I just came back from two jam packed weeks at Transmediale festival, 2017. Morehshin Allahyari and I were involved in a wealth of events, mostly in relation to our #Additivism project. Including: On the Far Side of the Marchlands: an exhibition at Schering Stiftung gallery, featuring work by Catherine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom, Morehshin and myself.

Photos from the event are gathered here.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook european launch: held at Transmediale on Saturday 4th Feb.

Audio of the event is available here.

Singularities: a panel and discussion conceived and introduced by Morehshin and myself. Featuring Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos.

Audio of the entire panel is available here. The introduction to the panel – written by Morehshin and myself – can be found below. Photos from the panel are here.

Alien Matter exhibition: curated by Inke Arns as part of Transmediale 2017. Featuring The 3D Additivist Cookbook and works by Joey Holder, Dov Ganchrow, and Kuang-Yi Ku.

Photos from the exhibition can be found here.

Singularities Panel delivered at Transmediale, Sunday 5th February 2017 Introduction by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke   Morehshin: In 1979, the Iranian Islamic revolution resulted in the overthrowing of the Pahlavi deen-as-ty and led to the establishment of an Islamic republic. Many different organizations, parties and guerrilla groups were involved in the Iranian Revolution. Some groups were created after the fall of Pahlavi and still survive in Iran; others helped overthrow the Shah but no longer exist. Much of Iranian society was hopeful about the coming revolution. Secular and leftist politicians participated in the movement to gain power in the aftermath, believing that Khomeini would support their voice and allow multiple positions and parties to be active and involved in the shaping of the post-revolution Iran. Like my mother – a Marxist at the time – would always say: The Iranian revolution brought sudden change, death, violence in unforeseen ways. It was a point, a very fast point of collapse and rise. The revolution spun out of control and the country was taken over by Islamists so fast that people weren’t able to react to it; to slow it; or even to understand it. The future was now in the hands of a single party with a single vision that would change the lives of generations of Iranians, including myself, in the years that followed. We were forced and expected to live in one singular reality. A mono authoritarian singularity. In physics, a singularity is a point in space and time of such incredible density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble out of the quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, political, ontological or material transformation. The coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. For mathematicians and physicists, singularities are often considered as ‘bad behaviour’ in the numbers and calculations. Infinite points may signal weird behaviours existing ‘in’ the physical world: things outside or beyond our ability to comprehend. Or perhaps, more interestingly, a singularity may expose the need for an entirely new physics. Some anomalies can only be made sense of by drafting a radically new model of the physical world to include them. For this panel we consider ‘bad behaviours’ in social, technological and ontological singularities. Moments of profound change triggered by a combination of technological shifts, cultural mutations, or unforeseen political dramas and events. Like the physicists who comprehend singularities in the physical world, we do not know whether the singularities our panelists highlight today tell us something profound about the world itself, or force us to question the model we have of the world or worlds. Daniel: As well as technological or socio-political singularities, this panel will question the ever narcissistic singularities of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ – confounding the principles of human universality upon which these suppositions are based. We propose ‘singularities’ as eccentric and elusive figures in need of collective attention. It is no coincidence that ‘Singularity’ is often used as a term to indicate human finitude. Self-same subjects existing at particular points in time, embedded within particular contexts, told through a singular history or single potential future. The metaphor of the transformative Singularity signals not one reality ‘to come’, nor even two realities – one moved from and one towards – but of many, all dependant on who the subject of the singularity is and how much autonomy they are ascribed. The ‘Technological’ Singularity is a myth of the ‘transhumanists’, a group of mainly Western, commonly white, male enthusiasts, who ascribe to the collective belief that technology will help them to become ‘more than human’… ‘possessed of drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical powers.’ As technological change accelerates, according to prominent Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, so it pulls us upwards in its wake. Kurzweil argues that as the curve of change reaches an infinite gradient reality itself will be brought into question: like a Black Hole in space-time subjects travelling toward this spike will find it impossible to turn around, to escape its pull. A transformed post-human reality awaits us on the other side of the Technological Singularity. A reality Kurzweil and his ilk believe ‘we’ will inevitably pass into in the coming decades. In a 2007 paper entitled ‘Droppin’ Science Fiction’, Darryl A. Smith explores the metaphor of the singularity through Afro-American and Afrofuturist science fiction. He notes that the metaphor of runaway change positions those subject to it in the place of Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth condemned to push a stone up a hill forever. For Sisyphus to progress he has to fight gravity as it conspires with the stone to pull him back to the bottom of the slope. The singularity in much science fiction from black and afro-american authors focusses on this potential fall, rather than the ascent:

“Here, in the geometrics of spacetime, the Spike lies not at the highest point on an infinite curve but at the lowest… Far from being the shift into a posthumanity, the Negative Spike is understood… as an infinite collapsing and, thus, negation of reality. Escape from such a region thus requires an opposing infinite movement.”

The image of a collective ‘push’ of the stone of progress up the slope necessarily posits a universal human subject, resisting the pull of gravity back down the slope. A universal human subject who passes victorious to the other side of the event horizon. But as history has shown us, technological, social and political singularities – arriving with little warning – often split the world into those inside and those outside their event horizons. Singularities like the 1979 Iranian revolution left many more on the outside of the Negative Spike, than the inside. Singularities such as the Industrial Revolution, which is retrospectively told in the West as a tale of imperial and technological triumph, rather than as a story of those who were violently abducted from their homelands, and made to toil and die in fields of cotton and sugarcane. The acceleration toward and away from that singularity brought about a Negative Spike so dense, that many millions of people alive today still find their identities subject to its social and ontological mass. In their recent definition of The Anthropocene, the International Commission on Stratigraphy named the Golden Spike after World War II as the official signal of the human-centric geological epoch. A series of converging events marked in the geological record around the same time: the detonation of the first nuclear warhead; the proliferation of synthetic plastic from crude oil constituents; and the introduction of large scale, industrialised farming practices, noted by the appearance of trillions of discarded chicken bones in the geological record. Will the early 21st century be remembered for the 9/11 terrorist event? The introduction of the iPhone, and Twitter? Or for the presidency of Donald J Trump? Or will each of these extraordinary events be considered as part of a single, larger shift in global power and techno-mediated autonomy? If ‘we’ are to rebuild ourselves through stronger unities, and collective actions in the wake of recent political upheavals, will ‘we’ also forego the need to recognise the different subjectivities and distinct realities that bubble out of each singularity’s wake? As the iPhone event sent shockwaves through the socio-technical cultures of the West, so the rare earth minerals required to power those iPhones were pushed skywards in value, forcing more bodies into pits in the ground to mine them. As we gather at Transmediale to consider ai, infrastructural, data, robotic, or cyborgian revolutions, what truly remains ‘elusive’ is a definition of ‘the human’ that does justice to the complex array of subjectivities destined to be impacted – and even crafted anew – by each of these advances. In his recent text on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Jean-Luc Nancy proposes instilling “the condition of an ever-renewed present” into the urgent design and creation of new, mobile futures. In this proposition Nancy recognises that each singularity is equal to all others in its finitude; an equivalence he defines as “the essence of community.” To contend with the idea of singularities – plural – of ruptures as such, we must share together that which will forever remain unimaginable alone. Morehshin: This appeal to a plurality of singularities is easily mistaken for the kinds of large scale collective action we have seen in recent years around the world. From the Arab Springs, and Occupy Movement through to the recent Women’s March, which took place not 24 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump. These events in particular spoke of a universal drive, a collective of people’s united against a single cause. Much has been written about the ‘human microphone’ technique utilized by Occupy protesters to amplify the voice of a speaker when megaphones and loud speakers were banned or unavailable. We wonder whether rather than speak as a single voice we should seek to emphasise the different singularities enabled by different voices, different minds; distinct votes and protestations. We wonder whether black and brown protestors gathered in similar numbers, with similar appeals to their collective unity and identity would have been portrayed very differently by the media. Whether the radical white women and population that united for the march would also show up to the next black lives matter or Muslim ban protests. These are not just some academic questions but an actual personal concern… what is collectivism and for who does the collective function? When we talk about futures and worlds and singularities, whose realities are we talking about? Who is going to go to Mars with Elon Musk? And who will be left? As we put this panel together, in the last weeks, our Manifesto’s apocalyptic vision of a world accelerated to breaking point by technological progress began to seem strangely comforting compared to the delirious political landscape we saw emerging before us. Whether you believe political mele-ee-ze, media delirium, or the inevitable implosion of the neo-liberal project is to blame for the rise of figures like Farage, Trump or – in the Philippines – the outspoken President Rodrigo Duterte, the promises these figures make of an absolute shift in the conditions of power, appear grand precisely because they choose to demonize the discrete differences of minority groups, or attempt to overturn truths that might fragment and disturb their all-encompassing narratives. Daniel: The appeal to inclusivity – in virtue of a shared political identity – often instates those of ‘normal’ body, race, sex, or genome as exclusive harbingers of the-change-which-should – or so we are told, will – come. A process that theorist Rosi Braidotti refers to as a ‘dialectics of otherness’ which subtly disguises difference, in celebration of a collective voice of will or governance. Morehshin: Last week on January 27, as part of a plan to keep out “Islamic terrorists” outside of the United States Trump signed an order, that suspended entry for citizens of seven countries for 90 days. This includes Iran, the country I am a citizen of. I have lived in the U.S. for 9 years and hold a green-card which was included in Trump’s ban and now is being reviewed case by case for each person who enters the U.S.. When the news came out, I was already in Berlin for Transmediale and wasn’t sure whether I had a home to go back to. Although the chaos of Trump’s announcement has now settled, and my own status as a resident of America appears a bit more clear for now, the ripples of emotion and uncertainty from last week have coloured my experience at this festival. As I have sat through panels and talks in the last 3 days, and as I stand here introducing this panel about elusive events, potential futures and the in betweenness of all profound technological singularities… the realities that feel most significant to me are yet to take place in the lives of so many Middle-Easterners and Muslims affected by Trump’s ban. How does one imagine/re-imagine/figure/re-figure the future when there are still so many ‘presents’ existing in conflict? I grew up in Iran for 23 years, where science fiction didn’t really exist as a genre in popular culture. I always think we were discouraged to imagine the future other than how it was ‘imagined’ for us. Science-fiction as a genre flourishes in the West… But I still struggle with the kinds of futures we seem most comfortable imagining. THANKS   We now want to hand over to our fantastic panelists, to highlight their voices, and build harmonies and dissonances with our own. We are extremely honoured to introduce them: Dorothy Santos is a Filipina-American writer, editor, curator, and educator. She has written and spoken on a wide variety of subjects, including art, activism, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. She is managing editor of Hyphen Magazine, and a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow, where she is researching the concept of citizenship. Her talk today is entitled Machines and Materiality: Speculations of Future Biology and the Human Body. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira are Brazilian design researchers, who very recently wrapped up their PhDs at the University of the Arts Berlin. Under the ‘A Parede’ alias, the duo researches new design methodologies, processes, and pedagogies for an onto-epistemological decolonization of the field. In their joint talk and performance, Luiza and Pedro will explore the tensions around hyperdense gravitational pulls and acts of resistance. With particular focus on the so-called “non-lethal” bombs – teargas and stun grenades – manufactured in Brazil, and exported and deployed all around the world. Rasheedah Phillips is creative director of Afrofuturist Affair: a community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture. In her work with ‘Black Quantum Futurism’, Rasheedah derives facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions to celebrate the ability of African-descended people to see “into,” choose, or create the impending future. In her talk today, Rasheedah will explore the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and alternative theories of temporal-spatial consciousness.      

Looking for print-on-demand services that offer a 'ring binder' option (a bit like this... A4 print bound with two or three of these). The book would be offered online, one click print, bound and shipped. Ideally with a cover and back cover of higher quality (hard back?) material. The user would simply be able to order a copy of the book, and it would arrive in a ring binder, each of the 360 sheets would be removable.

In this text, we introduce Txtblock, a decentralized tool for publishing and distribution of digital text in a format called the block—a squarely defined, eternally immutable unit of information. The block is the successor of the book. Cryptographically bound, the block is given a name that is directly derived from its content. In this way it is made tamper-proof and resistant to censorship. We see this proposal as a small contribution to the internet renaissance.

Hardcore Software presents Piracy Today, a platform for actions an interventions that challenge our dominant cultural order. The pilot exhibition presents work by four artists and practitioners who use piracy to interrogate patterns of cultural transmission.

http://hardcoresoftware.org/

Wednesday 28 August 2013 | 6-10pm Open discussion starts at 7pm Penthouse 4C, Barbican Centre Foyer

FEATURING WORK BY AND Publishing | Martin Dittus | Geraldine Juarez | Lawrence Lek

OPEN DISCUSSION 7-8.30pm Hosted by Rachel Falconer (Curator) Stuart Bannocks (Designer & Theorist) Ami Clarke (Artist & Curator) Martin Dittus (Hacker) Lawrence Lek (Artist) Daniel Rourke (Artist & Writer)

We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.

But really, who cares? 3

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers — all as writ over time.

The future book — the digital book — is no longer an immutable brick. It's ethereal and networked, emerging publicly in fits and starts. An artifact ‘complete’ for only the briefest of moments. Shifting deliberately. Layered with our shared marginalia. And demanding engagement with the promise of community implicit in its form.

But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production chain? For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical or geographical facts. The time and effort afforded to books, it is suggested, has been squeezed by budgetary and staffing constraints, by the shift in contemporary publishing towards the large conglomerates, and by a greater emphasis on sales and marketing campaigns and on the efficient supply of products to a retail environment geared towards selling fewer books in larger quantities. 

One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted. My idea was to expand on a photography exhibition I’d put together in 2009 called Stills From The Unmade Film of a Half-Written Novel. The title says it all. I’d taken 20 short extracts of the novel I was writing, and still am writing, which is about time-travelling air conditioning salesmen trying to save the world in the 1960s, and made 20 images based on them as if they were production stills from a film. It was installed in Norwich Arts Centre for a month.

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium too. Music, film, newspapers, blogs, videogames—it’s the nature of a digital society that all these come at us in parallel, through the same channels, consumed simultaneously or in seamless sequence.

Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the Book, thriller writer Louise Welsh and the historian Sheila Hingley.

Just recently, yet another device to read books electronically has just been launched - experts predict it will make this a mainstream activity. So Philip asks: why we are once again hearing concerns that innovations like e-readers and the iPad impede our imagination, shorten our attention span and make us intellectually shallow. Others argue

I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.

Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them?

In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and it

In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen, from the enclosed world of the individual reader to the networked one of the Internet. While innovative for its own time, the Institute’s mission built on Stein’s decades of experience exploring the frontiers of electronic publishing, whether with Atari, the Criterion Collection, or Voyager. Long before the popularization of the Internet, the tools that Stein developed for publishing with floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and LaserDiscs laid the groundwork for dramatic shifts in how we interact with (formerly) printed media. Much of his work proposed hybrid formats, combining the referential nature of books with the visual appeal of films, using computers to turn texts into what Stein was already calling, in the mid-’80s, “user-driven media.” Today these hybrids seem natural, but the history of publishing and technology prior to the Web,

In the beginning, before there was such a thing as a Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushed them with ink and, using the mechanism that would change the world, produced an ordinary little schoolbook. It was probably an edition of a fourth-century grammar text by Aelius Donatus, some 28 pages long. Only a few fragments of the printed sheets survive, because no one thought the book was worth keeping.

"Now had he kept to that, doing grammars...it probably would all have been well,” said Andrew Pettegree, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and author of “The Book in the Renaissance,” the story of the birth of print. Instead, Gutenberg was bent on making a grand statement, an edition of Scripture that would cost half as much as a house and would live through the ages. “And it was a towering success, as a cultural artifact, but it was horribly expensive,” Pettegree said. In the end, struggling for capital to support the B

For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. It would be astonishing to learn, if some retrospective survey could be carried out, that hours per head spent reading didn’t increase across all capitalist or otherwise modernizing countries (most Communist regimes having been energetic promoters of literacy) until at least the middle of the past century.

A few years ago, the French thinker Régis Debray published a brilliant and suggestive essay placing the rise and decline of socialist movements within this frame of ever-greater literacy. The question of socialism can be bracketed for now. More relevant, for the future of reading in general and novel-reading in particular, is Debray’s periodization scheme, in which an immemo

Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book—leaving, in the best case, about a dollar of profit per book.

Though this situation is less than ideal, it has persisted, more or less unchanged, for decades. E-books called the whole system into question. If there was no physical book, what would determine the price? Most publishers agreed, with some uncertainty, to give authors a royalty of twenty-five per cent, and began a long series of negotiations with Amazon over pricing. For

Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to a decentralized, worldwide marketplace. New technologies, however, do not await permission. They are, to use Schumpeter's overused term, disruptive, as nonnegotiable as earthquakes.

Innovative Books: I am looking to compile a list of the most innovative uses of the book format. Books that break the mould in their layout and design, perhaps books that use online systems to extend their content value or push their form into new places. I am most interested in narrative and theory, but any book that is interesting (artist books etc.) would be really appreciated. I have a few examples, in order of publication, to set the ball rolling:

Compendium for literates : a system of writing by Karl Gerstner - A book about book form in an innovative form. Beautiful and still fresh

Dictionary of the Khazars: a lexicon novel in 100,000 words by Pavic - a 'dictionary novel' "written in two versions, male and female, which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines"

A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Philips - an artist who has used one particular edition of one particular book as a space for his work for many years

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larson - extended use of footnote, side-note and illustration to give the narrative dimension

I would love any ideas you have!

Fictional Stimulus is a reading experience for people who like books and are curious about the future of literature in the digital world. It's an introductory taster for those new to reading online, and its form is inspired by the bookgroup where everyone reads the same material then gets together to discuss it at the end. Fictional Stimulus started on 22 September 2009 and runs for four weeks, over which time you’ll be sent twelve emails, one each time we make available a new batch of stimuli. Click on the green headings above to find the latest concise selection of material including new work and commentary, plus links to a few other sites you might be interested to look at.

Fictional Stimulus culminates in a live chat with Kate Pullinger and the if:book team on 13 October when you’ll have a chance to ask questions and join the debate on the future of the book. The complete Stimulus will still be available to read here after that date.

As well as reading the new content on the site

Though you’ll still have to do your writing using the old fashioned method — one word at a time — web applications and social media have made the process of writing a novel considerably easier and arguably more enjoyable. Here is a toolkit for using the web to write a book. If you know of any other great applications useful to aspiring writers, please leave them in the comments.