Publishing Forum: Reading Group / Wednesday 6 February 2013, 7pm

Wednesday 6 February 2013, 7 – 9pm
Publishing Forum: Reading Group
A joint reading group with X Marks the Bökship, Banner Repeater and The Everyday Press which has a specific focus on publishing.

Post-Digital Print, The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 
By Alessandro Ludovico, introduction by Florian Cramer
Published by Onomatopee, 2012
pages: 192
size: 9.2 x 1.5 x 25.2 cm
graphic design: Eric de Haas

We will have read and be discussing;

Chapter 2 – A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print.
Chapter 3 – The mutation of paper: material paper in immaterial times.
Chapter 4 – The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page.

A link to an online PDF is here: or

The book is available to buy from http://www.onomatopee.net
Price: € 15,00

In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.

Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?

In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

Previously Read:

The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future. By Robert Darnton. Published by PublicAffairs, 2010
The Electric Information Age Book. McLuhan / Agel / Fiore and the Experimental Paperback. By Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Adam Michaels. Published by Inventory Books, Princeton Architectural Press, 2012
The Binder and the Server. Published by Triple Canopy, March 2012
Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. By Liz Kotz. Published by MIT Press, 2010
Graphic Design, History in the Writing, 1983 – 2011. Published by Occasional Papers, 2012
The Fox. Issue 1 (1975) First published 1975. Republished by The Everyday Press, 2012
Liner Notes. Conversations about Making Books. i.e. Leipzig. Published by Spector Books, 2010
Against Intellectual Property. By N. Stephen Kinsella. Published by Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008

 

AND / Make your own book course / The Showroom, Feb – April 2013