Dear Beryl and list,

At 11:37 +0000 17/12/08, Beryl Graham wrote:
>Dear NEW-MEDIA-CURATING list member,
>
>This is our standard 'gentle reminder' that the guidelines for this
>discussion list include the request for postings directly relating to
>the discussion of new media art CURATING in particular, so please do not
>include this List email on any more general news mailings about
>exhibitions and events etc. (even if they are new media).
>
>Please do continue to participate in the discussion,

I'm so sorry about that and I usually don't use the list to make mere 
announcement (actually I wrongly thought there was a moderation for 
filtering unwanted announcements) but to enjoy and, unfortunately 
rarely, participate to the always interesting discussions.

Nevertheless I made a big mistake missing a few words for introducing 
a project that would have been posted here just for the sake of 
starting a discussion about how paper is involved in new media 
tactics and how its role and nature has changed since the pervasive 
introduction of electronic networks.

This is an essay I wrote an year ago on this topic that hopefully 
will balance the mere announcement.


The persistance of paper.

Paper publishing will never be the same again. It is deeply affected 
by a dual contradictory need. On one hand, real-time updating is 
pervading the printed page space with various technologies, and on 
the opposite, the need for something reliable and not dependent on 
the lack of tcp/ip waves or electricity is more and more precious for 
a generation stuck for most part of the day close to their unstable 
laptops. Various disembodiment of paper is practiced on the net and 
in connected devices, but the immobility (so the reassuring 
stability) of the printed page is on the other end growing and 
finding new customized way of production and consumption. Cellulose 
and electricity are not married, yet, but their vital relationship 
can still be taken as an opportunity for a new independent pervasive 
publishing wave.

The persistance of paper, how pixel want to be stable
Announced over and over from the end of nineties there's a 
perpetually upcoming technology that pretends, sooner or later, to 
substitute the paper. It's the so called 'electronic paper', 
'e-paper,' or 'electronic ink', a special kind of display made not by 
pixels and light, but by electrically charged micro-balls (a sort of 
pixels if you want) that can turn black or white. This kind of 
hardware is still an alien object. Usually it's a paperback sized 
display with a stylus to interact and display texts uploaded in 
various ways (via wireless networks, ethernet cable, smart media). 
I've had the chance, by accident, to personally check the iLiad, one 
of the few devices of this kind already for sale. After playing a 
little bit with the interface, the turning bar that 'turns' the page, 
and the display, my feeling was to be in front of book-sized screen 
palmtop much worst than a laptop, and worst than a paper book or 
magazine also. Even if it'll be much better when the technology will 
evolve, presently it seems more another 'wannabe' paper in electronic 
guise, than the future of paper itself. Some qualities are that it's 
quite stable and document-devoted, and this specific model runs on 
Linux, so seem to be the most stable of them all. But, I'd still 
prefer much to spend 600 euro in a bookstore than buying this gizmo. 
Electronic paper has a lot to do with space. One of its few 
challenging promises is to reduce the space in your bookshelf. But, 
what's the price of this 'promise'? To me it's similar to the never 
realized 'paperless' office, advertised from the eighties by the 
personal computer industry. Something magic that simply won't happen 
safely. It's a promise of virtualization, disembodiment of a heavy 
physicality, you'd like to reduce to have more. And this thrills to 
own more and more content, because digitally then it's easy to copy, 
share or simply store. This is one of the arguments behind the Amazon 
Noir project I've developed with Ubermorgen and Paolo Cirio. Paolo 
Cirio coded a software that stressed to the extreme limits the 
'search inside the book' Amazon.com feature, being able to obtain all 
the text though thousands of queries and then reconstructing the 
whole searched book. This is the actualization of all the parts of 
the book that can be searched. It's the 'imagined book' made real, so 
the virtual bulimic appetite for texts satisfied, in the end. But, no 
digital hardware or culture will save us from the weight of real 
books and things, the 'reality showdown'. Again, paper is more 
persistent.

The web space of magazines, turning pages with the mouse
Paper publishing has started to wonder itself what to do with the web 
from the very beginning. Probably the independent publishers even 
before than the industry as a cover of Factsheet Five of 1995 proves. 
The 'yellow pages' of zines dedicated an issue to the web and its 
consequences on the zine world. The cover title was 'Paper or 
Plastic?" and this comic, perfectly synthesize the fears of dying of 
the traditional zine world embodied by a bold younger 'silicon' 
bully. Today there's no more doubt that the electronic space par 
excellence is the web, and the whole publishing industry seems to 
still wondering itself on how to exploit this medium for their old 
business. They established websites with some (or more) content taken 
from the printed edition and various online shops that would have 
improved the sales. The latest strategy is a controversial one: 
giving away pdf files of glossy entertainment magazines, if you 
register on specialized websites. So you can find yourself not paying 
money, but personal data for the latest Business Week, Macworld, or 
Playboy issue. After registering, the download of a 50 or so megabyte 
starts and after a while you can flip or turn the pages with mouse 
clicks. The industry is then dramatically improving 'distribution,' 
and 'readership', two of the golden keyword of commercial publishing, 
apparently not affecting the sales. This strategy seems to be 
borrowed from the p2p scheme. The better the distribution (even if 
some of that is for free) the better the sales. And this could be an 
efficient response to the so called 'Digital Shoplifting' of 
copyrighted images that used to be quite popular in Japan. This was a 
social phenomenon that involved mostly young woman taking pictures of 
haircut or dresses in fashion magazines with their mobile phones in 
bookstores, and then sharing the picture with friends discussing the 
new trends. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association says the 
practice is "information theft" but bookshop owners said their staff 
cannot tell the difference between customers taking pictures and 
those simply chatting on their phones. And giving away content is a 
publishing habit that has been anticipated by a sort of underground 
design phenomenon. A substantial number of free electronic magazines 
(downloadable or viewable in a web page) have been produced in this 
field. This so-called pdf-zines (Magnify for example) were showing 
off creativity, affinity among different design groups, aesthetic 
experiments, content simply not worth for commercial magazines, or 
too controversial for them. It's very important that they were not 
interactive at all, not exploiting any characteristic of the 
electronic medium apart the potential infinite duplication and 
distribution. Sure enough they applied to these pdf files the same 
graphic and production standards of the paper medium. A sort of never 
born paper product, thrown off to the always free and crowded web 
channels.

Print-on-demand, the photocopy machine of the new millennium (coming soon)
The need for physical print could be said to be 'instinctual'. How 
paper can still trigger our inner instinct to read is at the core of 
a 2006 computer art installation. I'm talking about the 'Pamphlet' by 
Helmut Smits. It consists of a laptop, software, and a printer placed 
on the edge of a window. People can type a message on the laptop. By 
pressing 'send' a pamphlet is printed and dropped from the 10th floor 
by the printer. The falling down paper and the resulting 'pamphlet' 
on the street symbolizes the relatively short distance from the 
personal production to the public enjoyment of a printed product, and 
how the traditional product parameters has been disrupted. The 
fascination of take-away paper is the same at the base of newspapers 
that are starting to stretch their role and nature with downloadable 
and printable last minute editions. These are highly customized on 
one key factor: the updating time. They are meant to be read offline, 
so enjoyed with a relative calm, but with the most stretched and 
feverish time of production. This is part of a larger need: to put 
the virtually and real-time produced content out of the screen to 
affect real life or be enjoyed in it. And this is the field where 
another technology step into. The print-on-demand is very simple: you 
produce a pdf file of a magazine or a book. A print-on-demand online 
service charges you something (there are cheap and expensive one) for 
adapting the files to the production chain of a high resolution 
digital copier. Than you'd ask them to produce the number of copies 
you want (even a few or only one) also taking care of selling them on 
the web. This is drastically reducing the costs of printing and 
distributing, letting the author focusing on production. This is a 
potentially big opportunity for independent publishing, avoiding the 
usual initial costs of printing (the bigger one) and then giving to 
every publisher the opportunity to sell its stuff through the web 
without learning how to. I'm partially using it to save on the cost 
of Neural and on producing art books for some project of mine (like 
Amazon Noir). It'd be in the end what the photocopy machines has 
represented in the eighties and nineties, a cheap opportunity to 
print and distribute content in a stable, easy, usual, and physically 
enjoyable format. That's what paper still is.
-- 


Alessandro Ludovico
Neural Magazine - English (http://neural.it/) Italian 
(http://www.neural.it/neural_it/)
Latest Printed Issue - http://www.neural.it/art/2008/12/neural_31_1.phtml
Subscribe - http://www.neural.it/subscribe.phtml