The Open Book Futures (OBF) Experimental Publishing Group is pleased to announce the launch of ‘Servpub – A Collective Infrastructure to Serve and Publish’, one of three funded pilot projects resulting from OBF’s call for experimental book projects.
See full blog post by Rebekka Kiesewetter.
Servpub will be developed collaboratively by scholars, artists, designers, and technologists. It is a platform for research and practice around autonomous networks, affective infrastructures and experimental publishing through artistic and feminist methods that expands the idea of books as networked objects towards the infrastructures that facilitate their creation and distribution.
With this, Servpub embeds publishing in its fuller infrastructural context and creates an ecosystem that supports relative autonomy from US-centric technology companies at every level of the publishing process. The project challenges proprietary software solutions provided by profit-oriented companies that inhibit community-building, open knowledge sharing, experimentation, as well as critical reflection on power asymmetries and exploitative labour within technical infrastructures.
Servpub involves the following groups: Slade School of Fine Art, part of the University College London; CSNI, a research centre at London South Bank University; SHAPE, a research project at Aarhus University focussed on digital citizenship; Minor Compositions, a publisher of books and media drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life; In-grid, a London-based trans*feminist collective of artists/educators/technologists working in and around digital infrastructure; Syster Server, an international collective run by feminists that offers internet-based FOSS tools to its network of feminists, queers and trans; Creative Crowds, a shared server for FLOSS publishing experiments to explore how different ways of working are shaped by (and shape) different realities.
Image by Mara Karagianni.