to publish or not to. publish is the title of an investigation by Giselle de Oliveira Macedo, at the occasion of the Declarations conference. Her questions below are at the disposal of anyone with a publishing habit, in any medium. Your collaboration will be very much appreciated. Copy the questions here or send an email to giselle@subdimension.com.


jouke kleerebezem


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This questionnaire is part of the project 'to publish or not to. publish', which I, giselle de oliveira macedo, graphic designer, have been developing for the internet.
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the launch of the whole project will take place during the symposium 'declarations' which is being organized by the design art department of the concordia university in montreal, canada, from october 25 to 28: http://design.concordia.ca/declaration
-----------------------
at the moment, i am a researcher of the design department at the post-graduate institute jan van eyck akademie, maastricht, the netherlands. thanks for your collaboration.
-----------------------
the project will be located at http://www.janvaneyck.nl/publish from the dates mentioned above.
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TO PUBLISH OR NOT TO. PUBLISH.
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TO PUBLISH IS: an act done in public.
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NAME OF PUBLICATION

1) Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use (NQPaOFU) (www.nqpaofu.com) (since 1998)

2) Innovation and Design for Information Empowerment (www.idie.net) (since 1999)


DRIVE

1. describe your involvement with the act of publishing: your current position and how you got involved.

My history in publishing goes back a long way to high school and art school magazines and alternative press in the late 60s and early 70s. In 1980 I started designing and publishing Drukwerk De Zaak, which was an art/print periodical that ran until 1989: 42 issues long, as an annex to the activities of De Zaak artist's space. Drukwerk De Zaak 'translated' spatial and other art works and exhibitions into printed pages: we used to call it an 'exhibition in print'. After ten years, when we closed shop, some people were surprised to learn that actually there had also existed an exhibition space De Zaak, so the 'magazine' had played a very important part in the dissemination of our ideas and the work of the artists we invited.

From 1993 onwards I basically migrated from print to the Internet. The computer had been playing an increasingly important role in the production of the printed matter, so when it got connected, we got connected, and started thinking about and testing the new affordances. At the time I worked with another publication which had sprung up in Groningen NL (where De Zaak had been located), Mediamatic magazine. Around Mediamatic assembled people who embraced new media like the Internet for their artistic and design production and publication.


2. which medium do you work with and why did you choose this medium?

My current publications primarily use the world wide web, for obvious reasons: it is immediate, cheap, distributed, open, interactive. It allows for near real time personal publication. It is networked hypermedia that fit my needs best. Print still interests me a lot, especially magazines and periodical publications, also because of its markets' attempt to follow the pace and precision of informationalization, of direct address, or peer-to-peer information sharing. The magazine/periodical market knows many niche publications, which are of great interest and a joy to purchase and read. Also because of the paper medium and the superior experience of carrying and browsing a piece of printed matter...


3. what is your motivation and purpose? why did you start it? is profit a main motivation? or at least, a concern?

For me as an artist these publications are simply and fully my 'work'. It is post-studio and post-museum artistic practice, nothing more, nothing less. Profit is no concern, I earn my living in other organizations, and as a freelance artist.


4. to what extent are you in control over the production, marketing, and distribution of your publication? full, partial, no control? describe.

Full. My publications literally are produced from my own turf, in the studio, at home. There is no other party involved in the production and distribution of it, other than my ISP: an FTP address.


5. what is the gap (if any) between what you imagine your publication should be and what it actually is?

Such a gap doesn't exist for NQPaOFU. Apart from the fact that obviously, there's always a gap between whatever an art work or publication could be and what it actually is. As a work in progress, being processed 24/7, even more so the publication I imagine is never finished, but you finish parts of it all the time: daily entries, themes and pre-occupations drive its process. I start another issue with no specific reason other than that I think the previous one is 'finished', but the work at large will never be, until I give it up, or die.

With idie.net, IDIE, I would want this to be more of a collaborative project. It would gain from an active participation, multiple research and development, active production and editing. It is more or less stuck in its infancy state, but it can wait. For the time being it serves me as a storage and sometimes venue of design related topics and texts.


BELIEFS

1. tell me about your publication. please describe it.

NQPaOFU is personal publishing, rather than a personal publication: a process, an act rather than a product. Its daily routine, its mixture of personal and 'professional' information, insights, beliefs and critique, its context of other weblogs, all contribute to a connectedness, which I think is the true 'belief' behind such utterances. The world wide web was designed for this kind of activity, very much so, to quote Tim Berners-Lee, its 'inventor' and engineer: "this all works only if each person makes links as he or she browses, so writing, link creation and browsing must be totally integrated." That basically simple read-write-link activity shapes hypermedia, 'bottom up'. For 'writing' please read: expressing oneself in multiple media, in image and text, either animated or not, in sound or visuals. The web supports every kind of file today, it has become a fully equipped publishing environment. Still it is basically non-hierarchical, independent of major markets, like publishing companies. NQPaOFU and thousands of other personal publications do exactly what Berners-Lee foresaw. These publications build common knowledge for an information age to come. You say you wanted a belief? Here's one.


2. do you believe your publication has a message? if yes, what? if no, why not?

Should I say: 'Remember McLuhan', like Wired did in 1993? Of course not. But some of the message embedded in NQPaOFU is definitely 'look, we have a medium', as much as any other medium limits and at the same time allows publishing to happen, publications 'are' always the medium, precisely since McLuhan. But such 'give and take' between form and content has marked artistry and public expression since Lascaux... The meta-message of weblogging is that personal publishing matters. That an information age can only be truly open and egalitarian if not only access is possible to 'any information, for anyone at any given time' (the original information creed, for example brought forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation), but also upload and download is symmetrical. Meaning: we have to contribute as much as we take in, to produce as much as we consume. We are the media, we are the information age's prime capital.

I have a firm conviction that design is information, or content. Specifically with interaction design, when the 'user' or recipient is invited to actively shape the experience, gather his or her information, edit it and add to it, design is not simply a tool, a 'how-to-read-write-link'—it is content. "Design ist unsichtbar" (design is invisible, Lucius Burckhardt) days are far behind us. Can you imagine 'media are invisible'? We see what we get and how we get it and who's getting it to us. With NQPaOFU and other personal publishing projects, we note that, although as a principle not a lot of them are simple collective works, the participatory voice of readers and peer publishers are embedded in the format, in the writing, in the design. Personal publishing shows a lot of collaboration, context. It is a dialogic form of publishing.


3. do you believe your publication is a radical one? (not necessarily politically speaking but also esthetically etc)

I think it is radical as a personal project, for my total devotion to it. This again marks weblogging, or personal publishing. Weblogging is a radical genre. Its esthetics and its contents mix the private and the public, which define it as purely political, if you wish. Originally political, I'd say, so not signing up to the party lines. Not relying on representation, but actively engaging in speaking out, speaking for itself by itself, in the typical 'collaborative', contextual, linked way as I described before.


4. do you consider yourself an activist of any cause? if yes, what cause or movement? is this engagement reflected in your publication?

Here the answers are simple: no. And none. And yes. You can read from NQPaOFU what it is: notes, quotes, provocations, and other fair use. That's all. There doesn't exist something like a 'weblog movement', god forbid. There is cliques and circles of friends, and mutually indebted people running these publications, very much so. Some among 'us' love each other, even when they haven't met. But as much as there is 'no here in here' (when thinking of the dislocated character of the Internet and web), there is 'no us among ourselves', for the weblogging community. There's no party lines, thank you very much.


5. what's the social relevance, if any, of your publication, do you believe it can somehow change the world?

Social change is both one of the conditions of alternative cultural organization, as that it results from it. The relevance of any publishing experiment, if it is real and truly trying to learn, not mimicking a previous 'revolution' in the rich history of alternative expression, changes the world by definition, if only at the edges. But a lot of us live at the edges, and want to stay at these edges, and have the best of times at the edges, knowing that whatever happens here, will sooner or later be adopted in a different form, in a different context, to change other worlds and other people's lives.


6. are you part of a network? can you describe your role in the network?

I think the answer to this question is in the above. I can add that the Internet and web, being the 'network of networks' it is, connects me to a lot of different networks, and to the individuals who constitute these networks. A network is of no particular relevance to me as a 'commodity'. The network is its connections and what and who are connected, and what is exchanged over the network, the network is the networking. It is an organizational and production mechanism, not a goal by itself. One small networking circle that is particularly important to me is 'Generosity', a small group of mutually interested webloggers, whose updates can be monitored at 'kokonino.com' and whose authors are on a shared mailing list to communicate 'off-weblog'. Yet again, some of my favorite weblogs are not 'in' Generosity, but highly into it, like 'birchlane.org'.


COMMUNICATE

1. does graphic design play any role in your project? if yes, which, if not, why not?

Graphic design is my formal background: it is what I studied in the 1970s. I've met Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema in my early childhood years, they were politically connected to my family, radical leftists, all of them. I can't 'use' these heroes of graphic design for my curriculum in any important way, as I was too young to even claim their influence on my career. Yet, I remember them both personally, and also the colorful environments which I visited, while their creators and my parents were for the umpteenth time changing the world. So graphic design plays an important role in my body of work, including its idealistic challenge. When and where I studied it, however, there existed no disciplinary program of whatever kind. Among art students we happily mixed and matched, glad that the political late 1960s/early 1970s' revolution in art school management was over and we could get back to work. So graphic design then and there meant: making posters, publishing multiple art works, spending time in the silk-screen workshop and hanging out with the other artists. That kind of graphic design I have never left.


2. does internet play any role? how?

The Internet and web are my medium of choice since 1994. Like I said, it allows 'immediate, cheap, distributed, open, interactive, near real time personal publishing'. It weaves into my everyday in an intricate way. Publishing on the web means 'daily operations', the title of my short text for Mute and my paper at the Declarations conference. Daily operations return the arts and artists where they belong: off-stage, performing for and with other disciplines and a variety of smaller audiences. The Internet is the first dislocated non-hierarchical mass medium, mass individualization, mass customization—you name it. What else does one desire? Apart from a snug place on earth where to access it from.


3. do you make use of (other) professionals to develop your project?

The people who wrote Pagespinner web authoring software are the first to mention. Then my ISP. And off the technical side, there's my peers in weblogging, for inspiration, for raw content and their best links.

LOGISTICS

1. how old are u, male or female, profession.

Hm. Look it up on the site, if this really interests you and you cannot guesstimate from the above...


2. when did you start? did you have any previous experience? have done it before?

It's all up there. I started using a computer to produce cheap typesetting in the mid 1980's, using an Atari... then I bought a Mac in the early 1990s? I think so.


3. where are you located/based (city, country)?

Le Moulin du Merle (dotcom), St. Germain des Bois, France.


4. how many people do you work with on your project?

I need people to join me for IDIE. Badly. NQPaOFU is one man bandwidth.


5. how do you fund your project? Are you supported by any specific group/company/corporation?

It is all paid for out of my own pocket. There are no direct revenues.


6. how do you distribute it? Do you sell it?

It is made freely available over the web.


7. who is your public? any target group?

Weblogging is a peer-to-peer activity, but has a larger audience, which in my case probably consists of people in 'the industry', in cultural production: artists, designers, writers. People in networked media.


8. how many people do you reach?

There is a very steady rate of 150-200 individual visits daily to NQPaOFU, of which like ten are my own visits, after updates and just to see whether it is still 'out there' and doing fine ;-) The numbers have slowly risen over the past three years. I guess and can tell from the referrer logs that most of these are regulars, although the past six months the amount of hits from search engines has increased. IDIE is much less.


9. how do you advertise/publicize your publication? Internet/ads/word of mouth?

It advertizes itself. I have never done any announcements for it, nor see the need for any particular campaign. It appears in several online lists and jump boards. And you know what: search engines work!

10. are you a not-for-profit organisation? how do you make a living?

I make a living as a freelance artist/consultant/writer.


11. how many hours per day/month/year do you spend on your publication?

A lot. A hell of a lot.


COMMENTARIES AND OBSERVATIONS

Maybe later. Check again here. Also I have my own paper to deliver at Declarations, its title being 'daily operations'. It is published at idie.net.


notes quotes provocations and other fair use © 2001, jouke kleerebezem: jk@nqpaofu.com





Giselle de Oliveira Macedo's original questions

email any submissions to giselle@subdimension.com

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please, can you be so friendly and give me as much detail as possible in your answers? thanks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
this questionnaire is part of the project 'to publish or not to. publish', which i, giselle de oliveira macedo, graphic designer, have been developing for the internet.
-----------------------
the launch of the whole project will take place during the symposium 'declarations' which is being organized by the design art department of the concordia university in montreal, canad·, from october 25 to 28: http://design.concordia.ca/declaration
-----------------------
at the moment, i am a researcher of the design department at the post-graduate institute jan van eyck akademie, maastricht, the netherlands. thanks for your collaboration.
-----------------------
the project will be located at http://www.janvaneyck.nl/publish from the dates mentioned above.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
TO PUBLISH OR NOT TO. PUBLISH.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
TO PUBLISH IS: an act done in public.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NAME OF PROJECT(S)
-----------------------
DRIVE:
-----------------------
1. describe your involvement with the act of publishing: your current position and how you got involved.
-----------------------
2. which medium do you work with and why did you choose this medium?
-----------------------
3. what is your motivation and purpose? why did you start it? is profit a main motivation? or at least, a concern?
-----------------------
4. to what extent are you in control over the production, marketing, and distribution of your publication? full, partial, no control? describe.
-----------------------
5. what is the gap (if any) between what you imagine your publication should be and what it actually is?
-----------------------
BELIEFS:
-----------------------
1. tell me about your publication. please describe it.
-----------------------
2. do you believe your publication has a message? if yes, what? if no, why not?
-----------------------
3. do you believe your publication is a radical one? (not necessarily politically speaking but also esthetically etc)
-----------------------
4. do you consider yourself an activist of any cause? if yes, what cause or movement? is this engagement reflected in your publication?
-----------------------
5. what's the social relevance, if any, of your publication, do you believe it can somehow change the world?
-----------------------
6. are you part of a network? can you describe your role in the network?
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COMMUNICATE:
----------------------
1. does graphic design play any role in your project? if yes, which, if not, why not?
-----------------------
2. does internet play any role? how?
-----------------------
3. do you make use of (other) professionals to develop your project?
-----------------------
LOGISTICS:
-----------------------
1. how old are u, male or female, profession.
-----------------------
2. when did you start? did you have any previous experience? have done it before?
-----------------------
3. where are you located/based (city, country)?
-----------------------
4. how many people do you work with on your project?
-----------------------
5. how do you fund your project? Are you supported by any specific group/company/corporation?
-----------------------
6. how do you distribute it? Do you sell it?
-----------------------
7. who is your public? any target group?
-----------------------
8. how many people do you reach?
-----------------------
9. how do you advertise/publicize your publication? Internet/ ads/ word of mouth?
-----------------------
10. are you a not-for-profit organisation? how do you make a living?
-----------------------
11. how many hours per day/month/year do you spend on your publication?
-----------------------
HTTP://
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COMMENTARIES AND OBSERVATIONS:
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