quotes & found questions

We’ve seen people take action with tools and platforms that were the most readily available, to deliver a message.
Looking back at the design of protest, we can trace a kind of urgent vernacular, mostly created by people who were not formally trained as artists or designers. These are moments where the making happened in spite of the constraints, collaboratively, with minimal resources.

To approach the question: ‘what is urgent?’ begs another one: urgent for whom?




Urgency  relates to the current moment, but reaches beyond the quick, and therefore, dirty.

How can we position our content in such a way that it can compete with the new and how can we keep our audience engaged and connected?

How to balance the three factors of success – speed, quality, and positioning – so that they don’t come at a cost to one another?




In which way does a digital container influence its content? Does the same book — if archived on different platforms, such as Internet Archive, The Pirate Bay, Monoskop Log — still remain the same cultural item?

In short my answer to this question would be ‘no’. Books are embodied entities, which are materially established through their specific affordances in relationship to their production, dissemination, reception and preservation. This means that the specific materiality of the (digital) book is partly an outcome of these ongoing processes.

⟵ Paul Soulellis, lecture on URGENTCRAFT (available here)

⟵ Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing by the Institute of Network Cultures (available here)

⟵ A Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices with Janneke Adema by Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti, with Janneke Adema (available here)

→ what is urgency? 
→ what are urgent topics?
→ what is an urgent publication? what is it about? what does it look like? how is it made?

Paul Soulellis, URGENCY READER (2019)

Urgency Reader is an experiment in publishing as a gesture of call and response: the quick circulation of a charged collection of texts—in some cases raw, in-progress, or sketchy—to a small but deeply engaged audience.

A total of eighty contributors far and wide sent 467 pages of work in just under two weeks, signaling a need to publish urgently, but less preciously, on non-corporate platforms.

Urgency Reader 2: Mutual Aid Publishing During Crisis (2020)

Urgency Reader 2: Mutual Aid Publishing During Crisis began with a 10-day open call that was announced on March 18, 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The call for work was motivated by two desires:

1—to collectively document some of the extraordinary conditions, dynamics, and emotions being experienced while in quarantine, and 2—to provide some relief to artists and writers impacted by the crisis, in both creative and monetary forms. How might publishing as artistic practice embody communal care?

urgent publishing

- Aims to, although retaining its relevance and momentum, reach beyond the now, and be a sustainable practice

- Looks for new ways of presenting information to the reader

- As a practice, often questions the ‘how?’ of the publishing process
Although: "Urgency for these readers, lies in the why rather than the how of publishing a work." (from Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing)

- Aims to create a close-knit relationship with the audience/the reader

- Makes use of available tools

- Is collaborative
It develops a situated account of hybrid publishing, where authors, editors, publishers, designers, and readers operate together. (from Here and Now?)

hybrid publishing

- spans across multiple mediums, possibly even platforms

- combination of physical / digital publication and/or analogue/digital creation and production methods

- can take different forms

Topics?

(more like... things i've thought about that could be related / interesting to research more)

- cross-platform storytelling / ARGs (An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions. [from Wikipedia])

- collecting to publish (P. Soulellis; Key to other ways of presenting information, we found, is to not just have an author proclaiming something but to start from the idea that the book is doing something, and that it should be allowed to do so. [from Here and Now?...] )

- the urgency of social media? (posting on social media/life sharing)

- urgency in making (why do we make/create?)

- urgency in making but not necessarily sharing?

- perception of information we find online vs 'offline' - what do we believe more and why? who has the authority to decide? (post-truth) 

- archiving, digital archiving, archiving the web

- loneliness, isolation (especially now during the pandemic, but also general 'modern life' loneliness & disconnect to other people