APRIL2006

The possible Format of a Workshop in Adelaide ?
by Roger Malina

i thought i would do a last post before the workshop
monday at hardcopy in adelaide

i want to emphasise the way that a publishing ecology
is an evolving set of mechanisms for dissemination
of information and debate and that what we need from
funding bodies is an open ness to experimentation=

whenever an intellectual community can make explicit a
need that is not being met by the current publishing
ecology then the grounds for an experiment exists- and
indeed the internet offers much lower thresholds to
micro publishing that was the case before

when Leonardo was founded in  1966= it was around
a group of artists and scientists who at that time
were developing a number of experimental art forms
including what became known as kinetic art and the
seeds of digital art forms

the artists exhibiting in paris at that time
could not get their exhibits reviewed by the critics
and their work was dismissed as "not being art'= the
art science and art techology terrain was not foregrounded
in the art world at that time, and commnication
and publication was indeed in the hands of very few
outlets= in a sense= leonardo started as a vanity press

a second problem was that these artists and scholars
wanted to write about their own work and their own
ideas= and not just be interviewed by critics or
writers who then explained to the art world what
the artists work with= artists writing was just not
a recognised part of the ecology except in the case
of manifestos a few artists books= the need was to
provide a forum for artists to write about their own
work-in the same way that scientists write about their
own work= even thought they also have chosen creative
activity and not writing as their primary mode of expression

when the founders of leonardo started approaching publishers
the only publisher that heard them out was a scientific
publisher called pergamon press= and the journal was published
in a "format' and methodology that was patterned on the way
other journals at that scientific publisher were produced=
and scientific peer review was the model= the cultural
publishing world was just so hostile to the very premises
of leonardo that the scientific publishign world was the only
place to do the experiment

the situation of course is now very different and Leonardo
has been doing its best to evolve with the needs and the
changing environment

five years ago Leonardo almost decided to stop publishing
and to start again from scratch= Rich Gold was on the board
and experiments like Amerika's alt-x and other publications
were emerging that were designed from scratch as on line
publications with print components

what happened in the meantime is that our contract publisher
mit press also evolved- each issue of leonardo now appears
on line simultaneously with the print version=and indeed
even though our print run has stayed the same at 1500 copies=
the on line down loads have been increasing steadily=
something like 100,000 downloads a year

a problem that remains is that we still work with a traditional
"copyright release" from authors= we have been interested in
adopting some of the more open licensing systems like
creative commons etc= but it has difficult to find a way to do
this within the context of a publisher that has 40 publications=
that need to use the same approach to streamline the process-
and its interface with the commercial on line database systems

as a result we do loose some authors now that refuse to sign
the copyrigt release that we use, but i would say that this
is no more than one or two authors a year.

anyway=i thought i would put this background info into
the discussion=

the format for our workshop monday as i understand it
is a very open discussion format= we have several
sessions structured around different seed topics= given
that the attendance will be over 30 people it is going to
be difficult to have everyone able to contribute to the debate
so i hope that the on line discussion can continue so that
all the various topics can get raised

see you in adelaide !

roger

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