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). 

Monday
Jul012013

OHP Feedback blog - call for participation

This is to announce the full operation of Feedback, a theory-driven Humanities weblog publication under the auspices of Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/feedback), and to solicit active participation in its readership and contents. The publication arises as part of a dual effort to:

1) render the insights and bearings of contemporary critical theory disposable to current rapid-fire transformations taking place in the terrestrial eco-system, information and communications, demographics, the arts, and related areas of cultural activity;

2) to effect a transition from the dominant discourse-parameters and publication formats in conventional academic publications to the communication and interactivity now facilitated by the electronic media.

Feedback is the umbrella for eleven largely autonomous but closely interrelated desks covering the following areas: Aesthetics, Comparative Media, Film, Education, Literature, New Ecologies, Performance, Science, Sexualities, Theory, and Urbanities. Inquiries and solicitations should be addressed to the desk chiefs who have assumed editorial duties in the respective areas – or to us, Editorial.

Feedback is a website that is an outgrowth of open-access publishing and the social contracts surrounding authorship and intellectual property known as the Creative Commons. A good measure of any excitement that the publication generates arises in the collective, non-profit ethos in which such technological innovations as WordPress and such compendia and data-bases as the Wikipedia were created. Feedback’s parent organization, Open Humanities Press, is establishing itself as a leading electronic publisher in the theory-driven Humanities.

The textual and visual posts comprising Feedback thus have an outreach dwarfing the access afforded by conventional academic publications. It gives us enormous pleasure to invite rigorous theoretical readers of contemporary culture, performance, science and technology, sexualities, the media, the eco-sphere, and its human settlement to join the publication’s expression and community.

Kindly please pass this notice on to other students of culture amid contemporary conditions who may be inclined to respond to our solicitation.

Sincere thanks for your kind attentiveness. Perhaps the desks will be posting your work.

Editorial
Henry Sussman – henry.sussman@yale.edu
Jason Groves – jason.groves@yale.edu

Desk Editors
Aesthetics
Robin van den Akker – Erasmus University Rotterdam
Timotheus Vermeulen – Radboud University Nijmegen
Comparative Media
Erin Obodiac – Cornell University
Education
Jeffrey R. Di Leo – University of Houston-Victoria
Film
Henry Sussman – Yale University
Literature
Ranjan Ghosh – University of North Bengal
New Ecologies
Jason Groves – Yale University
Performance
Stephen Barker – Claire Trevor School of the Arts
Noam Gal – Hebrew University in Jerusalem/Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
Science/Technology
Chris Shaw – Texas Tech University
Sexualities
Katrin Pahl – Johns Hopkins University.
Nathan Gies – Johns Hopkins University
Theory
William Egginton – John Hopkins University
Todd McGowan – University of Vermont
Urbanities
Craig Epplin – Portland State University
Justin Read – University at Buffalo

--
Henry Sussman,
Visiting Professor,
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures,
Yale University,
POB 208210,
New Haven, CT, 06520-8210,
WLH (Harkness Hall) 307,
(203) 432-0792

Thursday
Jun132013

New living book about life: the unborn human by Deborah Lupton

THE UNBORN HUMAN, edited by Deborah Lupton:
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/The_Unborn_Human

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Unborn Human, the 24th book in its open access Living Books About Life series.

Unborn_human_3.jpg

The essays in this collection, edited by Deborah Lupton of the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, examine the unprecedented level of discursive prominence unborn human organisms – embryos and foetuses – experience in the contemporary era. Debates about the moral status of the unborn, about their claims to personhood and whether they should be treated as full human subjects, have been ongoing for a long time, particularly in areas related to religious philosophy, bioethics and abortion politics. Over the past half-century, however, these debates have become more diversified, intense and complex in response to a number of social, technological and economic changes. This Living Book about Life covers many of these facets of the unborn human. By incorporating academic articles as well as material from social, news and other digital media sites spanning historical medical, contemporary medical, sociocultural, bioethical and legal perspectives, The Unborn Human demonstrates the various and diverse contexts in which knowledges, concepts, objects and practices work together to configure embryos and foetuses.

***

LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Living Books About Life (http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org) was launched by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org) in October 2011.

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.

Monday
May272013

Photomediations machine 

We are pleased to announce the launch of Photomediations Machine (http://www.photomediationsmachine.net): a curated online space where the dynamic relations of mediation as performed in photography and other media can be encountered, experienced and engaged.

Photomediations Machine adopts a process-based approach to image making by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political flows of mediation that produce photographic objects. Showcasing theoretical and practical work at the intersections of art and mainstream practices, Photomediations Machine is both an archive of mediations past and a site of production of media as-we-do-not-know-them-yet. Photomediations Machine is non-commercial, non-profit and fully open access.

Curated by Joanna Zylinska and Ting Ting Cheng, Photomediations Machine has an International Advisory Board which includes Katherine Behar, Lisa Cartwright, Alberto López Cuenca, Asbjørn Grønstad, Richard Grusin, Sarah Kember, Max Liljefors, Melissa Miles, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Luiza Nader, Nina Sellars, Jonathan Shaw, Katrina Sluis, Marquard Smith, Hito Steyerl and Bernadette Wegenstein. It is a sister project to the online open access journal Culture Machine (http://www.culturemachine.net), established in 1999.

***
Photomediations Machine invites the following types of submissions:

• Visual projects that fit the photomediations theme (selection of images, links to video hosted elsewhere). We accept submissions from artists themselves as well as from theorists and curators. All visual projects need to be accompanied by a short description or a contextualisation piece.

• Short articles (up to 2000 words, including references) on any aspect of photomediations, accompanied by one or more images.

• Reviews (up to 1400 words, including references) of any relevant exhibitions, events or publications, accompanied by one or more images.

• Interviews with artists, theorists, activists and curators (up to 2000 words) working at the interstices of photography and media, accompanied by one or more images.

• Announcements / news about current exhibitions, installations, events and publications that will be of interests to Photomediations Machine’s readers (100-500 words), accompanied by one or more images.

Please submit all text as a Word or rtf document and all images as low-res jpegs (1024×768 px; 72dpi). For written submissions, please use the Culture Machine style sheet. Authors need to clear copyright to all images used. Decisions about individual submissions will be made by Photomediations Machine’s curators in consultation with members of its International Advisory Board and external advisors.

Please send your submission to: mail@photomediationsmachine.net

Website: http://www.photomediationsmachine.net
Twitter: @Photomediations

 

Wednesday
May222013

Open book digital humanities series

Open Book Publishers is proud to announce the launch of a Digital Humanities Series. The series is overseen by an international board of experts and its books subjected to rigorous peer review. Its objective is to encourage and support the development of experimental monographs, edited volumes and collections that extend the boundaries of the field and help to strengthen its interrelations with the other disciplines of the arts, humanities and beyond. It will offer digital humanists a dedicated
venue for high-quality, Open Access publication.

Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. For further details and instructions on how to submit please see www.openbookpublishers.com.

Editorial Board

Paul Arthur, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Julia Flanders, Gary Hall, Brett Hirsch, Matthew L. Jockers, John Lavagnino, Willard McCarty, Roberto Rosselli del Turco and Elke Teich.

Open Book Publishers

Open Book is an independent academic publisher, run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. We publish monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. All our books are available to read for free online. To date we have 30 books in print, over 215,000 visits to these books via the Web and readers from over 125 countries. See www.openbookpublishers.com for more information.

Saturday
Apr272013

'We are all game-changers now': open education - a study in disruption 

‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption is being written as part of an ongoing collaboration between Mute Publishing and the Media Department at Coventry School of Art & Design. It has emerged from a shared interest in, among other things, the ability of new forms of networked technologies, open access digital publishing, collaborative web tools and sociable spaces to enhance educational activity.

The background to these are Coventry University’s Centre for Disruptive Media and key theme of Open Media, and Mute Publishing’s explorations of the relationships  between creativity, technology and society since its founding in 1994.  The efforts of these respective organisations include, but are not limited to:

 

●    Coventry University’s proactive stance on open access and open education, including:
○    A bold, yet critically nuanced, Open Media policy
○    The Media Department’s Open Access mandate – the 3rd Green OA Mandate for a Humanities Department in the World,  1st Nationally, UK's 24th Green OA Mandate, Planet's 92nd
○    The Media Department’s ‘Open’ courses, including  PICBOD, PHONAR, and Creative Media Activism, the longest running of which dates back to January 2010

•    Further Open Media-related initiatives, i.e.
■    Liquid Theory TV
■    The Jisc funded Living Books About Life series
■    The University’s Digital Media Grand Challenge initiative and newly established Centre for Disruptive Media

●    Mute Publishing’s eighteen-year archive of editorial, providing analysis of networked technologies’ effects on culture and society, including:
○    A back catalogue of 6000+ web articles
○    Existing publishing output of 50+ magazines, five books, a range of special projects and filmed live events
●    Mute Publishing’s ongoing experiments with digital publishing, e.g.:
○    changes in the material form of the print magazine (six different formats)
○    exploring the relationship of print issues to online content/archives/user activity
○    developing publishing tools and digital services for audience/community/users
●    Mute Publishing’s open software development under the name ‘OpenMute

In Spring 2012, Coventry decided to structure the relationship more actively so as to draw out a strategic direction for its collaboration with Mute Publishing. It drew up a commission for Mute Publishing to work with the department’s Open Media Group to produce the following multi-part project, designed as a critical experiment with both collaborative, processual writing and concise, medium-length forms of shared attention:

1.    A collaboratively written book engaging critically with the burgeoning phenomenon of Open Education (OpenCourseWare, MOOCs,  TED, Wikiversity, The Public School et al), co-authored by Coventry’s Open Media Group and Mute Publishing.

2.    A public, open access, collaborative research wiki, where an initial, provisional, very much tbc version of this book on Open Education can be made available as it emerges and begins to take shape as part of the Culture Machine Liquid Books series from Open Humanities Press. Publishing an initial version of ‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption  on a research wiki  is also designed ensure it is openly available to be read, commented upon, edited, updated, rewritten, reversioned and used in the production of derivative works by the wider community of researchers, teachers and learners. 

The second part of this project, the ‘We Are All Game-Changers Now’: Open Education - A Study in Disruption collaborative research wiki, is available here.

For more on Mute and its history, see Nick Thoburn, ‘Ceci n’est pas un magazine: The Politics of Hybrid Media in Mute Magazine’, New Media and Society, December 5, 2011; and Julian Stallabrass, ‘Digital Partisans: Mute and the Cultural Politics of the Net’, New Left Review, 2012.