Some recent-ish publications

Experimental Publishing Compendium

Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (book series)

How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’.

'Experimenting With Copyright Licences' (blogpost for the COPIM project - part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books pilot)

Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum

Contribution to 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!' (invited talk: in Spanish translation with English subtitles)

'Defund Culture' (journal article)

How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities (printable poster), Partisan Social Club, adjusted by Gary Hall

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' (journal article)

'Writing Against Elitism with A Stubborn Fury' (podcast)

'The Uberfication of the University - with Gary Hall' (podcast)

'"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall']' (press interview in Colombia)

'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)

Open Access

Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here

Radical Open Access

Radical Open Access Virtual Book Stand

'"Communists of Knowledge"? A case for the implementation of "radical open access" in the humanities and social sciences' (an MA dissertation about the ROAC by Ellie Masterman). 

« Ulises Carrión: a text is only a book when it is bound | Main | Towards a new political economy: Open Humanities Press and the open access monograph »
Thursday
Jul212011

On the unbound (nature of this) book (version 3.0)

(The following series of posts has been written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project.

Version 1.0 of this material was first presented at The Unbound Book conference, held at Amsterdam Central Library and the Royal Library in Den Haag, May 19-21, 2011.

Version 2.0 of this material is due to appear as ‘Force of Binding: On Liquid, Living Books (Mark Amerika Mix)’ on remixthebook.com, the companion website to Amerika's remixthebook volume. remixthebook by Mark Amerika will be published by University of Minnesota Press in September, 2011.)

 

What is the unbound book? Can the book be unbound?

•    

Is remixthebook, with its literary, philosophical, theoretical, artistic and poetic mash-ups and accompanying website where visual artists, theorists, new media scholars, philosophers and musicians sample source material, ‘postproducing it into their own remix/theory performances’, a book unbound?

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines the term ‘bound’ as follows:

‘bound in bind …tie or fasten (something) tightly together…;
walk or run with leaping strides…; …a territorial limit; a boundary…; … going or ready to go towards a specified place…; …past and past participle of bind…’

In which case the unbound book would be one that:


had been gathered together and firmly secured, as a pile of pages can be to form a print-on-paper codex volume;

had a certain destiny or destination or had been prepared, going, or ready to go toward a specific place (as in ‘homeward bound’), such as perhaps an intended addressee, known reader or identifiable and controllable audience;

and had been springing forward or progressing toward that place or destiny in leaps and bounds.


Had because the use of the past participle suggests such binding is history as far as the book is concerned.  Today, in the era of online authorship, comment sections, discussion forums, social tags, RSS feeds, YouTube clips, streaming video, augmented reality, 3D graphics, interactive information visualisations, geolocation search capabilities, crowd sourcing, remixes, mash-ups, and texts being generally connected to a network of other information, data and mobile media environments, the book is being disrupted, dislocated, dispersed. So much so that if the book is to have any future at all in the context of these other supports and modes of reading and writing, it will be in unbound form; a form which, while radically transforming the book, may yet serve to save it and keep it alive.



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