- This event has passed.
PUBLISHING—ART—COMMUNISM Symposium and Book Launch on the Materiality of Experimental Publishing
June 2, 2017 @ 1:30 pm - 7:00 pm BST
Symposium 12.30pm to 6pm. Book launch for Anti-Book 6.30pm to 8pm
Confirmed speakers:
NINA POWER, University of Roehampton; series editor at Book Works
EVA WEINMAYR, AND Publishing
NICK THURSTON, Artists’ Writings and Publications Centre, University of Leeds; Information as Material
ANTHONY ILES, Mute Magazine; Anguish Language
NICK THOBURN, University of Manchester; author of Anti-Book
The diffusion of digital media has led not so much to the death of the book as the multiplication of publishing forms, tools, and processes. Print is at once displaced and given a new impetus. For we find in art publishing, small press communism, conceptual writing, and other fields, a renewed attention to the ‘media-specific practices’ (Katherine Hayles) of print, to their hybridisation with digital platforms, and to techniques of the capitalist capture of text. This ‘post-digital condition’ is the context for our symposium on the many forms and materialities of experimental publishing in art and politics, where publishing is taken in an expanded sense that includes, and is constitutive of, formations of writing and reading (Rachel Malik).
Our aim for the symposium is twofold: to explore the specificities of experimental publishing in art and politics, and of their cross-fertilisation; and to politicise publishing form and practice, toward a communism of material text. We invite practitioners and theorists – as well as the publishing curious – to come and join the discussion, which will be held in the delightful surrounds of the MayDay Rooms archive of radical publishing.
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (University of Minnesota Press 2016), Nick Thoburn’s recent book on communist material text will be launched in the evening with wine and a short presentation or two.
Attendance is free but places are limited. RSVP to Nick Thoburn, indicating your attendance for the symposium and/or book launch, N.Thoburn@manchester.ac.uk.