Winners of the Photomediations competition announced

After much deliberation, the Photomediations team, together with guest curators Katrina Sluis (The Photographers Gallery), Karen Newman (Birmingham Open Media), and Pippa Milne (Centre for Contemporary Photography), are proud to announce the overall winner, curators’ choices and commendations for the Photomediations open call competition.

We would first of all like to thank everyone one who contributed work. The sheer quality, diversity and creativity evident in each submission made the judging process hugely satisfying for us but equally challenging to agree on our final selections. Every qualifying (licensed & attributed) image submitted to the call will be showcased here on the Photomediations website and we hope will continue to inspire and provide the foundations for others to produce new remix creations and showcase the benefits of open licensing within the creative sector.

Therefore we are pleased to announce the winners:

Overall Winner

a-storm-in-a-teacup_webh-768x750

Mark Murphy
, Storm in a Teacup (CC BY-NC-SA)

By deftly selecting and splicing together two remarkably different images, Mark asks us to imaginatively ponder the physical impossibility of a ‘storm in a teacup’”. (Katrina Sluis)

“Just really beautiful”. (Karen Newman)

Curators’ Choice Awards

Wioleta Kaminska, I Miss My Home (CC BY)

“An ambitious and poetic combining of images, text and motion graphics – which explores what might be the visual language of a photograph on a screen… [T]he submission has resonance with contemporary events in Europe.” (Katrina Sluis)

CM-Brosteanu-The-Haystack_web-300x263 CM-Brosteanu-The-Ladder_web-300x263 CM-Brosteanu-The-Open-Door_web-300x263

Constantin Marian Brosteanu, The Nature of Pencil (CC-BY)

“In the tradition of other artists such as Andreas Müller-Pohle, Constantin has playfully explored the remediation and materiality of historical photographs in contemporary screen culture with the assistance of a Game Boy camera.” (Katrina Sluis)

ezgif.com-resize

Elle Heaps, Muscle Beach (CC-BY)

“The humour that Elle has co-opted here is witty and subtly layered. Her use of a 19th century muscle man, placed on top of a scene that brings to mind Baywatch while giffing through the colours of the gay pride flag, gives viewers a lot to interpret.” (Pippa Milne)

Judges Commendation Awards

Katie Hindle, Blouse (1850—2016) (CC0)
Hayley Pritchard
, Untitled (CC BY)
James Thorn
, Pigeon (CC BY)
Sam Forsyth-Gray
, Scalp (CC BY-NC-SA)
Tara Rutledge
, Moroaica (CC BY-NC-SA)
Nathan Gabriel
, The Flight of the Ava (CC BY)

The new Photomediations exhibition space will be live in time for its launch at the ‘Cultural Heritage: reuse, remake and reimagine’ conference in Berlin.

You might also be interested in the next stage of our project; the development of a set of open-source creative challenge cards that will feature selected Photomediations image submissions throughout the pack – fully attributed, of course! The idea behind these is to build upon the creative jam sessions that we ran across Europe and Australia and offer the cards as tool to use within a classroom or group community setting to stimulate further exploration of open creative practices.

The Photomediations team
photomediations@disruptivemedia.org.uk

Photomediations: An Open Book
Photomediations: A Reader
Photomediations Exhibition Space

 

A Guide to Open and Hybrid Publishing

Or how to create an image-based, open access book in TEN easy steps

POB-Exhibition-banner-guide

The world of publishing is undergoing dramatic changes, with the emergence of new publishing platforms, the increasing need for cross-media content and the transformation of the book into an ‘open medium’. The aim of this guide is to explain the concept of ‘open and hybrid publishing’ and to encourage various parties – students, educators, artists, curators, independent publishers, cultural heritage managers – to become involved in open and hybrid publishing themselves.

Using two case studies of multi-platform publishing projects, this Guide to Open and Hybrid Publishing demystifies the process of publishing online and offline today. Promoting the creative reuse of the available cultural resources, it draws attention to the complex issue of copyright when it comes to publishing written texts – as well as images. It also discusses the various business approaches that ‘open and hybrid publishing’ can embrace.

What’s happening with publishing today?

The rise of new devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad, has facilitated new ways of reading. It has also changed the very nature of the medium that is being read. Desktop computers facilitated a shift to screen-based reading, while laptops, smartphones and tablets encouraged the development of cross-platform multimedia contents. Today it is e-books, tablets and smartphones, more than online newspapers, that are radically transforming the publishing landscape. The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported recently that e-books are ‘on course to outsell printed editions in UK by 2018’. The book market itself is showing definite growth tendencies in respect of both the commercial e-book market and, under the open access publishing model especially, academic publishing market. With regard to the former, ‘The UK consumer e-book market – which excludes professional and educational books – is forecast to almost triple from £380m to £1bn over the next four years’ (The Guardian, 4 June 2014 ).

E-books are only one part of this new ecosystem of reading, writing, publishing, distribution, access and sales. They represent, in Europe, just a few percentage points of the revenue of the national book industry. Certainly, for many publishers these days (such as Penguin Random House or Hachette Livres) expanding their access to international markets on a global scale through e-books is a priority. Yet publishing is no longer limited to the traditional publishing houses: technology companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google have now entered the picture. With their new production and distribution models, and new modes of presenting content, these companies are disrupting the traditional structures – and strictures – of the pre-digital publishing industry. Interestingly, they are also promoting a more seamless relation between text and image.

As for academic publishing, while the shift to digital and the promotion of open access (OA) to knowledge – where outcomes of academic research, in the form of articles, research papers and reports, are made freely available online – is relatively advanced in the sciences, it has yet to become more firmly established in the humanities. One reason for this is that in the sciences the major form of communication is the peer-reviewed journal article, and it is easy to make journal articles available on an OA basis because of the way copyright works for articles: you can always publish a pre-print version online as soon as it’s ready. In the humanities, however, the book (the academic monograph in particular)  remains the gold standard by which academics are measured – and it is more difficult to make a monograph available OA. Yet many non-profit, scholar-led presses which publish open access monographs, such as Open Humanities Press and Meson Press, have emerged in recent years. Mobilising academic labour traditionally given to large commercial conglomerates to become directly involved in the book production process, such presses have challenged the monopoly and business practices of commercial publishers of academic books.

What is the Open and Hybrid Publishing model really about?

The Open and Hybrid Publishing model presented here offers an alternative to the top-down, one-to-many traditional publishing model. It does so by drawing on the availability of valuable textual and visual material under Creative Commons licenses (licences which allow free distribution and use of works). Employing open source software – i.e. software whose code is publicly available for all to use, modify and improve upon – the Open and Hybrid Publishing model offers clear benefits to smaller publishing enterprises, both commercial and non-profit, and also to individuals. The ready availability of material that can be published on an open access basis, the reduced costs of printing and binding, the wide availability of print-on-demand services, and the relative ease of distribution of electronic and paper books, including those that are self-published using platforms such as Amazon and Blurb, means that the primary costs of the future implementation of such projects will have to do with staffing, i.e. with the setting up of such projects, copy-editing and proof-reading them, and, last but not least, with publicising them. But the majority of other costs associated with the traditional publishing business will disappear. This is why the role of the publisher now can be taken up not just by large established organisations and businesses but also by small groups or even individuals.

This expansion and the relative ease of performing this role of the publisher today – blogs, Twitter, Scribd and Academia.edu, etc. mean that anyone can now publish in a matter of minutes – have at the same time generated a need for capturing the attention of the increasingly fragmented audience. This is where the role of the book editor as a ‘knowledge curator’, that is as someone who selects relevant bits of knowledge and directs relevant audiences to it, becomes crucial. This role can be successfully filled by various organisations and groups within the cultural, art and educational sectors – organisations that are not traditionally associated with publishing but that already have established audiences for the content they could offer.

The Open and Hybrid Publishing model can thus be of use to many parties:

  • museums and galleries
  • educational institutions (schools, colleges and universities) and communities of learners worldwide
  • artists, curators and arts managers
  • cultural centres
  • business organisations working with media images
  • individual users (book readers, writers and artists interested in self-publishing)
  • non-profit organisations such as artists’ collectives
  • internet communities with interest in open cultures.

 

How is Open and Hybrid Publishing different from Open Access?

OAlogo         hyb

Exploring the newly arising possibilities in the publishing market, Open and Hybrid Publishing allows users to experiment with different modes of publishing textual, audio and visual material. It also allows for the promotion of alternative, sustainable and resilient business practices for individuals working with texts and images (artists, curators, art managers) and smaller enterprises, such as artists’ collectives and non-profit organisations. This model takes as its starting point the fact that the so-called digital revolution has facilitated the development of new modes of knowledge dissemination and research methods as well as new forms of communication. Digital distribution channels have also allowed for a wider access to academic and other cultural resources – a development that has gained the moniker ‘Open Access’.

Open Access allows free online access to academic research (articles, books, reports, etc.). The scholar-driven Open Access movement emerged in response to academic publishing being dominated by profit-maximising corporations (e.g. Taylor & Francis, Elsevier). While scholars are keen for their work to be read, appreciated and cited, this possibility is being hindered by the gate-keeping business models of their publishers, whereby knowledge is sold at rather high cost. As a reaction to the increasing commercialisation of the universities, Open Access is powered by a belief that access to knowledge and research should be the right of all people and not just a privilege of the few who can afford to pay for it.

The Open and Hybrid Publishing model makes use of, and creates, Open Access resources but it also uses other publishing modes and formats, both online and offline, which can be subsequently monetised (e.g. distribution of an electronic – epub, pdf – version of a textbook or a novel for free, with a paper copy being sold; sales of limited runs of artists’ books to accompany an exhibition or a web project): hence its ‘hybrid’ nature. This hybrid model of publishing allows users to experiment with the overall form of publications and with their business premises. It thus allows for the emergent publishing practices to develop as free educational and art experiments supported by the institutions hosting them, and as sustainable commercial ventures. However, in promoting the socially significant open access to knowledge and facilitating access to cultural heritage, the value of Open and Hybrid Publishing transcends direct monetary benefits.

Building on the approach of Open Access publishers such as Open Humanities Press and Anvil, the model employs a targeted approach to publishing various kinds of materials. It works on a project-to-project basis, thus challenging the traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach. The two case studies presented below – (1) the Living Books About Life online series of Open Access academic books that allow all readers not just to access them for free but also to edit and re-version them; and (2) Photomediations: An Open Book, a multi-site project that combines the online and offline publication of texts as well as images – illustrate the educational, artistic and commercial possibilities opened up by this model. They also highlight many of the practicalities of Open and Hybrid Publishing, including the minefield that is copyright.

In a nutshell: Open and Hybrid Publishing learns from Open Access, it sometimes borrows from OA; it may incorporate OA strategies, but it can also go beyond them, depending on what a given publication and the organisation or group bringing it out want to achieve.

Case Studies

I How can you create a ‘living book’ which keeps growing?

livibl_splash-page

Living Books About Life, http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), and published by Open Humanities Press, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life – with life understood both philosophically and biologically – which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing Open Access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g. air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Editing such an open, living book about life could not have been simpler. After the editors decided on the topic, they had to find 10 or more scientific or science-related articles on it in one of the open access science repositories. They were also encouraged to include some other articles, excerpts, images, podcasts, video clips, etc. – as long as they were available under appropriate Creative Commons licences or, on Flickr, had ‘no known copyright restrictions’ , or as long as permission had been obtained from the copyright owner to use the works in the ways the editors intended.

By creating twenty-one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series showcased exciting opportunities for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant scientific issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the pedagogic experience of working with open access materials. All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers – although ‘frozen’ pdf versions of the books are also created, to strike the right balance between editorial authority and experimentation. Through this, the Living Books About Life series engages in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.

Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three UK-based academic institutions: Coventry University; Goldsmiths, University of London; and the University of Kent. The publishing model behind it – and behind its parent organisation, Open Humanities Press – has been shared with, and adopted by, other organisations, such as Punctum Books (an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage) and Meson Press (an open access press that publishes research on digital cultures and networked media). Its authors would like to encourage some further sharing, adoption and modification of this model – and of the idea of the living book embraced by it.

II How can you redesign a coffee-table book for the Internet age?

splashpage-final 

Photomediations: An Open Book, http://www.photomediationsopenbook.net

Photomediations: An Open Book redesigns a coffee-table photography book as an online experience to produce a creative resource that explores the dynamic relationship between photography and other media. The book uses open (libre) content, drawn from various online repositories of open access material, and tagged with a CC BY or another open licence. Through this, the book showcases the possibility of the creative reuse of image-based digital resources.

Featuring a comprehensive introduction and four specially commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks that include over 200 images, Photomediations: An Open Book tells a unique story about the relationship between photography and other media. Its online form allows for the easy sharing of the book’s content with educators, students, publishers, museums and galleries, as well as any other interested parties. To collect the images, the book’s editors conducted an extensive search of open image collections and repositories such as Europeana, Flickr: The Commons, and Wikimedia Commons, using carefully tailored keywords  such as ‘optics’, ‘networked image’ and ‘library’. For intellectual property reasons, the images chosen had to be tagged with a relevant Creative Commons licence, or they had to be marked as being ‘in the public domain’ or having ‘no known copyright restrictions’ (the latter being a designation adopted on Flickr: The Commons, when cultural institutions have reasonably concluded that an image is free of copyright restrictions): otherwise it would have been impossible to include those images in the book. The process of searching revealed the extreme wealth of widely available open images and other forms of visual cultural heritage online – many of which can be reused, often in commercial publications (e.g. images tagged with the CC BY licence, which lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon the original work, even for commercial purposes, as long as the original creator is acknowledged).

The book’s four main chapters are followed by three ‘open’ chapters, which can be populated with further content by a variety of users, after the launch of the book. The three open chapters are made up of a social space – a Tumblr blog titled ‘The Book Is Alive’, an online exhibition and an open reader. A version of the reader, featuring academic and curatorial texts on the subject of photomediations, has also been published in a stand-alone book form, in collaboration with Open Humanities Press. A pdf version of the reader is downloadable for free, with a printed copy being available for purchase. All these different publication formats that are part of the project are designed to show what a contested object ‘the book’ has become in the digital area, while also highlighting the hybridity of the publishing platforms and mechanisms that are available today. In an attempt to visualize this state of events, the splash (or front) page of Photomediations: An Open Book is designed to evoke a set of book spines while the navigation around the book mimics a traditional page turning experience. Promoting the socially significant issues of ‘open access’, ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open education’, the project offers a low-cost hybrid publishing model as an alternative to the increasingly threatened traditional publishing structures.

Photomediations: An Open Book was developed as part of the European Commission-funded Europeana Space under its ICT Policy Support Programme. It is a collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, and Coventry University.

How to create an image-based, open access book in 10 easy steps

Using the two case studies discussed above, we present behind-the-scenes tips on how these projects came about – and on how anyone can follow in our footsteps to design a similar open/living/hybrid book, either as a free open project for themselves or their organisation, or as a commercial product. Feel free to borrow, share, adjust and improve upon our idea and model.

 1. Choose a platform for hosting your book

One way of thinking about the book as an open, hybrid, living object in the digital age is to reimagine it as a kind of website: a series of linked online pages, held together by a contents list but also by some unique design elements.

The Living Books about Life project runs on a wiki, using MediaWiki software – which is basically the same software used by Wikipedia. Photomediations: An Open Book, in turn, is based a single page of html code. You don’t need an experienced coder to get it done: our html page was customised by our designer from a readily-available module – a Fullscreen Pageflip Layout – taken from the code sharing website codrops. For the splash page (i.e. the front page of our Photomediations site), we repurposed the Image Accordion with CSS3 module. If you can do some basic html design, or have a web designer involved in your project, you can use similar ready-made, freely available modules. You can also get some low-cost help with your website by hiring someone from freelancer, even on a one-off basis.

If you know nothing about web design and have very limited resources, the web software and publishing platform WordPress is the way to go: it’s free, customisable and easy to use. It also provides lots of ready-made templates. You can download it and install it on your own website, or, if you are a complete newbie, you can build your project, and thus publish your book, directly on their site  – in a slightly more limited way though.

2. Develop the right design

To ensure your book doesn’t look like just any old website, you may want to introduce some design features that reference a ‘real’ book – or that playfully remediate its format. (Your can make a book cover and stick it on the splash page or you can insert a page-turning feature into your website). You can pick up plenty of ideas from open source and code sharing websites such as codrops.

It is important that the shape and look of your open book reinforces its content.  In designing Photomediations: An Open Book we experimented with many different shapes and styles of the platform before we settled on a design that remediates the experience of a coffee table book. Its main landing page is designed to evoke book spines and the navigation around the book mimics the traditional experience of turning book pages.

Deciding on the method of navigating through your book is equally important. You should also have an easily accessible contents list, or map, of the book as a whole. Last but not least, you need to ensure that your design is ‘responsive’, i.e. that it works well on different devices and platforms, from desktops and laptops, through to iPads and mobile phones. (Many of the recent WordPress and Tumblr templates are already designed this way.)

3. Secure hosting and a domain name

Unless your institution is able to let you use some web space on their server, your will need to secure some space on which you’ll host your book. Hosting web-based projects on shared servers is inexpensive these days and can be bought from companies big and small. (The biggest ones include Bluehost, GoDaddy and 1and1 – but do look around.) The same companies will also sell you a domain name – like photomediationsopenbook.net – that will act as the address for your book. They will also ensure your book is easily found by search engines such as Google.

When choosing your address, think of one that best encompasses the nature of your project. For us the concept of mediation (‘photomediations’) and the idea of an open book were important components, all of which found their way into the project’s overall title and also its URL address.

4. Decide what types of content and media to include

Your book will no doubt feature still images such as photographs, as well as scans of drawings, paintings and other visual material. You may also want to include moving images. It is easy to embed visual material into your website/book – for example, using the automated ‘embed’ feature in WordPress. Text can be incorporated directly (through ‘cut and paste’ into your template), but you may also want to enhance your book with some pdf material or even with links to external resources. The advantage of the latter is that the book appears more open, reaching out beyond the confines of its covers. The disadvantage is that you have no control over external links: they can become obsolete any time. When using video, to ensure the smooth and speedy functioning of your book it’s best to host video clips on a free external website, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and embed them into your site from there – rather than place them directly within your book.

5. Curate your visual content

It may be helpful to understand your role in putting together on online book as that of a curator rather than just an editor. In other words, you become someone whose task is to organise the deluge of images and other data available on the Internet into a coherent and visually pleasing whole, gathered under a strong concept. Editing such a book is therefore akin to putting on an exhibition.

There are plenty of well-designed, themed repositories of open access material on the Internet from which you can download very interesting images. Most of these repositories have excellent ‘search’ facilities.

For example, to find content for chapter 2 ‘Photography, Optics and Light’ in Photomediations: An Open Book, we conducted a thorough search through a number of repositories (listed in the Appendix), using a variety of keywords: ‘light’, ‘optics’, ‘luminosity’, ‘camera’, ‘apparatus’, ‘eye’, etc. Importantly, we narrowed down our search to images tagged with appropriate Creative Commons licenses or marked as being ‘in the public domain’ (as explained in the section below), so that we could reuse these images in our project.

6. Think about copyright

If you are using images or texts that do not belong to you, make sure you don’t infringe the copyright belonging to the right holder. (Just because something is ‘on the Internet’ does not mean that you can use it…) Always check the licence of the work you find in a given repository. Also, if you receive an image or a piece of text directly from its author or copyright holder, make sure you clarify what the conditions of its use are: i.e. what you can and can’t do with it (e.g. Can you use it for educational purposes? Can you include it in a book you’re planning to sell? Can you crop the image or shorten the text? Can you use the image as part of a banner you are designing for your website?).

There are several so-called open licences that are considered ‘safe’, in the sense that they leave you a lot of freedom with regard to how to us them. As a rule of thumb, it is safest to use artefacts that are marked as being ‘in the public domain’ (sometimes marked as CC0) or, on Flickr: The Commons, images that have ‘no known copyright restrictions’. You can freely build upon, enhance and reuse them for any purposes.

There are a number of Creative Commons (CC) licences that aim to strike the right balance between permissions and rights: read the letters attached to them carefully, and follow the explanations on the CC website, to see what you can and can’t do with each work (some allow you to do anything as long as you acknowledge the original author; others allow you to use the works for non-commercial purposes only; some allow you to modify the work, others don’t, etc. etc.). Two most useful CC licences are:

Attribution CC BY 88x31

This licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licences offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 88x31b

This licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This licence is often compared to ‘copyleft’ free and open source software licences. All new works based on yours will carry the same licence, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

7. Write captions – and supply additional text

It is important to always credit the work used – and, in case of images, to provide further information about them. Even if the copyright licence for a given image allows you to skip providing such information, it is good practice to include some further details about the image anyway, as they will no doubt be useful to your readers. This is how we’ve captioned the images included in Photomediations: An Open Book. Our example shows an image we found on Flickr by an author who calls himself ‘Doctor Popular’, which we included in a chapter on ‘Hybrid Photomediations’, as a commentary on new forms of portraiture today:

59Doctor Popular, AntiTagging, 2014.
 Self-portrait taken using the Anti-Tagging iPhone app that anonymizes photos by auto-detecting faces and glitching them out, thus producing a secure selfie. Source: Flickr. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Even if your book is image-based, you may want to include some additional textual material in it, besides the captions for your images. For example, you may want to write or commission an introduction that contextualises the book. You may also want to include some additional reading material, by way of ‘curating’ (that word again!) your book in an interesting and multi-dimensional way. There are plenty of knowledgeable open-access articles and books available online. Most of these have been written by academics and other experts in the field; many went through the ‘peer-review process’: which means that they have been validated by other experts in the field as valuable and original. Curating an interesting list of texts on your chosen topic is not that different from curating a ‘playlist’ of songs on your computer or phone. (See Appendix for a list of repositories of open access material.)

8. Decide how open/closed you want to make your book

We’ve explained above how to include open-access material – be it text or images – in your book. However, the assumption so far has been that readers will come to your online book the way they come to a traditional book, i.e. to read it, and then they leave it intact. But maybe you would be interested in making all or at least parts of your book open, for readers to add material to the existing content, update it, comment on it, re-mix it or make their own versions? (You can think of it as an educational exercise, an artistic experiment, or simply as embracing the much more creative model of engaging with media by younger generations, where the roles of the producer and the consumer of culture become more blurred.)

For example, in the Living Books about Life project all the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers – as long as those readers have registered on the site first. This possibility of keeping the books open in this way is both potentially exciting and potentially dangerous. There are two main issues here: (1) First, we wanted to protect ourselves against vandalism, and that was an easy thing to do. Each introduction, contents list and attributions list of each living book is also available as a ‘frozen’ pdf file. Also, the wiki retains a record of all the edits, so it’s always possible to revert to an earlier version. In addition, we have a rigorous backing up system, so we have copies of all the books in their editors’ ‘original’ versions – which can always be restored. (2) But there is also a practical issue with regard to some possible threats and opportunities. Our experience is that people (i.e., readers/users) tend to treat any published text, even on the web, as having a certain authority: too much authority, in fact. So, somewhat disappointingly perhaps, the most that people tend to do is post a comment. It’s relatively hard to get them to do much more than that. Indeed, people tend to adhere to fairly conventional notions of the author and the book as an object that shouldn’t be messed around with – which is interesting in itself. But this reluctance or wariness is also something we want to encourage users to get over with this project.

In Photomediations: An Open Book, alongside the introduction and four ‘closed’, read-only chapters on photography and other media, we have also included three open chapters – which take the format of three separate web pages:

  • Photomediations: An Open Reader – a collection of academic essays on photography and other media, which can be edited and expanded upon by any anyone
  • The Social Space – a Tumblr blog called ‘The Book Alive’, exploring the book as a living and dynamic medium via the posting of images of books present and past
  • The Exhibition – a space that encourages users to creatively experiment with images from our book and from the whole of the Europeana online collection of digitised items (or, more accurately, a single gathering place of data, allowing you to access material in a variety of European collections), and that displays the results of these experiments

9. Think whether you also want a printed version

Alongside your web-based book, you may also decide to publish a printed version. This could be the exact copy of all the online material included; it could include a selection of texts and images from your online book; or it could be an entirely new publication, mixing the online material with the newly sourced content.

For example, as part of our work on Photomediations: An Open Book, we entered into collaboration with the scholarly publishers Open Humanities Press to publish a version of our chapter 6 as a separate, stand-alone book. Titled Photomediations: A Reader, it includes 20 academic essays on the dynamic relationship between photography and other media, some of which are not available online. The book, looking very much like a traditional academic textbook, and illustrated with some images, was published open access, as a freely downloadable pdf. Printed versions can also be purchased.

It is very easy to print short runs of text- and image-based books, in very good quality, these days. Companies such as Blurb and Lulu provide their own online software which allows you to design the book for printing, even if you have no prior knowledge of book or web design. They also convert it for you into various e-book formats. You may also want to check out this website: http://www.disphotic.com/book-making/.

10. Get social

It is important to identify your readership by connecting to the existing online resources, be it social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Basecamp, Github) or personal blogs. You may want to attach a Twitter account to your book, so that each day you can publicise a different element from it. However, it’s not just about using social media to publicise your content. If you want to achieve real reader engagement, and get people involved in sharing, remixing and creatively reusing your content in some way, or even co-create content with you, you need to work with existent online communities. You can also attempt to build a new community around a particular educational, cultural or artistic project. See this article on co-creation from the EU RICHES project: http://www.riches-project.eu/co-creation.html.

Appendix

More on licences and copyright

  • Europeana Space – Copyright Tools for Cultural Heritage: http://www.europeana-space.eu/content-space/. Here you can access guidelines and tools for clearing copyright and find information about the development of business models for the creative reuse of digitised cultural heritage.
  • Out of Copyright: determining the copyright status of works: http://outofcopyright.eu/

More on academic publishing For a taxonomy of various forms of academic publications see this website by the Hybrid Publishing Consortium: https://github.com/consortium/publication-taxonomy.

Selected Open Access image repositories:

Open Access Directories (i.e., meta-lists of various worldwide repositories):

  • OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) – Authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Includes a tool to search the repositories’ contents. http://www.opendoar.org/
  • Directory of Open Access Journals – Categorized, searchable links to free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. There are more than 5000 journals in the directory. http://www.doaj.org/
  • Open Culture – the best free cultural and educational media on the web: http://www.openculture.com/
  • ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies) – Directory of the open access mandates of institutions worldwide, with links to their open access repositories. http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

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This Guide was put together by Gary Hall, Kamila Kuc and Joanna Zylinska, as part of the activities of Europeana Space, a project funded by the European Union’s ICT Policy Support Programme under GA n° 621037. December 2015. Licence: CC BY.

A pdf version of this guide can be downloaded from here.

Intervene

Anne Wyman

Anne_Wyman_01 Anne_Wyman_02 Anne_Wyman_03 Anne_Wyman_04 Anne_Wyman_05 Anne_Wyman_06

Aiming to explore the issues surrounding the lack of plants within urban spaces, this series uses the placement of plants to help people visualise how nature could enhance the urban environment. Concrete buildings and high-rise towers can become overwhelming with a constant repetition of shapes and colours. Through the introduction of plants into unexpected places, these photographs enact a visual ‘takeover’ of the city.

Anne Wyman is a final year student of Photography at the Leeds College of Art.

The Offence

Karolina Breguła

Inspired by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s 1937 novel Ferdydurke, in which obsession with youth and the new takes an absurd and unnatural form, The Offence is a short story in the form of a film. The narrative follows a chorus of characters in a provincial Hungarian town, obsessed with tradition and fearful of the unknown. The unassuming hero of the story is a town official who decides to rescue his fellow citizens from their backwardness by an unusual method: with an uncanny understanding of the human desire for perversion, he forces progress through unnecessary prohibitions and restrictions that he knows will be broken. The film is about the paradoxically liberating effects of censorship, capable of attuning society to its needs and desires.

The Offence was shot in Hungary in the summer of 2013, in reaction to a conservative political climate. Like Breguła’s more recent works, it addresses the complex relationships between non-specialist or “uninitiated” art audiences and the abstractions of modern art.

The Offence was written and directed by Karolina Breguła, with cinematography by Robert Mleczko, sound by Weronika Raźna, and editing by Stefan Paruch. It was produced by Breguła and Tamas Liszka.

Chelsea Haines for Guernica

Karolina Breguła, born in 1979, creates installations, happenings, film and photography. She graduated form the National Film Television and Theatre School in Łódź. She has performed and exhibited in places such as the Venice Art Biennale (Italy), Jewish Museum in New York (USA), National Museum in Warsaw (Poland) and Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw (Poland). She has received numerous awards, including Views 2013 and Samsung Art Master 2007, Polish Ministry of Culture Scholarship, as well as the Młoda Polska and Visegrad Scholarship. She is the author of works such as Fire-Followers (2013), Art Translating Agency (2010) and Let Them See Us (2003). She lives and works in Warsaw.

Adventures in Sound & Music with John Gruntfest

Adventures in Sound & Music Broadcast on Resonance FM with John Gruntfest & Stevphen Shukaitis Minor Compositions editor Stevphen Shukaitis is hosting a radio show on the work of free jazz saxophonist and poet John Gruntfest. The show will broadcast Thursday April 7 from 9-10:30PM on Adventures in Sound & Music produced by music magazine The Wire, for London-based art and experimental … Continue reading →

The Politics of the Office

Andreia Alves de Oliveira

1 Lobby. Advertising agency.

The office is a defining, everyday space of modernity, a space which is far from disappearing. Andreia Alves de Oliveira’s curiosity was not so much focused on what people spend their time doing in offices, but rather on the space itself. Office space is the default space in the lives of professional, corporate, creative, academic, administrative and civil servant workers. It upsets as well as bores people, it frustrates and enervates, it makes people feel inferior or superior, miserable or powerful. It rarely provokes indifference.

The project documents the offices of financial, corporate, and legal institutions based in the City and Canary Wharf in London. These provide an interesting case study not only because they encapsulate a vast body of knowledge, materialised in disciplines such as organisational behaviour, environmental psychology, ergonomics or office design, that has been applied to the architecture and design of offices in general. But they also reveal a contradiction between the visibility of these institutions – occupying imposing buildings in urban centres, with their activities impacting on the whole of society – and the invisibility of the space where these activities take place. Images of such office interiors exist mostly in the form of films, TV series and commercial photographs. It took nearly two years and five hundred companies conducted before the artist obtained access to the offices of around fifty of such institutions, which perhaps explains the general paucity of documentary representations of office spaces.

2Clients’ entertainment floor. Audit, tax, and advisory services firm.

3CEO’s office. Hedge fund.

Alves de Oliveira’s photographs reveal the new, post-Taylorist office, where discipline is achieved through rather subtle, symbolic means: spectacular, richly decorated receptions and clients’ areas which blur the lines between work and fun; colourful, stylish ‘breakout’ areas and staff ‘amenities’ provided as a trade-off for the loss of personal space in the now widespread ‘non-territorial’ offices, where there are no assigned desks; a system of spatial ‘status markers’ – quantity and quality of furniture, décor, amount of space per person, location within the floor and the building – put in place to signal hierarchical relations of power, reflecting wider systems that influence life in industrialised society, where material possessions often signify social status. Although the offices shown are devoid of people, human presence is felt throughout. The low vantage point of the photographs places the furniture at eye level within the frame, accentuating the chairs’ anthropomorphic qualities, making them stand for the people who inhabit these offices. The lower than usual camera height also has the effect of depicting space on a human scale, eschewing the spectacular, pleasing vistas typical of architectural and interiors commercial photography which define the common visual representations of these spaces.

4 Back office. Professional services firm.

5 Copy area. Reinsurance firm.

In their emptiness and neutral mood, these offices may bring to mind what Walter Benjamin saw in Eugene Atget’s photographs of Paris’ empty streets: forensic photographs of crime scenes. Benjamin was referring to crimes that were social and political. Similarly, the scenes here would refer not to individual incidents, but to events that have the capacity to impact on the whole of society happening everyday in these hidden interiors – no less than what could be termed, metaphorically and perhaps less metaphorically, as the crimes of capital.

While questioning how power is exercised through the space in/of the image, The Politics of the Office offers the opportunity to witness photographs of offices that are largely inaccessible to the general public. By making these spaces visible and by addressing them in their totality, the work creates an expanded image of the office that aims to contribute, following the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, to the production of this space – an everyday, overlooked, but defining space of industrialised and service-based society.

6Middle office. Insurance firm.

7 Staff bar. Advertising agency.

Technical specifications
Andreia Alves de Oliveira, The Politics of the Office, 2011 – 2014. 130 photographs, 20 x 30 cm each, with captions.

Andreia Alves de Oliveira (b. Portugal, 1979) is a photographer and researcher based in London. Her practice explores subjects related to contemporary life, more specifically life in Western, service-based society. She is interested in what is around; in the reality she is immersed in; in what makes life here, now.

Ways of Something

Lorna Mills

Ways of Something – Episode 1 by Lorna Mills

Ways of Something is a contemporary remake of art theorist John Berger’s BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing (1972). The project consists of one-minute videos by over 114 network-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of art making after the internet.

Curated and compiled by Lorna Mills, this remake is based a four-part series of thirty-minute films created by Berger and produced by Mike Dibb. In the original films, voice-of-God narration over iconic European paintings offers a careful dissection of traditional ‘fine art’ media and the way society has come to understand them as art. This current project invited artists to respond to what Berger called ‘learned assumptions’ about art in dialogue with the camera and the screen in its reproduction. It is, in effect, art about art about television about the internet.

Featuring formal, figural and kitsch practices to videomaking, Ways of Something consists of aesthetically diverse interpretations of Berger’s ideas on looking at art after the introduction of digital media. Ultimately, it turns the highbrow nature of documentary film into a wondrous and disjointed series of alternative outlooks on how artists understand art today.

Artists participating in Episode 1:

Minute 1: Daniel Temkin
Minute 2: Rollin Leonard
Minute 3: Sara Ludy
Minute 4: Rhett Jones
Minute 5: Jaakko Pallasvuo
Minute 6: Dafna Ganani
Minute 7: Jennifer Chan
Minute 8: Rea McNamara
Minute 9: Theodore Darst
Minute 10: Matthew Williamson
Minute 11: Hector Llanquin
Minute 12: Christina Entcheva
Minute 13: V5MT
Minute 14: Marisa Olson
Minute 15: Joe McKay
Minute 16: Carla Gannis
Minute 17: Nicholas O’Brien
Minute 18: Eva Papamargariti
Minute 19: Rosa Menkman
Minute 20: Kristin Lucas
Minute 21: Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer
Minute 22: Giselle Zatonyl
Minute 23: Paul Wong
Minute 24: Alfredo Salazar-Caro
Minute 25: Sally McKay
Minute 26: RM Vaughan & Keith Cole & Jared Mitchell
Minute 27: Andrew Benson
Minute 28: Christian Petersen
Minute 29: Faith Holland
Minute 30: Jennifer McMackon

* Episodes 1 and 2 of Ways of Something were originally produced by the One Minutes in Amsterdam.

Lorna Mills is a Toronto-based new media artist.

For Internal Use Only

Philip Welding

Philip Welding’s new photobook, For Internal Use Only, doesn’t exist. At least not yet. Influenced by the 3D printing phenomenon and Ikea’s flat pack processes, it is a ‘future book’ that you can download – for free – but you have to build it yourself.

PW Bound   IMG_0484

The photographs in the book depict the office workplace, an environment where there is an emphasis on worker productivity. What is evident, however, is that workers continually struggle to fit into this rigid framework, adopting strategies to effectively navigate the working world. Some of these strategies are at odds with the pursuit of productivity and could be seen (by the company) as ‘time-wasting activity’ – or as distraction from achieving the company’s objectives.

©RickyAdamPhoto (2 of 2)

To own the book, you are instructed to print it out at work and bind it using whatever materials are available. To make the finished product an official copy and a numbered edition, a photograph of it in the workplace must be emailed to the address below. In doing so, you are acting on company time, using company resources. Is this just one of many distractions from your agreed objectives? Or just another strategy for workplace survival?

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The photographs from the project are only available by downloading the book. The website doesn’t reveal the project itself, but instead shows the photographs that people have taken of the printed and bound book situated in their workplace.

Instructions:
Go to http://www.philipwelding.co.uk/ to download the book. Email photographs of the finished book in the workplace to trajectoriespublications@gmail.com

Philip Welding was born in Leicester, UK, and works as Principal Lecturer in Photography at Leeds College of Art. In 2000 he graduated from Nottingham Trent University, then completed an MRes at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2012. His work fits into a narrative that he has been exploring for ten years in various forms, which incorporates notions of labour, creativity, boredom, resistance and productivity to critique our relationship with daily working lives. Welding was selected to exhibit at Format International Photo Festival in 2015.

The Port

Richard Whitlock

Richard Whitlock, The Port, 2015, HD video, 8 min. loop, ca. 3m x 5m.

The Port is a silent video that depicts cranes loading and unloading ships in the harbour of Thessaloniki in Greece, and people strolling along the quay. At first glance it looks like a normal film, but it is in fact made up of many fragments of looped video and still photographs arranged in a flattened orthographic projection – like a moving painting rather than a film.

This work continues the artist’s enquiry (see Photomediations Machine 18/5/2014) into the effects of non-standard perspective configurations on our experience of photographic images, a viewpoint that has been constrained until now by the perspective of the camera lens. Yet digitalisation now affords the photographer the opportunity to make changes in this standard central perspective. The challenge, taken up in The Port and in Whitlock’s previous work, The Street, is to alter perspective in the moving image.

Many different ‘times’, many parallel narratives, can now coexist on a single screen. The Port has about 40 layers, one for each object, or sometimes two. For example, the sea is not one sea but rather two superimposed layers of waves. Time is thus enriched, being both circular (loops within loops) and multiple (many layers and speeds). This intrigues the eye, giving the feeling of seeing something for the first time.

The objects could of course be synchronised, and made to follow a regular rhythm, like a soundless music, but the artist has chosen to maintain the characteristic irregular pulsations of each type of object, intervening only minimally in the phasing of the cranes and the grouping of the strollers on the quay.

Richard Whitlock (b. Liverpool 1952) has made sculptural, graphic and photographic installations in many parts of the world. Dissatisfied with photography as a means of adequately representing these works, he began making photographs and films in unusual ways, avoiding the central perspective natural to these media. This by-work became a major preoccupation, leading to non-perspectival photographic and video installations in Helsinki, Grenoble, the Crimea, Taipei, Thessaloniki, Athens and New York. He lives in Greece.