of current theoretical reflections around "the disappearing future" (Cohen, Colebrook and Hillis Miller, 2012). While Latin American contexts have their own traditions of ecological thinking and environmental activism, so far their potential contributions to a post-liberal, non-moralistic take on environmental catastrophe appear as either superficial or non-existent. One reason for this may reside in the fact that Latin American environmentalism been shaped by the the natural and social sciences rather than the critical Humanities. With this liquid book we aim to contribute a dose of transnational philosophy and experimental writing to environmental criticism in Spanish, in the hope of making connections and forging new collaborations across countries, disciplines and languages.
Volume 11. Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies explores the technical as well as cultural imaginaries of programming from its insides. It follows the principle that the growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural thinking — and curriculum — that can account for, and with which to better understand the politics and aesthetics of algorithmic procedures, data processing and abstraction. Using p5.js, it introduces and demonstrates the reflexive practice of aesthetic programming, engaging with learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems. The book itself follows this approach, and is offered as a computational object open to modification and reversioning.
Git repository: https://gitlab.com/aesthetic-programming/book/
WikiNation (2008) – a project exploring new ways of organising platforms, institutions, cultures, and communities in all their complexity, uncertainty, and multiplicity; ways that do not uncritically repeat the reductive adherence to democracy, hegemony and Western, bourgeois, liberal humanism that can be found in the institution of academic criticism more widely.
Liquid Theory TV (with Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge - launched 2009, retired 2012) – a series of Internet TV programmes/video essays experimenting with new and different ways of acting as a public intellectual in the current media environment by communicating academic research and ideas to a wider community both inside and outside the university:
Liquid Theory TV: Episode 1 - Introduction
Liquid Theory TV: Episode 2 - Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control
Liquid Theory TV: Episode 3 - The Post-Secret State
The Open Scholarship Full Disclosure Initiative (2009) - as yet unrealised idea for an online directory detailing the sources of funding of all journal editors and publishers.
Pirate Philosophy 1.0 and 2.0 (2009) – a project investigating some of the implications of so-called internet piracy for the humanities, particularly the latter’s ideas of authorship, the book, the academic journal, scholarly writing and publishing, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use, content creation and cultural production. ‘Pirate Philosophy’ explores such ideas both philosophically and legally through the creation of an actual ‘pirate’ text using peer-to-peer BitTorrent networks.
The Living Books About Life series (2011) - edited with Clare Birchall and Joanna Zylinska, published by Open Humanities Press. Initially funded by Jisc, and published by Open Humanities Press, this is a series of 25 electronic open access books about life - with life understood both philosophically and biologically - that provides a bridge between the humanities and the sciences.
Culture Machine Live (launched 2012 - placed on hiatus 2015) - a series of podcasts edited by myself, Janneke Adema, Pete Woodbridge (now at Manchester School of Art), and Clare Birchall (King’s College, London). Includes talks with Richard Sennett, Johanna Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles, Chantal Mouffe, Geert Lovink, Alan Liu, Adrian Johns, Alessandro Ludovico, Ted Striphas and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on a range of issues including the digital humanities, internet politics, the future of cultural studies, transparency, open access, cultural theory and philosophy.
Photomediations: An Open Book (2015) - redesigns a coffee-table book as an online experience to produce a creative resource that explores the dynamic relationship between photography and other media. The project is a collaboration between academics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University (Joanna Zylinska, Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney and Michael Wamposzyc). It is part of Europeana Space, a project funded by the European Union's ICT Policy Support Programme under GA n° 621037. It is accompanied by a free downloadable pdf brochure, A Guide to Open and Hybrid Publishing (or how to create an image-based, open access book in 10 easy steps), written by myself, Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska, which uses Photomediations: An Open Book as an illustration.
Disrupting the Humanities: Towards Posthumanities (2016) - is a special issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Featuring a selection of heavily annotated video presentations and theory-performances, it seeks to break down the divisions between research and presentation, as well as between the ‘real-time’ and online or ‘virtual’ conference audience. The issue emerged from Disrupting the Humanities, a seminar series organized by the Centre for Disruptive Media (as it was then known) at Coventry University, which explored research and scholarship in a posthumanities context. Annotated using the open-source InterLace software developed by Robert Ochshorn, the issue integrates audience responses, questions, and social media engagement from the original presentations. These contributions were designed to dissolve boundaries—not only between research, presentation, and publication, but also between live and virtual participation.
ScholarLed (2018, ongoing) - is a consortium of academic-led, non-profit, open access book publishers. The founding members of ScholarLed were Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books. Formed in 2018 by members of the Radical Open Access Collective, the ScholarLed community develops systems and practices that allow smaller-scale presses to provide each other with forms of mutual support, ranging from pooled knowledge and expertise to shared on- and off-line tools and infrastructures. Members of the consortium each retain their distinct identity as publishers, with different audiences, processes, business models and stances towards open access. What they share is a commitment: to opening up scholarly research to diverse readerships; to resisting the marketization (and homogenisation) of academic knowledge production; and to working collaboratively rather than in competition. ScholarLed currently comprises Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, African Minds, MayFly Books, and mediastudies.press. (My direct involvement with ScholarLed ended in 2021 when Open Humanities Press withdrew from the consortium following ScholarLed’s decision to incorporate. However, both OHP and I remain actively engaged in collaborations with many of its presses.)
COPIM (2019, ongoing) - is a decentralised international partnership led, in its first iteration between 2019 and 2023, by Coventry University, and consisting of universities (Birkbeck, University of London, Lancaster University, and Trinity College, Cambridge), established scholar-led open access presses (represented through the ScholarLed consortium), libraries (UCSB Library, Loughborough University Library), infrastructure providers (DOAB, Jisc) and international membership organisations (The Digital Preservation Coalition). COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) collectively develops and builds the critical underlying modular components to support the resiliant publication of open access books by the scholarly community itself.
How to Practise the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities (2021) - is a collaborative project with the Partisan Social Club art collective, rooted in a central question: Can city inhabitants leverage resources from open access, open GLAM, FLOSS, P2P file sharing, copyfarAI, and the anti-privatised knowledge commons to create self-organised galleries, libraries, and museums? Originally developed for the Art and the Urban Commons project as part of the 2021 Coventry Creates exhibition, the project took shape as a printable poster. Designed to be displayed on billboards and wrapped around plinths, the poster replaces commercial advertising with contemporary theory—envisioning and calling forth a city that does not yet exist.
Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (2023, ongoing) explores the rewriting of books from the Open Humanities Press back catalogue. Edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Rebekka Kiesewetter and myself, this series experiments with ways to encourage readers and writers to actively reuse existing open-access book content published under Creative Commons licenses. As long as the license does not include the ND (No Derivatives) restriction, Creative Commons makes it possible to copy, remix, build upon, translate, and repurpose both books and their texts in any medium—provided the original author is credited (if the specific CC license includes the BY element). Collaborative open writing and editing tools further enable communities of authors to collectively rework published texts. This approach challenges modernist, Euro-Western notions of the fixed, finished autograph text produced by a single, self-contained (liberal humanist) author working in isolation from human and nonhuman others. The first book in the series is Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements With The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota.
Robot Review of Books (2024, ongoing) - is a creative experiment in exploring how AI can contribute to thoughtful discussions of contemporary literature, philosophy and technology. Designed as an online audio-visual magazine, it features short computational media essays - often framed as book reviews - delivered by a range of AI avatars.
Media gifts: the open notebook
While these media gifts constitute relatively distinct projects in their own right, they can also be seen as forming an open, living, fluid network of texts, websites, archives, wikis, internet TV programmes, publications and institutions that takes multiple forms and appears on multiple platforms, including the open humanities notebook section of the Media Gifts website. This provides a space where some of my ongoing research can be published more or less as it emerges, in beta, pre-print and grey literature form, and so made openly available for free, very quickly and easily. Indeed, the media gifts open notebook provides a forum where ideas, theories and concepts relating to all of the various projects in this network can be outlined, developed, reflected upon and openly shared, discussed and experimented with still further.
Why call it a notebook rather than a blog? Partly in an attempt to elude the diary-like, 'Daily Me' associations of the term blog. Partly because the academic, essayistic nature of much of the material published here means this space is indeed perhaps easier to understand as a kind of open, electronic notebook.
Some of which others have been involved in writing, editing, producing, developing etc. either openly, or anonymously, via pirate p2p networks etc. So you can’t always necessarily tell who, or what, the authors, are.