Publication formats: Maybe you need do decide what side you're on, GenAI or Zine?
As part of digital infrastructure research, we are exploring alternative forms to publish academic work. Currently and in different iterations: zines (from “magazine”). It really makes a difference to think about knowledge production in an open, playful format. Just make things.
For me, zines represent the internet culture of the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s hacky, a bit weird, but above all accessible to everyone. People use simple formats and dare to do something, especially design-wise.
Here are two examples. A zine within a zine collection that we were privileged to contribute from the RUSTlab and our data centre research project. In the “Liminal excavations” we contribute a piece on data centers, specifically: the different perspectives that gather around the infrastructure of a data center, it folks, designers, builders, scientists, you name it (they want to be named).
The second zine is part of the 2024 annual conference of the collaborative research center “Virtual Lifeworlds”. During the conference, I organized an “infrastructure wlk” with Estrid, which took us around the campus in Bochum and through various manifestations of virtuality. Three parts. We asked what the strange knowledge form of the lecture is all about (guiding us to a Hörsaal), how you can explore a data center using an AR app (servers fall from the sky and diesel generators rattle) and why a strange water stream was built in the middle of the brutalist campus (a stream which has now been shut down but still looks magnificient).
This is SO much fun, I can tell you, and it was a very material practice completing the zines. Designing, cutting, folding, glueing, sharing. Writing project proposals, books, papers and stuff is great. But we need to lighten things up, once in a while.
On another publication front, I have been very active in exploring collective writing. I’ve co-edited two speculative volumes: a situated lexicon on virtuality and a sci-fi-ish volume on writing uneasy predictions. www.virtuelle-lebenswelten.de/blog-post…