[-empyre-] Introducing Emmett Stinson and Sean Dockray

[morgan currie]

This June edition of –empyre “Publishing in Convergence" is moderated
by Michael Dieter (AU) from the University of Melbourne's School of Culture
and Communication, and Morgan Currie (NL) and John Haltiwanger (NL),
both from the University of Amsterdam's Masters in New Media program.

We would like to welcome two friends of ours to kick off Week 1, Sean Dockray
and Emmett Stinson. We've asked them to write about distribution systems
for digital publications. Sean is the mastermind behind one of our favorite
digital libraries, AAAARG, an 'underground' theory swapping site that went
mysteriously out of commission last week. He's here to tell us more about this
project and its current state. Emmett Stinson is an author who has
recently written
on ebooks and piracy. We are excited that they will kick-start our
discussion on
digital book distribution. We have included their biographies below and welcome
them to the conversation.

Emmett Stinson is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the
University of Melbourne. He is the President of SPUNC - The Small Press
Network <http://spunc.com.au/> and a Fiction Editor for Wet Ink: The
Magazine of New Writing. He is also a panelist on the Department of
Innovation's federal Book Industry Study Group, established by Senator Kim
Carr. His debut collection of short stories, Known Unknowns, has just been
published by Affirm Press.

Sean Dockray is an artist in Los Angeles. He is a co-director of Telic
Arts Exchange (http://telic.info) and has initiated a handful of
collaborative projects including a school (The Public School), a theory
text-sharing website (AAAARG.ORG), and an architecture radio show
(Building Sound). He has contributed writing to X-TRA, Bidoun, Fillip,
Volume, and Cabinet magazines, and his video and sculptural work have been
exhibited at Gigantic Art Space, ESL, the Cheekwood Museum, the Turtle Bay
Museum, and the Armory Center for the Arts. "The Public School (for
Architecture)" in New York, a project in partnership with the architecture
group, common room, was recently awarded a fellowship from the Van Alen
Institute. With fellow collaborators in The Public School, Caleb Waldorf
and Fiona Whitton, Sean is organizing a 13-day seminar at various sites
throughout Berlin this July, called "There is nothing less passive than
the act of fleeing," which will discuss the promises, pitfalls, and
possibilities for extra-institutionality. Sean studied architecture at
Princeton University before receiving his Masters in Fine Arts from
University of California Los Angeles.