PUBLISHING THE PUBLIC(ATION): WHAT IT MEANS TO MAKE SOMETHING PUBLIC

Yin Yin Wong (Yin Yin) — Matthew Stadler, an American writer who initiated Publication Studio in Portland, Oregon (with Patricia No) said that one of the core premises of a publication is the social life of it. A publication is a catalyst for a gathering of humans, understanding of each other and making something public. A publication is also a space to welcome humans as equal. A publication is a medium for people to converse with one another. A connecting force for debates and conversations.

Publication is different from a book because it involves a public. To make something public means engaging one or more people. Therefore, publication is a social tool. Publication is a concept. It is different from an object, an archive or a document.

Publishing is mobilization and facilitation of publication.

Yin Yin — Publication Studio works in a non-traditional way. It is a print-on-demand process. That means the bar for something to be published is really low, making it more accessible for an invisible group of people. Publication Studio works intimately with local authors and focuses on undiscovered creative minds from diverse range of interests. The distribution is through network, so authors can reach more diverse, underground and local audiences that are hard to reach through conventional publishing practices.

Yin Yin — The traditional publication is heavily embedded in institutions. Only established and in-the-network artists get their works published and mostly sold to the art and publication community.

Amy Suo Wu (Amy) — I don’t want to speak on behalf of XPUB, since I’m not teaching per se but a graduation supervisor. But to give some context, i’m an alumni of the course, however when I studied there it was called Networked Media, a course that focused on exploring networked technologies as sites for critical intervention, artistic research and political engagement. XPUB still very much carries forth this spirit however with a focus on the idea of making public in the age of post-digital networks. More specifically the course explores two main points. The first looks at publishing as the inquiry and participation into the technological frameworks, political context and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, how these are, or can be, used to create publics.

Amy — XPUB approaches publishing from the perspective of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices, in order to explore a broad range of methods and workflows, as well as inventing new ones. XPUB understands reading, writing, prototyping and documentation as core principles for critical design and artistic research. A publication, in this line of thinking, encapsulates these acts and therefore may manifest in multiple and hybrid forms. 

For me personally as an artist and designer, publication broadly means interacting and making something public. If we start from understanding publication as a way of making work visible to the audience, it can be anything from paper, bounded books, to performance, QR codes, wearable patches or even laundry.

Amy — Perhaps not a publication, but definitely publishing. Writing and posting on Facebook not only makes something public, but possibly creates public. The interaction with a public is crucial in the understanding of publication. A public doesn’t have to be this indiscriminate anonymous crowd, but can be a specific public such as your local neighbourhood community, school union, work, subculture, environment, family, etc.

Yin Yin — Yes, it can. Circulation is important. A workshop must circulate knowledge that was produced during the workshop. A publication must have an effect on the world and to the society that we live in. Otherwise, it would be the same as hanging a poster on your wall but nobody sees it.

Yin Yin — Publication must be democratic. It’s another form of dispersing ideas. An art object in a museum invites you to look at but it is still limited in an institutional confinement.

Yin Yin — Artists’ books is an iteration of the work that you’re making as an artist. The book itself is a piece of art but it can move and exist outside the opening time and and spatial confinement of the museum.

Publication Studio is about democratization of a book that doesn’t only travel to art book scenes or fairs. Contradictory, we still work mainly on artist books and are quite embedded in that scene. So, at the moment we’re still working to expand our content. In recent years we’ve published poetry, literature and non-fiction as well as artist books.

Yin Yin — The tax authorities of the Netherlands charge 9% for a book and 21% for a notebook. So, according to them for something to be considered a book, it must contain text. Therefore, yes! Text! (laughter)

Yin Yin — By the way, although the government thinks the text is necessary, I don’t think it is necessary.  Publication Studio has been experimenting with publication in different forms such as an exhibition. When we had an exhibition at Showroom MAMA in Rotterdam, we asked; Can publishing be an exhibition? What does that mean?

Yin Yin —The art book fair is a strange endeavor for us  because we have to print books beforehand, travel to the other end of the world to bring them to the fair and hope that you’ll sell. In 2019, Publication Studio Rotterdam was invited to participate in an art book fair in Australia. This means travelling to the other side of the world. Bringing all the books would be very heavy and very expensive to transport by the plane. 

So we invented a project called PUBLICATION STUDIO PORTABLE, together with Elaine Wing-Ah Ho from Publication Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong– which was a luggage trolley  in which we tucked a whole publication studio in. It included a printer, a glue gun and a cutter and weighed exactly 23 kilos, fitting the limit of international flights, to print and bind books at the fair. We demonstrated how we print on demand. We were there without bringing any books to the art book fair. The first thing we printed was the manual, the blueprint of the machine. There was definitely a performative aspect to it.

Yin Yin — Anyone can start a publication studio as long as you agree to distribute other publication studios’ works. There’s no mothership. Publication Studio Rotterdam works independently. It’s just like a group of people from different parts of the world trying to disperse information. We help each other also on technical parts. We are just some folks trying to get some texts and things around. And expand our reach. It’s very social. Each studio has its own input. Publication Studio Rotterdam is interested particularly in visual art, poetry and queer culture.

Amy — I don’t know.

Amy — Thank you Yin Yin! I just blanked out. Publishing as a political act is definitely what the course and I, as an artist, think about. For XPUB, it is not only the act of making, but the act of making public as well as the act of creating public. What this means to me is making certain knowledges (i mean this in the plural sense and not as a monolithic scientific entity) visible for certain groups. 

I’m personally interested in what voices we have? What does it mean to speak out?

Yin Yin — when you say silence in Asian culture makes me understand why I’m so loud!

Amy — In a way, teaching is publishing because it is circulating. Moreover, I write my course material, make it visible by way of engaging with my students. And in this way, my students can be considered my public or community of people whom I dialogue with. Within this space, knowledges are exchanged, cultivated and absorbed. Perhaps I’m extending the meanings of publication and publishing, but that’s what I like.

As a supervisor at XPUB, Clara and I call ourselves Book Midwives. Clara mainly works with students on editorial aspects; production of content, making tables of content, determining number of images or amount of pages and words. Clara also collaborated with Publication Studio Rotterdam to print out graduation catalogues. I work on the curatorial aspect of the publication; making the content public, producing a show, and guiding how to communicate the concept with the public. I’m not playing a curator, I don’t have a curatorial background. I just facilitate students to co-curate their own works.

Yin Yin — Publishing is a social practice. A marketplace is also social. But to have a practice means to continuously reiterate moments, performances, objects or acts to hone or activate that exchange in different ways. Otherwise, it’s just there. That’s also what a publication studio does. Every publication is different. We have different events. We speak to different people. It’s always practising and making it public.

Amy — Zines are a form of publication that are self-published and have a rich DIY culture. Self publishing or alternative publishing is interesting because if you look back in history, it started as ways to find comrades or like-minded people who have the same political views, or to counter hegemony. For instance, there were self published pamphlets by a radical group called the Ranters in the 17th century that held heretical views on religion, politics and sex (can you imagine, they were pro free love?!). There were science fiction fanzines in the 1930s during the great depression. There were   punk-zines that operated as proto social networks. 

In this way, you can say that one of self-publishing’s aims is to reach a specific public, or community of like-minded souls. And perhaps for this reason, zine culture historically was an underground subculture.

Amy — I wanted to work with Yin Yin on launching Thunderclap at Publication Studio a few years ago.

Amy — Thunderclap came from the time when I was doing an artist residency in Beijing. I was interested in the technique of steganography, which is a technique of hiding something in plain sight. It’s like camouflage but with a focus on communication mediums. Anyway while I was in Beijing, I found the work of a Chinese anarcho-feminist by the name of He-Yin Zhen in 1907 who wrote about feminism, socialism, Marxism and anarchism. According to the editors of her work in an English translation, her work and legacy was gradually erased over time. I decided to republish her work steganographically because I feared that if I published the work explicitly, the work would be taken down again. So I used clothing accessories such as patches and ribbons as a subversive publishing technique because it parasites on clothes and bodies. The patch, which I see as a wearable zine, consists of He-Yin Zhen’s quotes in English with a QR code that when passerby’s scan, downloads the PDF of her essay in Chinese.

Amy — In China, you can find random words printed on clothes. This is Shanzhai Fashion. Often these words are nonsensical English as they are not meant to be read within the context of China. They are in fact decorative elements which symbolize coolness and hipness precisely because it is ‘Western’. I used this phenomenon as a way to hide He-Yin Zhen’s work in plain sight. I have it here.

Amy — Yes, because people here can read English more readily. It’s a whole different level of engagement. In China, when people see the English words , it’s like a  cool visual thing. But Chinese people are more likely to ‘read’ the QR code. Whereas in Rotterdam people will read the text and care less about the QR code because it’s not widely used here.

Yin Yin — We’re working on a project  about publishing in public space. Distribution through public space is an ongoing interest of mine personally. I feel graphic design is much angled to it. It’s a language in public space that is forced upon the public usually. I’m always interested in how to infiltrate public language and visual language for means outside of the institutional and advertorial ones. With this project, we’re trying to find how readership and circulation of work is translated into public pieces.

Amy — I’m interested in publishing in a context where sensitive information is censored in the everyday landscape. Apart from Thunderclap, another work of mine that explores this is the exhibition Hutong Whispers, a steganographic catalogue of steganographic publishing projects camouflaged as a laundry line. The exhibition co-opts three omnipresent elements in the Chinese urban landscape – bedsheets; Shanzhai fashion; and QR codes – exploring them as covert media to publish sensitive and suppressed knowledge. This installation was designed to be eventually placed back into the traditional residential alleys of Beijing or hutongs, so that it may return back to its natural habitat, the context by which it was originally inspired.

I’m also starting a publishing project with my mother. It started last year when I visited her in Australia. She used to run a dry cleaning and alteration shop and I spent some time with her there and thought about the idea of repair not only of clothes but also our relationship that has been torn by time, distance and history. She told me that she wanted to publish a book about her life one day, so I suggested that she draw as she used to be an artist in China. The idea is to publish drawings in combination with my biographical writing on something that i’m  working on called an ‘embodied publication’. I’m interested in how the body can perform and publish at the same time? How to perform and publish work on the body in everyday spaces outside institutions? In this project, I’m excited to explore ways to publish embodied knowledges from immigrant bodies such as my mother. The act of making visible these invisible stories that are at the same time intimate and political is my next challenge.

Yin Yin — I think it definitely helps. I find Rotterdam to be uncompetitive and generous. If you wanna do something or you want to start something, you can do it. People will come. People will help. People will visit and people will return. Strong and generous local community. I love Rotterdam. It has an underground scene and it doesn’t ask for your attention. It’s humble.

Amy — I have a love-hate relationship with Rotterdam but I’m in my loving phase. I understand Rotterdam only when I’m outside of it because you can’t understand your environment until you leave. It has given me a lot of opportunity. When I first moved here 14 years ago, Rotterdam was still very white but there was space to do your own thing. There was a strong squatting movement and people were very supportive of each other. Now it’s a better spot because people start to stay and build community. In the past, people would come and leave.

Yin Yin — The ones that welcome challenges. We’re looking for a dialogue. It’s not for everyone. So you have to bring a little effort to the table. And the ones who enjoy physical books.

Amy — I agree with Yin Yin. It should be a dialogue. It’s not just a public but it should be a community. Like it shouldn’t be one-way communication but a conversation. You can do that with a community because they give back. 

What public do I seek? I think the public with willing to engage. The public that takes time to read, understands, thinks of critical questions and challenges me.But I think more and more, the public I seek is one that can help me understand and articulate my experiences of diaspora, otherness and violence.

Liu Chao-tze — no one can guarantee what’s gonna happen

Yin Yin — (on the phone with Clara) I need to help Amy answer a question.

Honey — It’s ok but I will give you the toughest question.

Clara — Thinking of the work that we’re doing at XPUB. I think it’s a synchronisation between physical and online teaching. The course manual The course manual for example will take more prominence and  be more expressive. It will make visible what’s happening in the classroom. Gray matter or gray literature, something that is only published for internal uses, will become a more deliberate space. More intentional effort put into the development, design and circulation of the course manual can be a way to liberate education from institutional confines. This would be an interesting thing in terms of education.

In terms of politics, in the Philippines, the cyber crime law called the Anti-Terror Bill makes it easier for the government to execute control and harass political dissenters, even small ones, even people who post critical opinions of their personal facebook accounts. I think we might see a small-scale resurgence in print as a safer place and as a way to evade surveillance.

Since more and more political campaigns are on social platforms, in another ten years, I would like to see political campaigns in a short form of publishing like in a single image-text vignette or a meme. Memes will become a more extensive form of publishing. How can you cram a political campaign into a single image that may lead to a larger publication?

I think Amy’s practice is also interesting. The idea that a single image can be a publication. QR code is a wearable clue that leads you to a bigger publication or content that exists elsewhere.

Yin Yin’s practice in Publication Studio is a different form of circulation. The circulation of publications that are printed outside the usual channel and governed by the community in various places. Circulation like what Publication Studios are doing will be more important in the act of publishing.

Amy — A bunch of people in China are already doing this. Setting self-published zines to dodge the surveillance in China. Making it at home and distributing it physically and analogly for the bypassing of political restriction.