The digital age has shown us how easily knowledge and information are now able to flow and circulate. It has rendered equally visible how hard it is especially for artists to challenge the dominant online presence with their commitment to printed matter and publishing. This workshop will engage with publications arguing for their role in creating a wider public. We will be discussing contemporary conditions of production, circulation, and distribution which insist on including questions of ownership, usership and belonging as concerns integral to the artistic practice itself. My experience with publishing lies at the intersection of art, intellectual property, and open culture involving alternative economies & digital ecologies, the commons, media & collectivity – all contributing to creating a sustainable public realm. We will be focussing on expanding an ethics of curatorial practice, with a particular emphasis on alternative modes of research and indigenous knowledge. We might begin by asking questions like: What is the relationship between ethics, research, publishing and the institutionalised practices of curating? Can the institution exert moral agency? How does this change the way we practice as artists, curators and researchers and by extension shapes how we speak, read, write? Through a series of interactive lectures hold by Marysia Lewwandowska, students will be able to turn to an alternative conception of publishing within artistic practices as the centre of this discussion, one which prioritises not information or formal knowledges but is embedded in the communal. We will enquire about forms of coming together through publishing not predetermined by outcomes but by a shared process of enquiry and a set of diverse interests.
Session 1. - Archival knowledge as public awakening.
Session 2. - Exhibiting Art History. Aby Warburg - Mnemosyne Atlas.
Session 3. - Artists/Publishers.
Session 4. - Distributed practices. Forms of ownership.
Session 5. - Online Viral Networks.
Session 6. - Publication as Activism.