UN-PUBLISH

The railways witnessed Britains transformation from agriculture to an industrial economy, as the increased efficiency demanded by the rapid developments in trade and labour during this period thoroughly homogenised time.

Publishing, distribution, dissemination; the sharing of ideas, filter bubbles that then isolate us from each other again, the speeds of data we receive warping our time and attention, speak of our now, very everyday, post-industrial time.

Click-drifting through “locust swarms of lettering” described by Walter Benjamin almost a century ago, as writing was “ruthlessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos": the maze of digital code we inhabit, for all intents and purposes, means that we can type a lot better.

The representational map that presented what was out there, for us to use for our own devices, (albeit drawn for someone else’s), has become an interlaced web, daily inscribed by every transaction we perform, make public, or perhaps detrimentally publish, within this heavily mediated networked space, whilst algorithms; the ‘filters’ that drive our desires, increasingly customise our experience.

The recent and increasingly exposed construction of consensus, arising from a bias in spectacular news reporting: an over-simplified 'victims-and-aggressor' meme, flocking from one focus of this sort to another, (and not unique to the tabloid, by any means) performs a particularly consistent form of reality management whose efficiency is enabled all the more so by the tools of citizen journalism.

Ideas regarding technology, open-ness and democracy proposed by the networked structures of web 2.0, ignore for the most part the materiality of digital data and its supporting frameworks, and do not necessitate emancipatory projects in and of themselves, but are tools that provide new methods of communication which also impact upon our sense of a collective and political voice.  The technology that facilitates the vast consumerism of capitalism, is at some core level, implicit also, in our ability to act politically, and affects our understanding of what it is to be politically engaged, certainly with respect to older hierarchical structures and former traditions that may come into question as a result.

'Un-publishing' (Julian Assange) accounts for the condition whereby online data is particularly susceptible to tampering, in that it is exceptionally easy to delete. No trace is evident of it ever having been there. You would have had to know it was there in the first place. Contrary to what we may suspect, traditional print media has a potentially longer shelf life, through the wide distribution of material: paper, that resists the censorious reach of corporations and authorities, (increasingly colluding), whether commercially or politically motivated. 

The archive of artists published material at Banner Repeater, sites this resource in the lives of commuters, passing through a working station environment, during peak travel times at 8 in the morning.  Multiple points of dissemination, both on-line and via the inter-connected transport networks that platform 1, Hackney Downs rail station is enmeshed, distribute these works throughout the city and further afield.

'UN-PUBLISH'; a series of critical works published on paper, disseminated from BR, are determined by these ideas of shifting time and labour relations: the co-evolution of humans and technology, and bear witness to epigenetic affects, that may come of these new conditions of time.

 

Series.

UN-PUBLISH  (1.02)  Nina Power.

Nina Power (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Roehampton University, and lecturer at the Royal College Critical Writing in Art and Design Programme) will be considering how different technologies mediate the experience of writing, reading, and publishing. When writing her book “One-dimensional Woman” (Zer0 books, 2009), which took a selection of material from her blog http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/, the specific conditions and form of writing and publishing became apparent, from on-line blogging to traditional print media. The work will be made available during the exhibition: The Map is the Territory, in a new publication from Banner Repeater, that will be free to take away from the library trolley outside the reading room.

 
UN-PUBLISH  (1.03)  Paul Mason. (economics editor at BBC Newsnight, writer and broadcaster).

Paul Mason was involved in a discussion at Banner Repeater during the exhibition The Map is the Territory: How it's kicking off everywhere, that picked up on some threads that run through his recently published book "Why its kicking off everywhere" with fellow speakers:  Nathan Charlton, and Andrew McGettigan (more details below). 

You can see the video of this here:  How its kicking off everywhere.


How it's kicking off everywhere.

Discussion with Paul Mason, Nathan Charlton, and Andrew McGettigan.
1-3pm Saturday 17th March, 2012.

Discussion between Paul Mason, financial journalist and economics editor for Newsnight and recent author of "Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere", Nathan Charlton, writer, technologist and director of Big Ideas, and Andrew McGettigan, author of the blog Critical Education and the book "The Great University Gamble" (Pluto, forthcoming) also of the Big Ideas team. We will be considering how the technology that facilitates the vast consumerism of capitalism is at some core level, implicit also in our ability to act politically, and how that affects our understanding of what it is to be politically engaged, with respect to older hierarchical structures and former traditions that may come into question as a result.

Considering ideas relating to new media; social media, and the new technologies that facilitate a new kind of connectivity between people, that allows for an accumulative awareness of social injustice in more immediate terms than ever before, and how this technology might impact upon events involving mass movements of people.

Whilst being mindful of the origins of concepts that took a hold historically during early
developments in technology in the 60/70's, and recognising that new technology does not
necessitate emancipatory projects in and of itself, but is a tool that provides new methods of communication, we will be looking at how these technological changes impact upon our sense of a collective and political voice.

 

 

broadsheet prints from the publication installed at the Container, Tokyo, Jan 2012.

 

UN-PUBLISH (1.01) Ami Clarke. The first UN-PUBLISH focus' on the communications between people in the life of Bradley E Manning, a US soldier who was arrested May 2010 in Iraq, and charged in July with transferring classified data onto his personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source, whom many have speculated was Julian Assange (Wikileaks), and that informed the leaked information that became widely known as 'cable-gate'. The meta-fiction by Ami Clarke, appropriates the instant messenger conversations published by the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph and Wired, to expose a young man at great odds with his situation, ideologically invested in both freedom of information and speech, and ultimately contextualized by his rich use of cyber-language.  It is printed on Financial Times news-paper, by the press that publishes the Financial Times and the Metro, amongst others.  

'No one suspected a thing. (I) listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while "exfiltrating" possibly the largest data spillage in America history."  (Bradley Manning).      

www.un-publish.org (the website is yet to be developed fully.)