Latest

Experimental Publishing Compendium

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)

Recent-ish publications

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). 

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project

Norimichi Hirakawa, The Irreversible [4-Dimensional Version] 2016

Biography

You can, as the saying goes, rise out of your class. You can go to university, move to the capital, get a job that supports your writing, publish with prestigious presses, maybe even win a prize or two. But you can’t rise with your class. Which is why most people don’t even try to change or break the class system and instead try to figure out how they can get on within it. Gary Hall is an avant-theorist and experimental writer, editor and publisher, whose work at the intersections of digital culture and philosophy shows some of the ways in which we can intervene in this pre-written script and actually begin to change the system itself. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he is founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures which brings together theorists, practitioners, activists and artists. He is also Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University in the US; and was previously Visiting Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; and Visiting Professor at the Hybrid Publishing Lab – Leuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany.

His research focuses on the generation of new forms of human/nonhuman cooperation, collaboration and the commons, as well as questions around class, elitism and digital capitalism. It has appeared in Radical Philosophy, New Formations, Media Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, American Literature and Angelaki, and has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and Slovenian. He is the author of a number of books. They include A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). In addition, he is co-author of Open Education: A Study In Disruption (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006).

He has a history of creating norm-critical collaborative research contexts. In 1999 he co-founded the contemporary theory journal Culture Machine which includes among its contributors everyone from Alain Badiou and Bernard Stiegler to N. Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker. In 2006 he co-founded the pioneering open access publishing house Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs, and which has published books by Isabelle Stengers, Timothy Morton, Claire Colebrook and many others. He also co-edited OHP's inflential Liquid Books series and the Jisc-funded Living Books About Life series. OHP was a founder member of both the Radical Open Access Collective and ScholarLed, with Hall being co-PI on the associated £3.6 million Research England and Arcadia Trust funded Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project which ran for 3.5 years to May 2023.

He has given lectures and seminars at institutions around the world, including the Australian National University, Cambridge University, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, K.U. Leuven, Lund University, Monash University, New York University, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in China, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Wellcome Collection in London.

He is currently developing a series of politico-institutional interventions that experiment with digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, contemporary theory in relation to the city and public institutions such as the art gallery, the library and the museum.

He is also completing two new monographs: Masked Media: What It Means To Be Human in the Age of Artifical Creative Intelligence; and Culture Must Be Defunded: Why the Arts Are So White, Male and Middle-Class (And What We Can Do About It).

He has written on class, the commons, copyright, cultural analytics, data, metadata, digital capitalism, digital humanities, the history and future of the book, media archaeology, new materialism, open access, open education, piracy, the posthuman, posthumanities, Marxism, post-Marxism, psychoanalysis, the quantified self, the sharing/gig economy, secrecy, the university, and on the philosophy of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Hardt and Negri, Mouffe, Latour, Stiegler and Braidotti. He is associated with the development of a number of critical concepts and practices, including open medialiquid theoryliving booksradical open accessthe microentrepreneur of the selfaffirmative disruptiondisruptive humanitiesmasked media, uberfied university/uber.edu, übercapitalism, anti-bourgeois theory and pirate philosophy