Currently, i work at XPUB (Master Experimental Publishing at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam) and co-run a server called creative crowds (CC) with Simon Browne and Doriane Timmermans. Together with Roel Roscam Abbing, Lídia Pereira, Niek Hilkmann, Dennis de Bel and Danny van der Kleij i initiated Varia in 2017, where i have been actively involved until 2023. Meanwhile, i am involved in research projects and work on commissions from time to time.
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[2024/2025] I am in the middle of a hands-on deep dive into PostScript, to study the impact of this file format and programming language on the timelines of design tools. This media archeological experiment is part of a research into permacomputing typesetting tools that i'm working on together with Aymeric Mansoux at the WdKA research center.
In collaboration with Martino Morandi, we worked on aggregariously snowplowing devices: experimental tools for the BXL based art organisation Constant to explore forms of ongoing publishing. We added tagging and marking features to an etherpad installation, to feed-forward valuable pad snippets, which we called snowpoles and snowfields. The work is documented in this section of Constant's zine on technodisobedience. [2023]
Content/Form is the follow up edition of the Peer-reviewed Newspaper from last year. Together with Simon Browne (as CC), we have been involved in the speedy production and collective editorial process, making this newspaper with wiki-to-print, participants, editors, designers (CC), server admins and the Servpub server in 5 days, in the sidelines of the Transmediale festival in Berlin [January/February 2024].
[April 2023] What can be (re)learned from operating shoulder-to-shoulder (or not)? I am taking time to chew on this question during a residency period at OSP.
Toward a Minor Tech
emerged from a range of contributions around the notion of minor tech,
during a 3-day sprint and workshop in London [January 2023].
The 12th edition of the Peer-reviewed Newspaper is made in a
wiki-to-print
environment hosted on the CC server, where contributors, editors and designers (Simon Browne and myself) produced the newspaper in parallel.
We also published
the code of this wiki-to-print boilerplate,
to continue the trail of wiki-to/2-print/pdf configurations.
Tripiti took care of the offset printing and shipped the newsletters to Berlin for their launch at the Transmediale later that month.
Through multiple moments of collective writing and designing at Varia, and while learning from ethertoff, ether2html, etherpash, etherbox, etherdump, and pad2print, but also just from using the software project Etherpad ... octomode [2021] transformed into a collective editing space for PDF making, using Etherpad, Paged.js and Flask. Inspired by the multi-centered, tentacular cognition capabilities of the octopus, we imagined a space in which the artificial boundaries of writing and design can be crossed; where writing, editing and designing can be done in one environment simultaneously, allowing the format to influence the matter and vice-versa.
The book Volumetric Regimes,
edited by Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting & Jara Rocha),
published in [2022] by Open Humanities Press as part of the
Data Browser series,
is the first one in the series made with free software, in this case with wiki-to-print: a configuration based on MediaWiki, HTML, CSS and Paged.js.
I wrote a new set of scripts for this project, very much based on ideas and ways of working of another wiki-based book project: Diversions, published by Constant and designed by OSP.
The layout is in itself also a version: it's a HTML+CSS remake of the existing template of the Data Browser series, originally designed by Stuart Bailey. I also contributed to the book with a text called The So-called Lookalike, to reflect on the impact of such embedded practice and this particular joyful and strange design process.
The Publishing Partyline
brought a group of practicioners together working or curious about web-to-print practices, during a two-day collective learning situation
in [October 2022] at Varia.
To prepare for this moment, Simon Browne and i produced a set of viewpoint cards
and hosted a radio series in which we interviewed
practicioners (in conversation with OSP),
tool makers (in conversation with Paged.js),
and educators (in conversation with Julien Bidoret and Quentin Juhel).
mail@manettaberends.nl
@manetta@post.lurk.org