>
>Most daunting to me also the idea - proposed by Charlotte Frost - to
>append this amazing wealth and meandering puzzle of partial stories and
>memories to what I assume is already a written art historical book [her
>forthcoming book, "Art History Online," due out in 2014] - this
>confounded me a bit, the crowdsourcing happens a f t e r the book was
>conceived and written? Or is the new book a printed version, and the
>archival discussion generated here will expand out into some fluid living
>meta thing including the .ljudmila friends' waybackmachining: would a
>future arthistory be able to be radically open to what it cannot contain
>nor adequately comprehend nor waybackmachine?

>>>To be clear, I'm not crowd-sourcing after the book has been written.
>>>Part of the premise of the Arts Future Book project (which I
>>>established in order to have a way of publishing the type of 'book' I
>>>wanted to create - note the inverted comas and word 'create' in that
>>>sentence - these are not your traditional academic monographs) was to
>>>have a series that would still produce peer-reviewed academic book
>>>projects, but could also work in a variety of ways. I noted at the
>>>beginning that our first publication is a print book, eBook and
>>>exhibitions/artworks. Although my own book was originally supposed to
>>>be the trial for the series, we moved Nathaniel Stern's ahead of mine
>>>because he had already done more of the writing. My plan - which I'm
>>>finally able to put into action now Nathaniel's book is on the market -
>>>was to research and write a book (which will be blind peer reviewed
>>>twice) and undertake an amount of public research/build an archive that
>>>will do all the things my 'book' won't be able to - not least of which
>>>is to directly use a list for research/writing. In addition to that,
>>>this list-based research/archive can feature multiple voices, direct
>>>links to further resources and contextual materials and even flat out
>>>contradict my work - if that's what comes of all this. So yes, you're
>>>right in the sense that there will be a print book (and ebook) and 'the
>>>archival discussion generated here will expand out into some fluid
>>>living meta thing' - I like that description by the way. The Arts
>>>Future Book series is very much inspired by all the pioneering work of
>>>list founders and online critics like Josephine Bosma and Josephine
>>>Berry Slater (JBS researched and wrote some of her PhD thesis publicly
>>>on the Nettime list back in the day).

>>>In addition to all that, I have just taken up a position at the School
>>>of Creative Media (which is headed up by Jeffery Shaw), City University
>>>of Hong Kong. In running this discussion I also wanted to test out
>>>whether people would find value in a list archivisation project. It
>>>looks already like there is scope for this so I'll be speaking directly
>>>to all concerned to find out how I could meet their requirements and
>>>support their legacies and then I intend to put in some funding
>>>applications here in Hong Kong. But everyone - feel free to email me
>>>directly if you have ideas on this or personal archives you'd be
>>>willing to let me work with.

All the best,

Charlotte