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Experimental Publishing Studio

Artist Paul Soulellis has posted online the syllabus for a class that he has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design called “Experimental Publishing Studio.” The class examines how publishing—especially publishing by and about artists—has been scrambled and renewed by the emergence of the digital. The syllabus includes a fascinating and extensive reading list, with links to online versions of most of the pieces.

In the syllabus, Soulellis writes that the takes both a philosophical and practical approach to publishing:

Publishing has never been a fixed notion. “What is publishing today?” remains a relevant inquiry, but with an increasingly expanded field of response, as platforms, channels and modes of production mutate and multiply … As certain legacies recede (privacy, authorship, copyright), how is publishing still “making public?” Let’s unpack (and entangle) these and other ways to explore the public circulation of work in a post-digital space. We’ll draw trajectories to and from the emergence of the networked artist in the 20th century, into the last twenty years, and particularly around the last two, as self-publishing becomes more and more inseparable from the artist’s ambient practice (and work) itself.

Among many other articles and videos, the reading list includes Hito Steyerl’s “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” and Metahaven’s video Black Transparency, about “collectivity and togetherness in a police state.”

The syllabus is available here (scroll down from the top).

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