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I am re-designing this part of my website. In the meantime, a brief overview of what I am up to:
Books
The Digital Imaginaries publication forms the fourth chapter of the Digital Imaginaries project that consisted of exhibitions, workshops and events in Dakar, Johannesburg and Karlsruhe. I initiated the Digital Imaginaries project with Richard Rottenburg, and I am now co-editing this edition with Richard Rottenburg, Oulimata Gueye and Philipp Ziegler.
Digital Imaginaries will be published by Kerber in print and available Open Access. https://www.kerberverlag.com/en/1780/digital-imaginaries-eng
The Book of Anonymity investigates anonymity in the digital age through a collection of scientific and artistic contributions. I am part of the Anon Collective (pssst), the anonymous editorial collective behind this volume. https://punctumbooks.com/titles/book-of-anonymity/
Publishing
As a publisher at Mattering Press, I am working on two books at the moment: Sensing In/Securities that looks at how sensor technologies enact regimes of in/securities. Nina Witjes, Nikolaus Poechhacker and Geoffrey Bowker edit this volume.
The second Mattering Book I am finalising at the moment is Boxes: A Field guide. This book explores the life of boxes, in the process aiming to challenge our senses and orderings of the world. The field guide unfolds over almost 40 chapters, including many that experiment with text and image.
I am working on distributing our books more effectively. Our titles are finding a new home in the Directory of Open Acess Books. Recently our books have been pirated by our friends at Memory of the World, every buccaneer’s favourite public library.
Events & Performances
The Mutant Assembly project brings together artists, scientists and activist in the ruins of Senegal’s ambitious post-independence university buildings. The event that will take place this year explores issues of decolonilisation and alternative forms of knowledge production.
I am working with Oulimata Gueye, who is the main curator, in close collaboration with the artists Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro who initiated the project. Documentation of the project will be presented as a media installation in an exhibition at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes this autumn.
Theatre
The theatre production Dying Together guides the audience through collective death, opening a space for the audience and actors to probe how we live together.
I did the research for the first part of the series, Dying Together | Humans, and helped with research and concept development for the second iteration Dying Together | Earth.
It was a pleasure to work again with the fantastic team around director Lotte van den Berg.
https://www.thirdspace.nl/en/werk/dying-together/
Infrastructure
Two years ago, with Joe Deville, I set up a collaboration between Mattering Press and our favourite Open Acess publishers (Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Open Humanities Press, Meson Press). The New Platforms initiative was funded by an EU OpenAire grant. We aimed to start a conversation about how small OA publishers could share resources, infrastructures and expertise to create a truly open infrastructure for academic book production.
What started as an explorative workshop in my studio quickly gathered momentum. In 2018 the participating presses founded ScholarLed, a collective of Open Access scholar-led book publishers. In 2019 ScholarLed, together with a fantastic group of librarians, institutions, tool and infrastructure providers, acquired a significant grant. It will fund the international Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project.
COPIM addresses some of the most pressing barriers preventing small publishers from interfacing with large-scale organisations and processes. For the next three years, I will dedicate some of my time to this project. https://scholarled.org/#infrastructure
Writing
Kat Jungnickel and my text on 'Machines of Enquiry' will be published by MIT Press in April as part of the edited collection 'Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research.' https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/transmissions
Moving
In April I moved studio, joining artist duo Hertog & Nadler (hertognadler.com) in studio 68 in the vicinity of Amsterdam's port.