Events
Publishing Forum: Reading Group
Publishing Forum: Reading Group
Thursday 7 February, 6.30—8pm
Publishing Forum is a joint reading group initiated by X Marks the Bokship, Banner Repeater and The Everyday Press which has a specific focus on publishing. For this special Birmingham iteration, ESP members will join Eleanor Vonne Brown of X Marks the Bokship to discuss Post-Digital Print, The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 By Alessandro Ludovico.
Participants will need to read the following chapters before the session on the 7th:
Chapter 2: A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print.
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 Post-Digital Print, The Mutation of Publishing since 1894, Alessandro Ludovico, Published by Onamatapee, 2012, 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.
Eleanor Vonne Brown set up and runs X Marks the Bokship, a bookshop and project space for independent publishers in London, UK. It specialises in small press publications by artists and designers. It promotes contemporary publishing activity through book launches, events and production resources that bring together individual practitioners to create a local publishing community. Projects include Publisher of the Month, Publisher’s Lunch, eShelf, the XARCHIVE and the XALPHABET; a print edition of 26 Xs by 26 artists. X Marks the Bokship has a shop in Cambridge Heath Road.
The Publishing Forum have 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, 2008
- Against Intellectual Property. By N. Stephen Kinsella. Published by Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008
This event is part of a series produced in partnership with the BA Art & Design course at BIAD.