Polish translation of New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

A Polish translation of the 2012 Open Humanities Press book New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, edited by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, has been published on the website of the Machina Myśli group.

It is available here: http://machinamysli.org/nowy-materializm-wywiady-i-kartografie/.

The page is in Polish, but if you would like to download a copy you simply need to click respectively 'pdf'' or 'EPUB' in text.

Why the Radical Open Access Collective is Not Taking Part in Scholastica's 'Academic-Led Publishing Day'

Members of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC) recently received an email from Scholastica, asking whether we as a collective would like to take part in an 'Academic-Led Publishing Day' they are initiating. Having discussed this informally with several of our members, we have decided not to take part in this day as a collective. The reasons for this decision are outlined in the response to Scholastic's invitation below (drafted by Janneke Adema and Samuel Moore). We do not want to speak on behalf of individual members in this matter, though, so if anyone in the ROAC is interested in taking part individually they can of course do so. 

Dear Danielle (who was writing to us on behalf of Scholastica),

Thank you for your invitation to take part in 'Academic-Led Publishing Day'. There are various reasons why, from a radical open access perspective, we would refuse to be involved in such a day. Let us set out some of these reasons.

First of all we feel the name of your proposed event is problematic. None of the organisations mentioned in your invitation - Library Publishing Coalition, Michigan Publishing, Ubiquity Press, the University of California Press - are academic-led (or scholar-led if you prefer that term). The exception is Ubiquity Press, which is however operating predominantly as a commercial service and infrastructure provider. Looking at the organisations you list this seems very much an 'academy-led' event, and we suggest you perhaps change the name accordingly (i.e. to 'Academy-Led Publishing Day'). 

We feel words are important here; and all the more so given a true 'Academic-Led Publishing Day' would indeed be one that is initiated, organised and 'owned' by academic-led publishing initiatives themselves, rather than commercial service providers such as Scholastica.

The Radical Open Access Collective promotes community ownership of research (as you say you do). The difference is that for us this includes ownership and custodianship of open publishing infrastructures. To this end we have set up an information portal which lists open source publishing software and platforms as open and non-commercial alternatives to the services that Scholastica and Ubiquity provide. We feel taking part in an  'Academic-Led Publishing Day'—which we would like to emphasise is not actually academic-led at all but initiated by Scholastica, a for-profit intermediary—would, as it is currently conceived, be to indirectly promote the commercial services you provide. We acknowledge some presses may choose to use Scholastica's services and benefit from them. As a collective, however, we aim to promote and seek alliances with non-profit and open alternatives instead. 

We would very much like to support an 'Academic-Led Publishing Day', if it were indeed initiated from the bottom-up by scholar-led publishing initiatives, and we very much support those not-for-profit organisations that are taking part in this event. We also don’t want to speak for individual members of the Radical Open Access Collective, and would not wish to discourage them from taking part in this event if that is what they want to do. (We will forward your invitation to our mailing list.) Still, as a collective, we choose to pass on this one. We hope you understand.

Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration by Katve-Kaisa Kontturi

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the new book in its Immediations series: Katve-Kaisa Kontturi's Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration.

In Ways of Following, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi offers rare, intimate access to artists’ studios and exhibitions, where art processes thrive in their material-relational becoming. The book argues for an ethical and affirmative mode of engaging with contemporary art that replaces critical distance with sensuous and transformative proximity. From writing-with to dancing and breathing, from conversations to modelling, it maps ways of following that make the moving materiality of art intensively felt. Drawing on long-term engagements with selected contemporary artists and their art-in-process, Kontturi expands the concept and practice of collaboration from human interactions to working with, and between, materials. With this shift, Ways of Following radically rethinks such core tenets of art theory as intention, artistic influences and the autonomy of art, bringing new urgency to the work of art and its political capacity to propose new ways of being and thinking.

Executing Practices: New Book in OHP's DATA browser series

The DATA browser book series, together with OHP, is delighted to announce the publication of Executing Practices. This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet users, all of whose practices make a critical intervention into the broad concept of execution. 

DATA browser 06
EXECUTING PRACTICES 

Edited by Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass & Magda Tyżlik-Carver
Published by Open Humanities Press
CC 2018 (Creative Commons Attribution By Attribution Share Alike License)
310 pages

Download as FREE PDF (colour)
http://www.data-browser.net/pdf/DB06_Executing_Practices.pdf
Download as FREE eBook (colour)
http://www.data-browser.net/pdf/DB06_Executing_Practices.epub

Outline:

This collection brings together artists, curators, programmers, theorists and heavy internet browsers whose practices make critical intervention into the broad concept of execution. It draws attention to their political strategies, asking: who and what is involved with those practices, and for whom or what are these practices performed, and how? From the contestable politics of emoji modifier mechanisms and micro-temporalities of computational processes to genomic exploitation and the curating of digital content, the chapters account for gendered, racialised, spatial, violent, erotic, artistic and other embedded forms of execution. Together they highlight a range of ways in which execution emerges and how it participates within networked forms of liveliness.

Contents:

Executing Practices
Helen Pritchard, Eric Snodgrass, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

Preface: Time of Execution
Yuk Hui

Modifying the Universal
Roel Roscam Abbing, Peggy Pierrot, Femke Snelting

RuntimeException()
Geoff Cox

On Commands and Executions
David Gauthier

Deadly Algorithms
Susan Schuppli

Executing Micro-Temporality
Winnie Soon

Spinning Wheel of Life
Winnie Soon

Synchronizing Uncertainty
Brian House

Loading... 800% Slower
David Gauthier

Bugs in the War Room
Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter

Erasure
Audrey Samson

Posthuman Curating and its Biopolitical Executions
Magda Tyżlik-Carver

Ghost Factory
Magda Tyżlik-Carver & Andy Prior

Bataille's Bicycle
Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard & Kasper Hedegård Shiølin

The Chance Execution
Olle Essvik

What is Executing Here?
Eric Snodgrass

Critter Compiler
Helen Pritchard

Shrimping Under Working Conditions
Francisco Gallardo & Audrey Samson

Afterword: Reverse Executions in the Internet of Things
Jennifer Gabrys

Produced with support from Aarhus University and Liverpool John Moores University.

Übercapitalism and What Can Be Done About It

'Übercapitalism and What Can Be Done About It' is my contribution to The University Is Ours: How To Build An Activist Union Branch, a handbook for activists put together by Des Freedman and Susan Kelly for the UCU Branch Solidarity Network, and published in October 2018. The whole handbook can be downloaded for free here.

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We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive (the prefix ‘über’ means ‘irresistible’, ‘higher’, ‘more powerful’); and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated capitalism in which work is becoming low in quality but high in risk and stress.

As recent court judgements against Uber and Pimlico Plumbers demonstrate, precarious workers are still able to fight for better conditions and win, no matter how irresistible these companies may seem. Yet the struggle against übercapitalism is not only a matter of returning to workers the employment rights they have lost as a result of outsourcing and casualisation. Just as business is innovating so we need to invent new strains of unionisation. 

The university is a particularly appropriate place to experiment with new techniques for organising labour. It was in the university, after all, that the artistic/entrepreneurial way of life that’s such a prominent feature of digital capitalism, with its emphasis on autonomy, self-management and the blurring of the distinction between work and play, was itself first developed. (Both Facebook and Google have their origins in the university, for instance.)

So how do we develop new forms of solidarity and collective bargaining in the context of übercapitalism? Union branch activists could begin by campaigning for all those working in the university, including students, to retain control of the knowledge and data they generate by placing it under a Peer Production License (PPL) or something similar. Such a licence would function to create a common stock of non-privately owned information that everyone in the institution would collectively manage, share, and be free to access and use on the same equal basis. For instance, it would allow universities as communities to decide that any for-profit business wishing to privatize and commodify their research and the related data must pay a fair price for it (rather than getting it cheaply or indeed for free as is frequently the case now), while also ensuring it remains openly available for use in the non-profit public sphere. 

Such an approach would make the academy far less vulnerable to disruption at the hands of any future HE equivalent of Uber. Adopted across the sector, it would enable universities to disrupt privately owned companies such as Elsevier and Academia.edu that have a business model resting on their ability to parasitically trade off publicly funded education and labour. 

Better working conditions could also be put into practice. Because any data would be collectively owned and governed, the rights of workers and students regarding such data could be protected – and discriminatory behaviours guarded against. Anything coming even close to the performance monitoring, surveillance and behavioural control of an übercapitalist outfit such as Amazon could be rejected. 

Most importantly, such a collaborative, commons-based approach to organising university labour would differ significantly from the hierarchical, top-down, wealth-concentrating ownership and management structure of most übercapitalist firms. The latter take great care to separate their for-profit business from the workers and users who generate it. In the former, however, those who do the work and generate the value – academics, researchers, students, librarians, technicians, managers, administrators, cleaners, caterers, security staff – would also own and control the knowledge and data on which the ‘business’ is built.

The university would then truly be ours.