5 Caledonian Road
Sat 7 Nov · 19:00 · £163
What if a book wasn’t an endpoint but an infrastructure? Please join us for the launch of Publishing as Collective Infrastructure. This title is less a ‘book’ than it is a radical rethinking of the book-form itself; formulated as a collectively authored, polyphonic work; an intervention into the realms of academic and open-access publishing. The project is grounded in experimentation and the bridging of theory and practice. It works to challenge proprietary software and big-tech dependency, orientating itself towards a future mode of publishing that must address the direct crises of precarity and education. Publishing as Collective Infrastructure challenges the idea of the book as a fixed object and reimagines publishing as a collective, political, and infrastructural practice. Emerging from the ServPub project, this book brings together artists, academics, technologists, feminist server collectives, and experimental publishers to expose how contemporary publishing is shaped by extractive platforms, proprietary software, unpaid labour, and opaque infrastructures. Against this backdrop, the authors develop and document alternative models grounded in free and open-source tools, collective authorship, feminist care practices, and self-hosted, small-scale infrastructures. Blending theory, documentation, and reflection, the book explores publishing as a full-stack practice: spanning writing, design, software, servers, logistics, and governance. It addresses topics including ambulant servers, wiki-to-print workflows, versioning and forking books, radical referencing, and autonomous publishing, while situating these practices within broader debates on infrastructure, open access, and knowledge politics. Rather than offering a blueprint, Publishing as Collective Infrastructure functions as a living experiment and pedagogical resource. It invites readers to think with – and work through – the infrastructures that make publishing possible, and to imagine how knowledge might be produced and shared otherwise. Bio: Publishing as Collective Infrastructure does not have a single, unified author. Instead, it is a polyphonic work shaped by the shared labor, ideas, and practices of multiple collectives and projects working across experimental publishing, feminist infrastructure, open-source design, and autonomous knowledge production. The book emerges from collaborations involving In-grid, Minor Compositions, noNames, Shape, and Systerserver, with contributions from Constant, Creative Crowds, Hackers & Designers, OBF Experimental Publishing Group, TITiPI, & Varia. Together, these groups contribute situated perspectives, technical practices, and collective forms of authorship that reflect the book’s commitment to publishing as a social, infrastructural, and political process. As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected], and a free ticket will be made available. If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email [email protected]. Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.