Of course it had to befall me to travel a 6-hour train journey from Rotterdam to Kassel on the hottest day of the year. 100 pages into Mike Davis’ new book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, a thirsty throat, and a headache after listening to 4 hours of Dutch adolescents practising their German (not recommended!), i finally get off the train at the Kassel train station. Before us is a week of talks, presentations and closed-door meetings under the umbrella of “Paper and Pixel”, where we want to tease out how the distinct qualities of respectively online and offline publishing (and their hybrids) influence the writing, editorial and publishing, distribution/dissemination process. The economy of publishing and consumer patterns are changing – not in the least due to technological developments. Publishers – especially small and independent ones - have to accommodate these changes if they want to keep afloat.
Alessandro Ludovico, co-curator of the week, and editor-in-chief of Neural, arrives later on that day. We settle for a late night salad, and soon the conversation goes into “our love for print”, and how the printed word has a particular weight to it – precisely because it is embodied, and - unlike online publishing - is unforgiving: once something is set in print it is final. So there’s definitely a difference in how we write depending which medium we use: the techno-aesthetics of writing (in the sense of genre) are inextricably linked to the technologies of publishing. As newspaper articles, pamphlets, magazine articles, books, blogs, news sites, online zines are all different in media carriers, so are they in tone. The whole relationship technology~modes of editing/writing is an interesting one; i hope we get to pursue these tangents during the week. Alessandro remarked that for online writing – even if you have a particular readership in mind – you never really know who your audience is; you get to know your audience after the fact. This is almost inverse to print publishing, where you have to know your audience because of distribution.
So lots of stuff to talk about this week, and hopefully some productive networking as well. Andrew Murphie, lecturer at the School of Media, Film and Theatre, University of New South Wales (AUS) was supposed to join us in Kassel, but unfortunately could not make it because of a torn calf muscle. He has graciously offered to share his musings on the politics and health of modern publishing with us on his blog.
I like how Andrew points how changes in publishing lead to changes in writing: depending on which ingredients you use, the dish will turn out differently. I am lookimg forward to lots of cooking this week!
nat muller
Taggé comme:
onlineoffline publishing, writing
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