[-empyre-] Publishing In Convergence, Week 2: Print and Pixels

[morgan currie]

I'd like to introduce this week's topic, Print and Pixels. Carrying
the discussion forward from (or better, alongside) our first week's on
distribution, the economics of piracy and experimental publishing
models, Print and Pixels concentrates on the (neo) materiality
question: can we discuss how the formal transformations of the book,
as it moves from paper to bit streams, from physical object to a
flickering concert of hardware and software, reverberate in the realm
of publishing? Of course this already threaded through last week's
conversation, but here we hope to talk more about material
constraints, current experimentation (think FLOSS, print-on-demand,
and formatting for multiple screens) and future potentialities,
legality aside, of publication. What can we do with code that we can't
with ink? How do the affordances of the networked book, the text as
assemblage, raise new possibilities for publishers? In turn, what does
this refreshed understanding of textuality mean for print (I'm
thinking of Emmet's point about the aesthetics of fetish collectors
items). This is a topic which this weeks guests have both expertly
theorized on a granular level, as well as put into practice.

We're pleased to introduce Katherine Hayles to this discussion.
Katherine Hayles (US, CA) is the John Charles Hillis Professor of
Literature and Distinguished Professor in the departments of English
and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, LA. Shis the
author of a number of books, including Electronic Literature: New
Horizons for the Literary (2008), and My Mother Was a Computer:
Digital Subjects & Literary Texts.

Also joining this week is Simon Worthington (UK), who has already
introduced his extensive work in digital publishing experiments. And
our third guest is Joost Kircz (NL), who began a university research
career in molecular physics (Amsterdam and Utrecht) before joining the
scientific publishing industry, where he spent 16 years at Elsevier
Science. From the start of his publishing career, he engaged in the
design and implementation of electronic publishing experiments and
products. As from April 2004, he is the visiting scientist at the
Information and Language Processing Systems Group of the University of
Amsterdam.