Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing

In the past two years, ArtEZ Studium Generale and ArtEZ Press have participated in the two-year research project Making Public (2018-2020). During this project, we looked at various strategies that publishers can use to play an urgent role in the public debate with their publications. Methods and prototypes have been developed to allow publishers to approach the current information society in new and alternative ways. Now there is a publication: Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing

Finally, there it is: your hard-wrought publication that provides all the necessary facts and reflections on a topic that inflamed public debate… two years ago. Time passes quickly and people have moved on, leaving behind the rubbles of badly informed and heavily polarized discussions and an ever more self-referential and hyped-up mediasphere.

Or: there it is, a wide-spread debate on a topic you don’t just care about passionately, but also know heaps about – urban design, political memes, technological biases; to name just a few examples – but why doesn’t your highly topical and informed work catch the attention of the public eye? And what if you would want to set the agenda yourself, as a writer or publisher, as the editor of a journal or book series: how can you grab the attention in a saturated information landscape, where previously existing criteria for quality content seem to have been overthrown or have turned out to be inherently myopic themselves?

Questions such as these are what we set out to investigate in the two-year applied research project Making Public (SIA-RAAK-MKB-project Maak het publiek). Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing presents the results of this project, led by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with 1001 Publishers, Amateur Cities, Amsterdam University Press, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Hackers & Designers, Mind Design, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Open!, Open Set, Puntpixel, Studio BLT, Valiz, and Willem de Kooning Academy.

Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing was first published as a semi-private, highly exclusive, time-released publishing experiment. For seven weeks, every week a chapter was distributed to subscribers of an e-mail list. Now it is also available in pdf and paperback format.

Order your copy here.
Download the pdf here.

We’d love to hear what you think of it. Contact us via miriam@networkcultures.org.

Authors: Cristina Ampatzidou, Marc de Bruijn, Barbara Dubbeldam, Barbara Lateur, Thaïsa de Leij, Silvio Lorusso, Ania Molenda, Pia Pol, Miriam Rasch, Kimmy Spreeuwenberg, Erwin Verbruggen, and Minke Vos

Editors: Silvio Lorusso, Pia Pol, and Miriam Rasch
Graphic design: Loes Claessens
Infographics: Barbara Lateur
Developers: Loes Claessens, Marc de Bruijn
Cover: Loes Claessens

The project is supported by: Regieorgaan SIA (Taskforce for Applied Research), which is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).