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Launch of the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions (CRAPCC) Geoff Cox: "How I wrote one of my books," lecture as part of the launch

Launch of the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions (CRAPCC) and Geoff Cox lecture: "How I wrote one of my books"

Oplysninger om arrangementet

Tidspunkt

Fredag 16. december 2022,  kl. 14:15 - 17:00

Sted

Kasernen, Langelandsgade 139, Building 1584, Room 112

Arrangør

Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions

We welcome all to the launch of the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions(CRAPCC)

14.15-14.30: Presentation of the Centre by Jacob Lund

14.30-15.30: Lecture by Geoff Cox: "How I wrote one of my books," followed by discussion

15.30-17.00: Launch of Jacob Lund's book The Changing Constitution of the Present and wine reception

Geoff Cox: “How I wrote one of my books.”

The pragmatic title of this talk is taken from Calvino’s essay that elaborates on the structures of one of his novels (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller). Like the broader experimental tradition of combinatory literature of which he was part, the reader’s attention is drawn to the procedural use of language, the formal rules and constraints in the act of writing. The inherent link to coding emphasises the potential of books to be dynamic objects not fixed in terms of attribution or commodity form or specific determination. Moreover, the procedural qualities of both writing and coding lend themselves to the sharing of resources and social exchange, allowing for modification of texts and versioning in public, through the use of experimental publishing tools and git repositories for example. Given these possibilities, and despite the trend towards open access, it seems odd that relatively little has changed in academic publishing and scholars still seek to distribute their work through journals even when more accessible and sustainable forms are available. Similarly, workflows tend to follow a model that remains relatively unchanged since industrialism. The presentation explores these concerns through some collaborative writing and publishing projects — citing some artist books, work that extends existing books such as Ways of Seeing, and the recent co-authored books Aesthetic Programming (2020) and Live Coding (2022). In different ways these examples are attempts to open up the aesthetic and political potential of publishing as a cultural practice in which books can be written and read as networked objects, distributed across various other spaces and temporalities.

  

Geoff Cox is Professor of Art and Computational Culture at London South Bank University (UK), where he is co-Director of Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI), co-Director of MA Curating Art and Public Programmes (w/ Whitechapel Gallery), and Adjunct at Aarhus University (DK). With Jacob Lund, he is co-editor of The Contemporary Condition book series published by Sternberg Press (since 2016), with Joasia Krysa, co-editor of the DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press (since 2018), and with Christian Ulrik Andersen, co-editor of the online journal APRJA. He has published widely, most often in collaboration, including: Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies (Open Humanities Press, 2020) with Winnie Soon, and Live Coding: A User’s Manual (MIT Press, 2022) with Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Thor Magnusson and Alex McLean.