PUBLISHING AS PROCESS

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Banner Repeater is a reading room with an onsite public library of Artists’ Publishing and experimental project space, and soon to be launched online Digital Archive of Artists publishing: BookBlast.  We’ve an ongoing arts programme of newly commissioned works with exhibitions, lectures, and performances, and launches of new publications, sited significantly on a working train station platform in Hackney.  The relationship to the early network of distribution of the railway is central to how we operate, in that we’re in a busy thoroughfare of passing traffic, of over 4,000 passengers a day, opening at 8am - 11am to take advantage of the packed platform to distribute artists publishing for free, six days a week into a main artery of the city of London.

 

Ami Clarke, founder of Banner Repeater, sees the project in terms of how we might think of a technical object – sited within the ebb and flow of the commuting public - enmeshed within the public transport networks. There’s been a tendency towards work throughout the arts programme that speaks about this human enmeshment with technology, as multi-media assemblages – with arrays of differring signs, symbols and representations of data. 

 

You can begin to see how Banner Repeater provides a site rich in a historical sense, as well as providing an opportunity to reflect on more recent technologies, in relation to writing and publishing, as well as distribution.  The arts programme often explores and experiments with an expanded idea of publishing that we have come to call Publishing as Process - so the idea of processual works, that critique through their production and distribution, and that come of the frameworks inherent to publishing and networked culture.  Drawing on N. K. Hayles and A. Ludovico’s work in the field of networked culture, it focus' on how important precedents such as ideas of authorship, intellectual property, and copyright, inform the constitution of a reading public, and a subject that emerges through market relations (Hayles,1999).

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