>>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Okay, hello and
welcome to Print Politics. My name is Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, and on behalf of CoMMPCT, the
SVA, Department of Anthropology and Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, I'm
so pleased to welcome both the presenters today and all of you in attendance. Before
I do that, I want to formally introduce CoMMPCT, and the people behind it to everybody because
it is a new initiative of the Society for Visual Anthropology that was founded just
this yea
r. So CoMMPCT stands for the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators,
and Teachers. It was founded by Nat Nesvaderani, Gabrielle Zamorano, and myself. We're committed
to creating spaces to discuss less visible elements of making publishing, collaborating,
and teaching both visual and multimodal anthropologies. We plan to collect shared wisdom and experiences
and triannual online curated repositories and to have virtual events like this that
both continue these kinds of conver
sations and activate other arms of the SVA like the
Visual Research Conference, Visual Anthropology Review, the flagship journal of the SVA, as
well as the AAA conference program this year hosted in association with CASCA. You can
find out more about CoMMPCT, including how to get involved. We are but three people but
welcome for more people to get in touch with us by visiting the SVA website. And Nat, if
you could drop that link in the chat that would be great. Today, we are so thrilled to welco
me both
Marc Fischer and Anne Pasek to discuss their work and projects. Marc is a Chicago based
artist and member of Temporary Services, a group that has produced over 100 publications
and organized and participated in dozens of exhibitions, projects, and events. Fisher
and Brett Bloom of Temporary Services also run the publishing imprint, Half Letter Press,
which I cannot recommend highly enough. And we can also drop a link of that in the chat
so people could follow along. Anne is an interdisci
plinary researcher working
at the intersections of climate communication, the environmental humanities, and science
and technology studies. Anne studies how carbon becomes communicable in different communities
and media forms to different political and material effects.
Anne and Marc will be in conversation with both myself and Craig Campbell, from UT Austin.
They will first each give a 10-minute presentation about their work, Craig and I will pose three
questions and lead a discussion for about
half an hour. And then we'll use the final
half hour to answer your questions that you might have in the chat. For your questions, please actually use the
Q&A button that you should see at the bottom of your screen. This will let other people
see your questions, upvote them, add comments to them so that we don't get a lot of the
same questions. And Nat will be monitoring those and raising those to the panelists in
that lasts 30 minutes, we want to say that the chat is also available, you can ch
at to
the entire group, to the organizers, to the panelists, to the hosts. And we've also enabled
automatically generated captions and a live transcript of the event, which may contain
errors just based on the sound quality of the mic, and other background noises. Final
thing: we are recording this, and we will post edited, tightened version of it to the
CoMMPCT website in November along with curated resources. In your emails, you should have
also gotten the call for participation. So, we are lo
oking for pitches for those online
curated resources. And we encourage you to submit. So without further ado, I'm going
to turn things over to Marc who will start us off. Thank you. >>MARC FISCHER: Thank you so much. This is
such a treat. Don't, don't visit too many anthropology departments. So this is this
is really great. Let me I'm going to set a timer real quick so that I try to stay on
task here. Okay, and I'm going to share screen as well. Hopefully everyone can see this.
So I'm going to t
alk just very briefly with Brett Bloom and others in the past I'm part
of the group Temporary Services, artists group that started in Chicago. We're now split between
Chicago and Fort Wayne, Indiana. In 2007. We started sorry 2008 We started a publishing
imprint, Half Letter Press, named for a letter size sheet of paper folded in half rather
than letter set letterpress. Excuse me real quick. We make art collaboratively. We've
been working we work outside of the commercial gallery system. Create
exhibitions, projects,
publications, togethers, together and with others. And we've published over 120 books,
booklets, posters and newspapers. For us a publication can be, you know, as modest as
a piece of paper folded in half, to something more like a 200-page book. I'm going to give
a very quick slideshow of just some range of some of the things we've done. Our publications
started more like exhibition guides, and then gradually we started making more standalone
publications that function wit
hout accompanying projects and exhibits. You know, photocopying,
digital printing, offset printing, occasionally newspapers, at first, maybe we made 150 copies
of the things we do, we've made newspapers that have print run of 20,000 copies, books
that have a print run of a couple 1000 copies. We distribute our own work, we work with stores,
we present our work at book fairs. Basically, all of the ways that artists books can go
out into the world, except that we avoid Amazon completely. So, in 20
07, I started this project
Public Collectors, which was basically created to encourage, I guess, what you would call
like sort of amateur experts to share their resources outside of an institutional setting.
There's this term the artists Claire Pentecost uses that I really like a lot of public amateurs.
So these people who are you know, really trying to figure it out, figure out how to deal with
certain problems in a kind of public setting as, as artists. And in 2010, I was visiting
Kansas City
to give a lecture and the young artists there Sean Starowitz reached out to
me and wanted to offer me a Burnt Ends Residency, I'm like, what is what is this, what is consisted
of was him taking an out of town artist out to lunch for barbecue, and showing them around
the city and he called that a residency. And it lasted like half of an afternoon and it
was I'm like the worst person to take to barbecue because I don't I don't eat red meat. So I
just had this enormous like coma-inducing turkey san
dwich that was like, seven inches
tall. But this idea really stuck with me and and in 2016, I decided to create the Joong
Boo Artists Residency, which consisted solely of me bringing out of town artists to have
buying them lunch at Joong Boo market in my neighborhood in Chicago, which is Avondale.
And it's this Korean market, Asian market that has a Korean lunch, snack stand in the
back. And it's very inexpensive. So it's not the kind of place where people suddenly would
feel feel guilty that yo
u bought them lunch there. Most people would just go and like
spend three times as much buying snacks and gifts for their friends in the rest of the
market after the residency. But it became a way of, you know, really making time for
others outside of something like you know, a studio visit at a college or a meeting with
someone where you're their advisor, but just basically been available to other artists
to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. And some people had very specific,
creat
ive things they were working on that they wanted feedback on. And other people
just wanted to have a free flowing, formless conversation. And I would generally I would
make like a little report at the end for the social media accounts of Public Collectors
at the end of the event, and then I published this booklet, The Meal-Based Artist Residency
Program, which talks about the ideas of the project and just gives an overview of what
we the kinds of kinds of people who participated what their work
is, and what we discussed.
So this hosted these are some of the past residents proudly displaying their finished
or mostly finished meals. So while this was happening toward the end, I did this 38 times
in two years. I would host up to two people a month. While this was happening, as is always
the case in Chicago, there were many protests around police murdering civilians. And I attended
these protests participated in these protests was involved in activism around this. And
at some point while t
his was happening, this was especially centered around the case of
former police officer Jason Van Dyke who murdered a Black youth Laquan McDonald shooting him
16 times. And at some point, they began pretrial hearings for for Jason Van Dyke at this building,
which is criminal court on 26th and California. I'd been in this building a couple times as
a prospective juror, on criminal cases. I did not get picked for jury duty once questioned,
it seems to be like a talent I have. But I was always ver
y interested in that process.
Went to some of the pretrial hearings. And on one of those days. You know, the court
met, someone needed more paperwork, something went back to discovery. And everything was
finished in five minutes. And the court went into recess until the next day. So, it's like,
well, like, okay, like, I'm already here. I'm already in the building, like, what else
is there to do? And there are about 25 courtrooms in this building. So I started visiting some
of the other ones whil
e he was in court for Jason Van Dykes pretrial hearing. You know,
there were other activists or other people interested in this specific case that I could
talk to and who were really knowledgeable and had a lot of insights. Once I left that
situation, I quickly found that the only person really people really witnessing what was happening
in court are people who either had a case for family members or maybe family of victims.
And that was it. There very few people observing otherwise, if anyone,
and it occurred to me
like in that moment, that maybe I was kind of getting tired of viewing Joong Boo, not
their food, but just that project, that maybe I should shift it to something more complicated,
and start a residency where I observe court with other artists, we cannot take photos
in court. So the photos are usually of the food we ate at the taqueria down the street,
and people's notebooks. The taqueria is where we have the same taqueria every time. Because
it's it's kind of where like co
urt and the outside world collide like you go to if you'll
see people in court or like security guards, lawyers, defendants who are out on bond. All
of those people are hungry and will go to this taqueria after they're done in that building.
So this project turned into a publication series and each publication consists of four
conversation with the different artists residents about what we observed in court. Typically,
we would observe a morning session you know, lasting about three hours. In so
me cases,
we would spend the entire day in court depending on what happened. And then so then every four
residencies there would be a new booklet, easily. These are about 36 pages long. They
cost seven or $8. Each. They're printed on a risograph duplicator as well as offset printed.
This is a photo from Jason Van Dyke s sentencing hearing you can sort of see me in the back.
And then to my side is the artists Josh Rios s says all this extra security in the courtroom
photos from the neighborhood o
r outside around the court because of not being able to photograph
inside the third and then fourth issue of the booklet. And this continued for 16 residencies,
for booklets. And on the last day of the project was basically the first day that everything
shut down because of COVID. I was actually about to go to court that day. And it was
clear that that was not something we could or should do and the resident had to cancel
the last minute. And I have I've not picked up the project since but that
was the basic
structure of the project. The other thing that happened was it I would donate $20, which
is the approximate cost of lunch for two people at Taqueria el Milagro, I would make that
donation to the community bond fund every time I conducted a residency. So the project
kinda hit a stopping point, my talk should hit a stopping point. But that's the basics
of that publication series. And hopefully people will think about this, you know, not
just as like a project about court, but a struc
ture that could be used for all sorts
of purposes that really, it's a commitment to spending time with others in your field
or some other field that you want to participate in. And anyone creating this like concrete,
material object that serves as a public record of what was discussed in the way that a journal
or book or anything else might. Thank you. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Thank you, Marc.
And I want to remind everybody, go ahead and start putting your questions in the Q&A button,
so you do
n't forget. But now we're gonna turn to Anne. >>ANNE PASEK: Thanks so much, Marc. That was
really, really exciting. I am thrilled to see where the conversation goes. I will kick
things off in the typical Canadian way with a with a land acknowledgement. My name is
Anne Pasek. And I'm speaking to you today from treaty 20. territory in Canada, the traditional
homelands at the Mississauga Anishinaabe. I'll also flag that I am not speaking entirely
alone. All the thoughts that I'm going to share toda
y have very much come out of extensive
collaborations with the Low Carbon research methods group. And the aim of this group is
to think about how the methods by which we produce but also distribute and share our
research are tied up simultaneously in environmental, social, and epistemological outcomes, like
always, all three together. And so if you know, like me, you're sort of professionally
anxious about climate change, and wants to sort of bring those concerns into your research
practice, it'
s incumbent to also think about how that connects to larger projects of building
an academy that's like more welcoming to live and work in and that can think different kinds
of thoughts. So, the idea behind this research group has a story, and I thought I'd just
start here by telling it. So, this is becoming less and less true as time passes, but I still
feel like I'm a relatively recent doctor, I finished my PhD in 2019. And that that project
was all about the kind of communicative and aestheti
c challenges of of making carbon into
an object of politics in the past 30 years of of climate diplomacy and debates. And part
of that is thinking really critically about carbon footprinting practices, you know, they
happen to be enmeshed with oil company PR efforts, and, you know, often bring us to
kind of rather thin political ends. So I wrote, you know, some some pretty critical chapters
on this, but but didn't want to kind of leave things with with me just writing, you know,
made words on a
page, and moving on with my life, I thought I should, you know, be a little
self-reflexive, try and practice or experience, what I'm thinking about with my interlocutors.
So I had enough skills that I could do a really crappy carbon accounting job. And so at the
end of the dissertation, there's this appendix where I try and like, apply these techniques
to see like, what different parts of writing this document sort of rounds out to in terms
of carbon climate impacts. And I was really surprised b
y the results. As you can see,
from my very exciting Microsoft Excel chart here, overwhelmingly, the vast majority of
my emissions, So 94% is airplanes, right? Like books or like digital data transfer,
like not even close. And what's more, the sort of some of these emissions from air travel
were about the same as the sum of my carbon footprint of just like living my life as a
broke student in New York for a whole year. So this told me that there was something happening
with the kinds of institut
ional travel funding I had access to. And the kind of research
norms that you know, encouraged me to travel so often. All that sort of really went against
like my self-image is like an urban climate lefty, leading a version of like the low carbon
good life. The other thing has told me was that when we're talking about the work of
research, right that the what and the how of method, we're also really talking about
mobility, about like kinds of travel, ways of being in the world physically and mov
ing
through it, that stand behind and inflect how we produce and exchange knowledge. So,
method, questions of method to me, I think are just significantly and always going to
be questions of mobility. And it's clear that some forms of research do more climate harms
than others. And so that that provoked me to think about, you know, what might it mean
to make a rough distinction and say, like, high carbon research looks like this low carbon
research looks like that? And where does that kind of sq
uare out across all kinds of different
projects, different research subjects, different disciplines? And how could this sort of culminate
in a discussion about method as a means to sort of build some collective gains for the
project of research and the livability of being a researcher, and I'm by no means like,
unique in this thinking, there's many initiatives across the world thinking about the role that
flying plays in professional lives and the climate system. No fly cli-sci is a bunch
of cli
mate scientists who are have gotten together disavowed air travel, and now take
rather heroic train trips to get to various summits. There's also a petition called Flying
Less, which is open to any academic who would like to sort of make a vow and join this this
collectivity, more close to perhaps the disciplinary center in this room, Hannah Knox has really
provocatively talked about not flying as a kind of formative pillar of post carbon anthropology,
whatever that might mean, it's an interesti
ng provocation. You survey all these efforts,
you find a range of different claims, you know, qualitative, quantitative, normative.
There's all sorts of people out there doing all sorts of things. But the sort of major
contribution that I wanted to make was to think about how this is again, like a more
than just environmental question. And I think that there's a way that we could do that,
by looking with some curiosity at how we exist in a culture of academic highs and lows of
norms, of structur
ing habits and opinions that kind of really do inflect the ways in
which mobility and carbon kind of congeal across the academy. And so, you know, I think
a lot about air travel is a kind of conspicuous consumption, right? There's pleasures in that,
also forms of social recognition and status, right, especially if someone else is flying
you somewhere, or you've just got like heaps and heaps of research funding, so like, you
can be the person who can afford to go to like, absolutely all the confe
rences in all
of your fields. And you know, that status is more than symbolic, right? It's an actual
field in my tenure file. It sort of works as evidence that I am influential and good
at my job, right? So, it's not something I think to be easily dismissed. But at the same
time, it's also a metric of achievement that clearly isn't available equally to everyone,
right, we could think about folks who have visa restrictions or like difficult passports,
people who simply don't have the money for al
l these hotels and flights. Folks who have
care-work obligations, at home that makes travel really, really difficult. People with
disabilities, for whom travel is extra risky, periods of pandemic and plague, right, where
that also factors out the list can really go on. But it's, it's clear that not everyone
can equally become this sort of jet-fueled knowledge subject. And more to the center,
we could also think about the ways that like air travel makes certain kinds of research
practice possible
things like helicopter or parachute research, this idea of, you know,
going into a place grabbing something getting out. I know that you folks in anthropology,
you've spent a great deal of time thinking through this all and I've probably got a lot
to learn from you. My point here isn't that, you know, getting on a plane inevitably equals
extractive research, but I'm interested in like, you know, thinking about how that plane
seems to be kind of structurally integral to a lot of the ways that th
is works out,
right, and how mobility and energy seem to be really key and unexamined parts of the
the kinds of harms that can happen in the academy today. And so this sort of brings
me to the question of media and mediated ways of producing and sharing knowledge to sort
of displace or offer an alternative to the assumption that we always need to do so in
person. Usually, the default here is that like we
all just need to put things online. Make everything digital. And the pandemic was a kind of
revolutionary,
if very poorly designed way of trying that out, right? I think we all learned that we
had more capacities than we thought. But we also all got really, really tired, right?
Having a lot of bad time on Zoom. And like, there's a bunch of really interesting people
thinking about how we could design digital exchanges better. What might it mean to have
like a good coffee break in a virtual conference, I think, is a question that, therefore has
a lot of stakes. We are here to talk about
print. So, I wanted to lay out just a few
claims. So firstly, I think that print is a really
important alternative to airplanes, right? When we think about what it might mean to
no longer take as as read or easily available, the idea of easy travel, we might look to
the past and think about how academic communities formed through the post, right? This sort
of like idea of a return to the Republic of Letters is really interesting to me. We might
also think about a kind of alternative hedonism, ri
ght? So like, what might it mean to prioritize
things that are genuinely enjoyable and good. When we reshuffle our lives in the midst of
a larger energy and climate transition? Maybe there's ways of bringing people along on an
environmental and equity journey, where we convince them that it's not just a question
of what they need to give up, but also what they could gain, right, and what would be
genuinely good in a world that we could make. And then finally, to come back to the question
of expe
rimental methods, I'm really interested in thinking about what new thoughts and forms
of collaboration might be possible. If we were all just a little more intentional about
the media that we use to do research, right? Or even research dissemination? You know,
what does it mean to kind of attack and dethrone the PowerPoint as the default and have to
think a little more critically and creatively about how we do what we do and what the right
tools might be? So my biggest example of how this all en
ds,
and what I'll focus on for the rest of my talk here is DIY Methods, which is a conference
conducted through the mail via zine and we're entering into our second year this year, last
year was our first. The way that it works is that we solicited pitches from researchers
all over the world and all over the academy, who wanted to share something about their
experimental research methods. They designed zines, some printed their own, some just sent
us a file to print, we had a kind of action cent
er where everything got collected, and
then compiled into these exciting orange envelopes. We then mailed them out to everyone who contributed.
So, if you gave us a zine, we gave you a cubic gram of zines back in the mail after a couple
of months. We also digitize the whole proceedings, which is hosted on H-Commons. So that meant
that like, participants effectively got like, you know, a DOI and a linE on their CV. So,
you know, it counts as real research and we can talk more about how we can cre
atively
navigate these sort of like institutional systems of prestige and gatekeeping. Doing
this also meant that we could, you know, invite people into the conference who hadn't contributed
a zine, right, like folks can just be attendees in the room as it were. And it also meant
that we got a kind of second shot at accessibility, because we could have sort of a screen reader
friendly versions of zines that can be both like visually elegant and doing wonderful,
interesting things for the eye. An
d then also, you know, rendered in a different form available
for different modes of consumption. And the results were really, really interesting. People,
I think, responded to the prompt cued in by some maybe like, remembered or experienced
or imagined 90s DIY zine ethoses. So, this often meant being quite literal, and like
producing a guide that would teach the reader how to do something themselves. How in that
spirit to sort of modify and invent it with the, the aim of a kind of like tacit em
powered
reader being, being the goal. So, for example, this is Peter Wojik s zine about public history
in Kentucky, examining sort of interesting and hidden racial histories of the horse racing
industry, in a neighborhood that's rapidly gentrifying, and it came in two parts. The
first was his production of the zine. The second was a blank. So, it has all of these
prompts and sort of walks the reader through how they can practice this particular methodological
orientation where they live and wher
e they work. Another highlight for me is a zine called
Play as a Mode of Research. So Jean Hunleth and Sienna Ruiz made a zine about how they
did work on children's health outcomes during the pandemic, so, how do you remotely collaborate
with children as research subjects? And part of their answer was to make these cartoon
characters of both themselves and the kids. And you know, using a character was a way
of kind of getting in front of anonymity concerns when you're working with minors, but it
was
also a way to sort of situate the researcher on more reciprocal grounds with the research
subject. And their's even begins by, you know, bringing you into that process. So, like,
you know, here's my, my goofy cartoon character, Yarn Ball, ready to go do anonymized research
about rural health outcomes. Um, we also had some folks who work you know, zine, zine seasoned
experts, like Izzy Hayes, who wrote a zine about Riot Grrrl Zines, and I really love
their work, because it includes all these
really interesting kind of like, director's
commentary, pop out texts about, you know, feelings of ambivalence, or enthusiasm about
what is otherwise the straightforward content of the zine? And, you know, it's lovely, there's
a complaint form in the back, explicitly soliciting readably feedback. So there's a way in which,
you know, opening the door to new modes and methods of soliciting research means that
you have different sort of readerly experiences and forms of exchange made possible by r
eading,
which was just really, really exciting. Others took the opportunity to think about the way
that the materiality of print really matters. So, Jessica Marion Barr s zine was made using
just paper flyers, and included also a block of handmade paper that had been crafted from
a local invasive weed dog strangling vine. And so the, the sort of part of that project
was thinking about the consances between like, invasive species in our ecological environments
and invasive species in our sort of
media environments, and how we can sort of work
to make those both into gifts, rather than pests. So yeah, it was it was amazing. And
we wanted to kind of capture our experiences of running this sort of unconventional conference,
and then figure out both practically, and then also, in more abstract terms, like theoretically,
what we were experiencing through the whole thing, we've got a whitepaper out, I'll drop
a link in the chat later. But some, a real like underscored kind of delightful disco
very
of the whole thing was really finding out that like, pleasure and conviviality were
qualities of print that that mattered, right. Being able to attend a conference, you know,
in a reading chair, at your own pace, away from a screen seems just to be broadly good
and appreciated by everyone. No bad PowerPoints, slides, menacing anyone, there was no one
reading I sort of overly wordy and hasty prepared a bit of theory. It was just genuinely nice.
And so again, I'm really holding on to both the
the kind of like strategic, and like theoretical
ties that come from a kind of politics of pleasure and how that matters for prints,
because I think both of these things are important. If you want to be notified when DIY Methods
23 proceedings go online, you can find a little button at the bottom of our website, and which
to do. So please do feel free. And we will also ping you when the CFP goes out for 2024.
Because we're gonna keep this this ball running, as long as I've got the funding for i
t, because
it's just too much fun. I think I'm gonna leave it here. I've also got more to say about
personal practices of zine making and the like, but maybe that'll come out in the comments
that come out in questions. Yeah, I'm just really delighted to chat with you all, because
it's, it's, it's good to be among print geeks, we are of a certain sort. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Thank you both.
Okay, so now we're entering the phase where Craig and I are gonna pose a few questions
for discussion. P
lease do post your questions in the chat or in the Q&A. And we'll get to
those in about 30 minutes. So, Craig, why don't you go ahead and start. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: Great. Thanks very much,
Stephanie, Anne, and Marc, thanks so much for your introductions, hopefully we can in
this conversation really build on the foundations you've established. So the first question
is this: Anne, on your website, you write that sometimes the best way to think through
questions is by making art or machines, end quo
te. Can both of you talk please, about
how designing for print might also help you think through different questions and questions
differently? Or put another way, what do you find particularly generative about working
in print? What does it mean to have a print practice? And what does it mean to be a publisher?
And for all of those in the audience, we gave them these questions in advance, so if you're
having trouble following that question, fortunately, they've had a chance to think a little bi
t
about it. So, did we decide who was gonna go first? I can't remember. Okay, I'll open
it up and either one of you go ahead and we ll go from there. Thanks. >>ANNE PASEK: Sure. I'll take a stab at a
part of an answer. And then Marc you can you can round things out and expand because I'm
sure I won't get it all. Yeah, I think I'll go back to what I said about you know, the
the sort of materiality of the object being important in both a kind of general like research-creation
arts-based practice s
ort of ethos. Right. Like, I think that we are all very indebted
to the tools that we use to think and and sort of taking a design-based approach which
encourages a little bit of more self-reflexivity about that, rather than just, you know, assuming
that an 8000-word article is the best and only way to shape a thought. I think that
also cashes out in being considerate of like the audience that you're trying to speak to,
and what the best way to speak to them might be. In some of my other zine pr
actices, I
really appreciate the way it forces me to write in a register that is human and legible.
It means that I can, like you know, share things with my family, it means that I can,
you know, leave things in public places, and know that they have a good shot of sort of
being understanded and understood and therefore impactful. Yeah, I had a little project once
were, when I was back in Alberta, my hometown, and also the sort of Oil City Major in Canada,
I made a little zine about like my, my
complicated petroleum feelings of being back in my hometown
and sort of seeing it differently. And I wanted to sort of like find a way to like, bring
my fellow Edmontonians, many of whom are quite resistant to thinking about climate change,
into some of those complexities. And the best way that I could think of was just to make
a lot of drawings, because it's the sort of visual lure that will encourage people to
pick up stuff, and then compose those into a zine and then just like, hit all of the
free libraries and bus stops, that I could find in walking distance, and just let them
float. Or alternatively, like, because everyone in Alberta has someone who works in the oil
sector, doing a kind of like reverse sampling thing, where I give zines to people to give
to people that they know that work in the sector to give to their friends. And I just,
you know, it's a common enough kind of book culture thought, but you, you don't know where
these kinds of promiscuous objects will end up. And
I think that is a really, really useful
thing to keep in mind when I'm forming my thoughts and trying to put them out there,
because you want to sort of make knowledge that will be a good guest, I guess, wherever
it lands, and and that I think, has a kind of interesting ethos of care it built into
it. I've been talking too much. What do you think, Mark? >>MARC FISCHER: It s such a great, great answer,
and I love that presentation. I think, you know, I mean, in terms of like bringing artists
to c
riminal court and spending a few hours there with them. And then so we would, we
would record this conversation we would have about what we experienced, transcribe it go
back and forth editing the transcription, sometimes people want to write something additional,
I think, you know, knowing that what you say is going to become a publication, I don't
think it was inhibiting for people. But it certainly does, like nudge people in a direction
of maybe speaking in a more precise way, or maybe making
more careful or thoughtful choices
about what struck them about the things we saw that they wanted to talk about. The parameters
of having like this not having this kind of the sky's the limit approach that you sometimes
find on audio, blogs, where people will just talk for an hour and a half. And like, you
know, it's like for this these booklets. I mean, it's like, you've got like eight pages,
or, you know, including images, in some cases for us to unpack what we saw in three hours,
which coul
d have included, we could have seen like 30 cases get processed by a judge in
five different courtrooms or we could have just stayed with one case. Or we could have
watched with one person all we did was watch jury selection for about three hours. And
and so, you know, that became what we talked about, but I think yeah, I think I think like,
you know, it becomes a different it sort of sets a particular tone for the nature of the
collaboration. And that you know, that people are, you know, going
to be let you know, they're
sort of making their experience, public and being accountable, you know, for how they
talk about what we experienced, you know, which really, you know, we, there's no, I
mean, anyone can do what we did without making a publication. But I think that there is like
a kind of commitment to thought and language that printing 500 copies of something that
moves around the world and ends up in libraries and lives in people's homes. then goes to
people's classrooms and all the
se different places that, that print goes. And I mean,
there were, at one point I was leaving, also leaving these publications in, like free newspaper
boxes and little free libraries. So they realized that, you know, I do think like they, they
are about, you know, experiences and material and subject matter that, like, should be available
and relevant and is comprehensible to people who live in Chicago and know that we have
a court system. So preparing, you know, for how you, you know, publish t
o those kinds
of unknowable audiences, I think is also that's, that's in the background to definitely. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: It's so interesting
to hear you to approach this that Mark, on the one hand, the artists would be more precise
and careful and an on your side coming from the more academic that it's like, oh, you
can be like, actually human and like, not have all the inhibitions about speaking to
your, your peers, or to the discipline or whatever. But that print is able, it's capaciou
s
enough to hold both of those intentions. I just found that really striking. In your response >>MARC FISCHER: I think part of the part of
the care is also like, you're sort of, like, you know, when you're in court, you're watching
people experiencing possibly the worst thing that's happened to them in their life. Right.
So it's also like, you know, it's, it's definitely like, the conversations aren't lively, like,
they're, they're very lively, but like, we're, we're also watching people's lives
get like
tossed around, you know, in that in that system, so, so I think, you know, that's, that's maybe
why, you know, I'm talking about it that way. But yeah. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: Good. Do we want to jump
to the next question? >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Yeah, you go ahead.
I have another follow up, too. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: Okay. Well, if you're follow
up is like, directly follow up, mine takes it off a little bit of a different path. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: So well, okay. So
my question was about
the what does it mean to be a publisher piece of it, because both
of you are not just putting your own work out, but you're also gathering together and
Marc, obviously, not, not just through these projects, but through other work and thinking
about somebody in the chat, mentioned the Quaranzine, the 11 by 17, like all of that,
what does it mean, or how do you relate to bringing other people's work to print or designing
texts or modifying it and making it be part of this the way that you phrased
it Marc be
part of this public record? >>MARC FISCHER: Yeah, I mean, you're, you
know, you're basically you're in part being like a caretaker for other people's work and
ideas, and, you know, which is like, a many years long process of, you know, either selling
things through a webstore, or bringing them to stores, or bringing them to book fairs,
or including them, when they're exhibitions that include my work, like, that becomes another
platform for giving visibility to the work of other peopl
e. So yeah, so I think I mean,
to me, like being a publisher is, is, you know, it's like you're caring for, like, every
aspect of the process from like, the printing itself, in many cases, or, like, taking things
to the post office, you know, and finding a home for, you know, taking this kind of
responsibility for the things you've made yourself or with, with other people. And yeah,
the worst thing in the world would be like to waste all of these resources, making publications,
and then they jus
t like, nothing happens with them. You know, they don't, they don't go
anywhere, they're not read by anyone. So like that, you know, being, you know, guiding them,
like, into a world so that they enter the world so that they have some kind of life,
you know, that's a big a big part of this. And I mean, you know, and ike the, the author
and the artist, and the designer and the printer, like can do all of these things. You're not
just sort of like, pass, you know, there are people who pass their e
ntire print run over
to some distributor who does this and they have almost no interaction with their readers
and their audience. And to me, that would be dissatisfying. Like I enjoy every part
of this process. Even though it is very time consuming and labor intensive, like the labor,
that labor and that time is all part of the creative work. >>ANNE PASEK: Yeah, I really resonate with
what you say about how it seems like it, you wear many different hats, right? You're never
just a publisher, whe
n you're putting you are a publisher. >>MARC FISCHER: And today we're like lecturers.
Analysts. >>ANNE PASEK: Yeah. And like so, you know,
there's, there's like relational skills that happen there, right, like trying to support
people who are kind of stuck or talk people gently away from an outcome that might might
be overly complicated and have had some sort of bad materialization. There's also a kind
of, like, editorial, like level. So for DIY Methods, it's a sort of juried conference,
so we w
ill jury pitches and then will need to sort of consider, here's the substance
of my intellectual idea, and here's my plan for how I would sort of instantiate it in
something and both of those things matter and, and can both sort of like benefit from
kind of productive feedback. So I guess, like to be a publisher to be a collaborator, in
a very expansive sense. And, and that has its own rewards and struggles, as does all
part of academic work. But yeah, it's worth I think, thinking critically abo
ut and, and
practicing, right, just like I hope we all get a chance to be on either side of that,
like peer review publication machine, it's rewarding to do the same with print. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: So I've got a bit of a follow
up in, I guess it's kind of an elaboration it seems to be, for me. Anyway, over the past
few years, I've noticed how design is really been captured as a term to mean lots of different
things kind of like curation did a while back, and in, in that it's kind of shadow layout,
and sort of technical practices of layout, which really get treated as being like, just
technical, right? And so one of the things that interests me about you both and your
work is, how does layout teach you? And how does layout lead you to think in different
ways? And again, that s a very, very big question. I know. And it but it's something that really
fascinates me, and I think we don't really talk enough about that, because it just gets
treated as like a just a technical thing, right? >>ANN
E PASEK: I have a short answer, in part
because I'm like, I don't know, if I do good, a well enough job on this front. But if if
you have the kind of process where you have a very, very rough draft, that's just texts
that you're then sort of bringing into however you you design, whether that's cut and paste,
or whether that's a sort of publisher program, and you're really kind of like finishing those
ideas with layout in mind, I think it can be really effective, because layout is a way
of kind o
f pacing the span of a thought, right. And some thought deserved to be sort of small
and held with a lot of space, others, you know, should flow from one to the next. So
that is to say, excellent layout is sort of excellent cognitive design, and is to me kind
of intimately tied into the formal and conceptual work the prose should be doing. Sometimes
that's an aspiration, though. How do you mind that line, Marc? >>MARC FISCHER: I mean, I have the most unfussy,
pragmatic approach to designing ever
ything. And a lot of it has to do with, with budget
and resources and not feeling like text needs to be this multicolor, 35 font extravaganza.
I mean, you know, legal size paper is a standard format. It's also just kind of hilarious to
me that a publication about what happens in courtrooms would be on on legal format. But
you know, it's like, it works really nicely for two columns per page. My wife always makes
the critique that I don't leave enough room for people's, like fingers on the margins
that I'm ungenerous in this way, but yeah, I mean, I mean, for me, it's like we're presenting
I'm publishing conversations in this case, and they should flow you know, clearly in
a like in a clear visual way and, and I think with Public Collectors with the way I design
things in general, it's like I really try to keep the the focus on, the content is generally
other people's writings, thoughts, images, and I try to create like the least fussy layouts
that don't distract away from, you know, tha
t honor what people are trying to say without
trying to make them excited about this visually crazy layout or something if you know. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: Okay, thanks. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Sorry. I wonder
too, if like the multiple hat wearing that, as publishers we re also collaborators, also
is where there is such a sharp divide, I feel between the kinds of projects that y'all are
doing and the kinds of work that anthropologists on this call might be imagining for themselves,
given, given the
industrial landscape of academic publishing, right? So I know that Fiona McDonald
is on this webinar, we co edited visual anthropology review, we launched a beautiful redesign,
that's now all going into the garbage can, because Wiley wants to mainstream stuff, and
it's making impossible for us, for them, we're not,we're on the editorial board now for VAR,
to be able to publish work that considers layout, that considers how the image and text
and the pacing and all of that work together, often i
n the often using the language of making
it more accessible, making it work across platforms, making it work, that print is dead,
digital is the future, that this needs to be always available. And Anne, on the Low
Carbon Research Methods website, I love that, while y'all digitize things, and things are
available, if the sun is not out, and the raspberry pi that is powering the website
doesn't have power, it's offline. And like that sense that you know, it doesn't, it can
be accessible without be
ing constantly, you know, sucking resources. So, I want to pivot
from that observation to actually out third question, because I'm mindful of the time
and I think we've already talked a little bit about circulation. So, Anne and Marc,
both of your practices and projects are rooted in generosity, which which Craig and I really
appreciate. Can you talk more about and you've already spoken a little bit about this but
how does that shape your approach to editing, designing, organizing, publishing, a
nd the
like? What lessons about making collaborating? Do you feel others could learn from this work? >>MARC FISCHER: I mean, basically, when you're
making a publication, I mean, you're, you're making time like, for other people, like you're,
I mean, to me, like making it making the, it's like, in order to make these booklets,
I have to spend time with people, I have to email back and forth with them. In the questions
Tamera brought up this project Quaranzine, which was, during the first three mo
nths of
the pandemic, every day, I made a new double-sided-piece-of-paper format publication and about 75 out of 100
of those issues that I made, were collaborative, were collaborations with other people and,
and during that time, you know, what everyone was so freaked out for a million reasons,
that spending those five or six hours maybe working back and forth over email, never in
person with collaborators was, you know, this amazingly positive, holistic thing, you know,
is this incredible expe
rience of sharing this like digital emotional space with, with other
people and, you know, with like, zero regard for whether it would be like, commercially,
you know, successful or profitable in some way. It actually wound up, like, sustaining
itself extremely well. And, and being profitable, because so many people wanted to support it.
But, but yeah, it's really, I mean, it's really about like, and then with, like, spending
time with people in court, I mean, you experience like, you know, horr
ible, horrible, you hear
like, terrible things. And so doing that with another person is also like, shoulder, you
know, sharing the weight of that and, you know, caring for each other that, like, you
know, we just watch something terrible happened to this person, or heard about something terrible
that was done to another person. So, so, yeah, I mean, like that being together with a person,
you know, in the making of the work is, I mean, that's, that's an important part of
the whole process for m
e. And those collaborations. Yeah. >>ANNE PASEK: Those are all really good answers.
Mine, I think are going to be a little bit less magnificent and may be askew, but I want
to sort of underline what you said, because I think that's really good. My, my first answer
is, is really unsentimental. It's just that part of the reason why I could do this project
was that I got a very fancy Research Chair job, which sort of gives me quite a lot of
walking around money. And instead of spending that on conf
erences, like flying me there,
I thought it would be interesting to spend it in a way that could, you know, build a
network could bring some of that positive, like positive politics of pleasure forward.
And sort of Robin Hood those resources around. So, I think anyone who finds themselves so
advantaged, may also find it rewarding to give stuff away. One of the nice things is
that yeah, DIY Methods is very, very free. No one pays to be a part of it. And I just
get to, you know, cover the printing
and shipping costs, and this is how I'm sabotaging the
Canadian government. It's, it's quite nice. The second thought that I had follows from
that, but with a little bit more sentimentality, which is that I think that there really is
a way of approaching research as a gift economy. And like, you know, Stephanie, I think this
this lands a lot with with your zine about hospitality as as research. But for us and
Sarah Rayner, a grad student that I worked quite closely on this project with, like,
i
t seems endemic to zine culture in general, right, like, you put so much of yourself into
creating something that you sell for very, very little or you just give away and I think
that's a really beautiful ethos to sort of bring back to academia, right, like in effect,
that's what we do with peer review publications. It just feels kind of joyless at the end and
if you don't have an institutional library subscription, it's not free for you for sure.
So you know, if we are expending so much effort
with a kind of brought hope that it will find
someone that that it might be useful for and knowing that that use will never be easy to
align with all the effort that goes into getting there. Might as well just wear our hearts
on our sleeves I think. Yeah. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: You got sentimental there
that was great. You tried for the unsentimental but yeah, that we wear our hearts on our sleeves.
It's lovely. Stephanie, do we want to move to questions now from the audience. Do we,
what do we want
to do? >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI
Sure. Yeah. Looks like we looks like we have a question the Q&A box from Florian. Do you
want to read that one Craig? Can you see it? >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: I'm not sure. I can see
it. Okay, okay. Okay, so Florian says, Thank you very much to Marc and Anne for your great
presentations and your zines projects reminds me of the networked character of correspondence
art and mail art. And I think it is a wonderful way to bring researchers, artists, and print
geeks loved th
at expression together. I was wondering how the zines but also Marc's collaborative
publications resonate back with the interlocutors, to people in court, to families etc. >>MARC FISCHER: Well, one of the interesting
things that happened during the courtroom residency, so it's very interesting to be
in that space, you know, not as an employee of the court, not as someone with a case,
not as a prospective juror, just to be there to bear witness to that process. But, you
know, in doing that you're
surrounded by family of people who are tied up in this process.
And one, there was one, one situation that I observed with people multiple times, was
hearings for a man, Gerald Reed, who was tortured into confessing to murders he did not commit
by Chicago police. This is a, there's a long history of police torture, resulting in coerced
confessions in Chicago. And, you know, there were there were people there in court who
I knew as activists. And you know, one point we were observing this case,
like sitting
behind the mother of this man, Gerald Reed, and at some point, you know, and, I was, and
I visited, I went attended multiple of his hearings with different artists, and I started
sometimes scheduling the residencies around his hearing so I thought it was important
to try to continue to pay attention to what was happening. And at some point, I just,
I gave, you know, copies of when I started making the publications that included those
hearings and our discussion of them, I gave them
to a person who knew, was connected to
his family. And, and eventually, Gerald Reed was actually cleared and released from prison.
And it was quite a surprise and quite enjoyable one day to receive this Facebook friend request
from this person whose hearings I had been attending. I haven't really been in touch
with him since, but, but I mean, you know, so I think like, like I allow for that, that
possibility. Did I go out of my way to like, send copies of the booklets to the judges
whose courts
I observed? No. Did I seek out, you know, prosecuting attorneys who I found
really horrifying? Like, no, I did not do that. One, like funny anecdote is that there's
a bookstore in the Chicago Cultural Center that carries my publications. And through
like their Shopify system, if someone pays with a credit card, as a vendor, I can sometimes
actually see, like, who purchased what, and there was someone with the last name Topinka.
And I'm like, who? Like that name is really familiar. And it was, it
's like the son of
the former Illinois Comptroller, the late Judy Baar Topinka, that her son is like a
former military lawyer, you know, who had purchased like three copies, different issues
of this publication series. So, you know, like they're known, and also unknown ways
that these things go out into the world and who reads them? Do I know what he thought
of them? Like, no, I don't, but, but I always allow for that possibility that you know,
these, these things are, you know, that they're ava
ilable to all kinds of audiences. >>ANNE PASEK: Yeah, I similarly, wish I had
more stories than I do, I think, on this question, like, it's part of the vexatious part of print,
right? Like you, you never get to know what your reader thinks. And you can only sort
of, like roughly intuit, where, where some of these things land. For me much less excitingly,
it tends to be classrooms, like I will hear from professors who are like, I'm assigning
a project based on this zine, I want I want my students
to do something like it. Or like,
you know, this was a format that, like I could bring into a first-year class, so I'm doing
it. And I kind of like that, because it's, it's a, for me at least, as a reader myself,
like, whenever I've really liked something, I want to pass it on to someone. So I'm like,
if that's happening, then that's probably a good sign. >>MARC FISCHER: Yeah, maybe it was totally
not a reason to bring certain I mean, people people would, so people would participate
in my proje
ct by just reaching out to me through my website, and asking if they could be a
resident, and then we would try to schedule and figure it out. But there were multiple,
and most of the people were based in Chicago for that. But also multiple of those people
teach and would bring me back to talk about the project to their students. And for us
to talk about our experience together for their students. And a lot a lot of students
are very interested in, you know, they're abolitionist or they're inter
ested in prison
issues, and just didn't even realize like that there's something you could do, that
you can just go to court and sit there and walk around and observe different things.
And this is like, like an or like the mechanics of how you would do that. So, so that was
another aspect of this also, right? That it is it's like a methodology that has all kinds
of applications. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Okay, we've got
another question from Oro: "Zines and artists books are largely para-academi
c and anthropology.
We've been working on peer review opportunities, which brings self-publishing into academic
legibility. Any thoughts on having reviewers or peer reviewers participate in publishing?" >>ANNE PASEK: Yeah, I, to me, this gets to
the question of like, how we can be strategic in getting away with things, which is maybe
to put a slightly devious spin on the question. I don't want to presume that, that you might
sit with that mild bit of bad faith, but that I am. But yeah, I think c
ertainly in Canadian
academia, and to lesser degrees, or greater degrees, depending on different contexts,
right, like, there are doors that are opening around ideas like research creation, or arts-based
research. And quite often, those are open doors with poorly defined or, or in, in, or
highly variable interpretations on like, what counts as research. So, you know, if I put
on an art exhibition somewhere, there is the kind of like legitimating factor of the name
of the gallery, or whether it w
as a juried show or not, that that kind of makes it more
legible on my tenure file. And I sit with some uneasy enjoyment of the fact that the
folks who are evaluating the tenure file probably aren't going to be artists and aren't going
to have, are going to sort of take it on on credit that like it should count. So, there's,
there's flex there where a person can, can, can drive many projects through that window.
And so, you know, I often count my zines as research creation, although like they, t
hey
are more than just that, or aren't always that, but it is a kind of like rough label
to call something to make a claim, a claim that lands with a certain audience. But I
also in my head, as a publisher, don't want to presume that that's always going to be
enough for folks. So for DIY Methods, we are a juried conference. So, you know, we, we
vet pitches and then select the ones that we think are best to move forward. And that
means that folks who, who do get in get to say they were part of in
effect a juried show,
so it should count to something to that end. I know there are other exciting directions
with folks doing things like peer reviewing, like video essays, and then having like the
peer reviews published with the essays as a way to sort of ensure that you have good
reviews, and then are also sort of crediting that reviewer as in effect to a tacit, secondary
sort of co-author of the process. I think how we do this with, with like, highly visual
design-based practices will be as
varied and multiple as there are people doing it, there's,
there's lots of good ideas bubbling up through the cracks. And I'm super excited to know
how that's working all that on your side. And super curious, too, about Marc. >>MARC FISCHER: I do teach college graduate
level courses, but I've had like zero interest in how institutionalized institutions, validate
projects. And, and I really, I, you know, I that for me, there's not really any hierarchy
of importance between something like working
in a museum or presenting work in a museum
versus presenting work in someone's backyard, or, you know, a book being in like, the Library
of Congress versus a book being in like, a little free library in my neighborhood, So,
yeah, I don't care about how peer review works. I think, you know, I think that, like the
life of the work and how it's, it's, you know, whether it's useful or interesting, you know,
and, and sustains worthwhile conversations for people who read the work and tend to it,
to m
e, I mean, that's the kind of thing that's, that's important, you know. Within, whether
that's within my own field or within academia, or, you know, that like the family of Gerald
Reed like that his case was discussed by people who cared enough to spend multiple mornings
watching it happen, you know, so. So, yeah. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: Maybe I can sort of build
on that a little bit. Because I'm kind of curious. I mean I've been traumatized by the
academic publishing system, but I've also had like am
azing moments where I've seen my
work develop through peer review, right? And just to be, you know, clear, I think, you
know, peer review certainly can be mysterious, but it's also like, at base, another set of
eyes looking at your work and saying, Hey, this is working well, this doesn't really
seemed to work well. And when it's at its best, it is like a really congenial and rich
process. I think that leads to better work. And so I think, in the spirit of that question,
in some ways, you know, a
nother way of asking that could also be, you know, what does it
mean to get other eyes on your work? Before, before you say, Okay, I'm done. I want to
put it out there, right? At what times do you say, you know, what I'm happy with, I
trust myself to get this out. And at other times, maybe you're like, oh, actually someone
needs to look at this, or, you know, is this the right typeface? Or, you know, am I doing
things right here? I don't know. So, I mean, to me, there's like another element of t
hat,
too. It's not just about that big boogeyman of the, you know, corporate publishing industry,
and academic originations. >>MARC FISCHER: I mean, this is the thing
I love about collaboration is like that, it does provide that other, that multiple people
have, you know, or have a concern with what is produced and so that another person is
looking at the introduction that I wrote, right, to the work we did together, and is
copy editing with me and suggestion, suggesting a word change, yeah, bec
ause it's like, they're,
they're invested in this, this also. But for something like, you know, these, these residency
reports, I don't submit them to like, I mean, I have amazing community of other artists
who care about similar issues, but I feel good enough about the thoughtfulness of the
people I've collaborated with on each discussion that, that, that's, that's enough for me.
I'm also impatient, like, I want the work to go out into the world and not, you know,
be slogging through, you know,
yielding, I mean, it's, you know, I maybe approach it
more like, it's like, if you were a painter would you have like 15 other painters come
look at your painting before you decide to show it? I mean, probably not, you know, or
would you let like, you know, a roomful of musicians listen to your album, or your mixtape,
or whatever, you know, before you put it on the internet. Like, I don't know, maybe people
do that. Maybe if it's like, a really expensive project, it needs to be like vetted by a
ll
of the backers and everything else, but, but I just don't I don't feel the need for that
for most of the things I do. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Yeah, >>ANNE PASEK: I was like, Go ahead [crosstalk] >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: I'm muting, I'm
muting! >>ANNE PASEK: Okay, we'll come back to you
because I'm sure this is an interesting thought. I was just gonna say that so to say that,
like, you know, the kind of like history of zine making is a history of the pleasures
and possibilities of not havin
g any form of review to be accountable. Even your peers
right, you can, you can be a stubbornly bad, cantankerous zine maker and find joy in that.
And sort of when I look at my own practice, I think a lot about you know, as Marc mentioned,
right, like different, different stuff has different immediacy and needs it seems and
so some things I feel very confident just sort of throwing out and seeing what happens,
others less so, although I'm reflecting on it sounds kind of nice, what you're laying
out there Craig, to have a kind of like, art school crit, right, like available at the
level of both concept and design. And it's something that I would really struggle to
pull together. When I do seek out feedback from peers, I usually just circulate a kind
of plain text version, because I'm looking for them to engage with like, the facticity
of the idea or the strength of the claim. And then I can sort of like you know, just
trust myself to like do the visual parts on top of that, but wouldn't
it be nice if it
were otherwise? Maybe that's part of the magic that CoMMPCT can make happen. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Yeah, you know,
listening to talk Marc, it strikes me of like, the feeling that I get when I co-teach with
faculty from Fine Art where we have like totally different starting positions right. And like
mine is like maybe like a more anxious, you know, traditional like, let's make sure let's
like let's work through this, let's like you know, work through it to death and, and the
y
are most, most, more typically more focused on the experience of making the work, of being
together, and then the possible impact that they can't control once it's out in the world,
right? And it makes me think, like this type of work, or this type of practice, right,
so that it's not like this not that, not that your publications are not precious things
but I think too often with academics that are so estranged from all the intermediate
processes that go into bringing work into the world, bec
ause they are not allowed access
to them, they aren't, they don't even imagine that they have a choice to do a layout differently,
or have that kind of conversation or that kind of collaboration, that there are questions
that they may not even be asking. And if they worked faster, if they worked, more, more
focused on those moments rather than this thing that's going to live forever, and be
you know, a complete representation of me that I won't be able to take back or that
might get wildly popul
ar or wildly, you know, disregarded, that there is something about
the timing of the kind of work that we do. And you know, because we're part of Society
for Visual Anthropology, I'm also thinking about, you know, how much of this is already
accepted within documentary filmmaking, ethnographic filmmaking, because it's such a labor-, material-,
time-, resource-intensive process, that there is more of that kind of crit feedback, not
necessarily vetting, but you can become kind of too close to the
work to be able to see
it, you need to see it with fresh eyes, and that's what peer review can do, and that's
what this kind of stuff can do. And it it strikes me, too, Marc, that like, this is
also a question of genre. So I mean, I'm curious, maybe for work, that's not like a write up
or a report, or not the Quaranzine project that was about a kind of like daily practice,
have you had other kinds of relations to your work, that's maybe wanting to get more feedback?
If genre s the different? >>M
ARC FISCHER: I mean, definitely with certain,
with things that are I mean, they're different, like, part of you know, with, like making
small publications is that they just don't need as much time as full-length book, right?
You know, so if you're about to print 2000 copies of a 200-page book like that, that
gives you a certain amount of pause. Or, you know, as much as I don't want to like to think
of one opportunity is more important than another, I was included, Public Collectors
was included
in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which about 125,000 people attend. And I wrote
a essay publication to accompany the project I showed that was about like a very complicated,
sensitive situation involving this archivist who, music archivist who ultimately immolated
himself publicly in protest of the Iraq war. That was a text that more than one person,
other person read, I think about 15 people probably read that. Not an academic peer review
of like, what I think of it's just like, it was reviewed by
, by peers, like other, other
artists, family of his, like the people that I thought, you know, a handful of people that
I thought really needed to know, that I needed to feel comfortable, you know, with this text
before, but also because I was telling the story of another person. And wanted to make
sure that I did that in a very careful way. Not that like other things don't require just
as much care, but you know, but there are degrees of that, I guess. But I think also,
I'm very self-conscious
about not like, overly tasking my friends with, like, extra work,
because these aren t, like, projects that, like are put before committee. I mean, the
Institute, I do get some institutional support for the work I do. But it doesn't involve,
but that's more like this part-time faculty development grant that I can get from the
college that I work in, or the support of talking to people's classes. And that's usually
after the fact, not like having students give me feedback on you know, what I'm a
bout to
make or something like that. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: I just want to circle
back to something that you said Anne about, we're already doing all of this labor, we're
already doing all of this free work for the academy, we might as well redirect that energy
towards things that bring us pleasure, things that can circulate in a different way, and
something that you said Marc earlier about the print run of certain academic journals
being, you know, kind of smaller than some of these booklets
and these some of these
publications. So, I just want to, I mean, Craig, if you want to speak to this, feel
free, but like, what, what are the alternatives that we should be pursuing or thinking about? >>ANNE PASEK: Um, one answer is to be a little
bit selfish and, and, you know, find creative ways to exist in the institutions that you
exist in, that are sustaining to you in ways that, you know, will be as individual as all
the individuals in the room. Another, and to me, quite motivating ethos
is to try and
build coalitions. So, wherever we are building little gardens, I think it's important to
make sure that they, they connect different corridors and different parts of ourselves.
So again, to sort of come back to my like, endless, like, climate change is an important
thing kind of theme, right? Like, I think the viability of some of the really, really
big things that we want to win will really depend on building a lot of friendships, right,
and getting people from very, very dissimi
lar backgrounds to sort of see shared stakes in
the success of it. And that, for me, sort of motivates how, how I negotiate these questions.
And, and yeah, helps also, the, the pleasure part helps sustain the coalition part, too,
so wherever one can find a two-for-one, it's always a good deal. >>MARC FISCHER: I mean, they like these friendships
and community and sustaining these relationships. I mean, it's something like the zine world
does incredibly well, you know, across great distances. And
part of that, I think, is like
having these tangible things that you exchange with other people. I still have, like, hundreds
of publications, made by other people from when I was a teenage zine publisher in the
late 80s. And would just always be getting these things in the mail, constantly. Maybe
like one final anecdote that, I think is, I think, yeah, people should really like.
It's important, I think, not to underestimate the power and impact of printed things. I
was on a panel, this zoom dis
cussion hosted by Printed Matter about sustainable publishing
models. And because I had 10 minutes to talk and had a lot I wanted to try to cram in,
and to be respectful of time, I wrote out what I wanted to say, which I don't usually
do. And afterwards, someone was like, You should publish that, like that was really
helpful. And like, okay, because I actually wrote it out, like, I can easily do that.
And I printed it, and people are like, I really want to have a copy of that I want to be able
t
o give that to my students. And then I wound up printing like 1000 copies, and then someone
wanted to print. Yeah, and you know, here's one of them, right? And then someone wanted
to translate into Spanish from Mexico. And I'm like, Okay, let's do that. Then someone
wanted to translate into Spanish for Spain, and then also for Argentina, which were a
little different. And then someone translated into French, and then they translate into
Korean. And then it was translated into Greek. There s anot
her one coming up, I'm trying
to remember Portuguese, I think is, is next. And like, you know, I have no idea like that,
like things can move around and be and have, have that kind of life. If you can find this
text on Halfletterpress.com. The listing for the printed version just includes the entire
text. So I think, you know, this idea that I think that you know, these things can have
all kinds of lives in the world. And I think a lot of academic journals don't really allow
you the freedom of t
hought to consider like all of those, what all those possibilities
are because of the restrictiveness on access cost, things like that. The thing that I this
text, it's had such a great life. I mean, you know, I the last time I printed it, it
was like maybe $400 to print 2500 copies of this thing on really nice paper because I
let my printer pick out like all the papers that were left over from expensive corporate
jobs that he just had. So, I didn't I didn't care about all the paper being the sa
me for
every single copy. So instead, it's on like seven different beautiful papers, instead
of one generic paper because we also, I also care about book waste and publishing waste
and trying to mitigate that so it's a way for him to burn through all this stuff that
was sitting around that he didn't have a use for otherwise. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: It's a great anecdote, I
love it. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI: Okay, any last thoughts,
we've got about two minutes. >>CRAIG CAMPBELL: I have a big thought. B
ut
we don't have time for that, but maybe just sort of throw it out there. And it's, you
know, I see the postal system. And I've been thinking a lot about it recently. And I see
it a lot as something akin to public transportation, and have great concerns with the ways it's,
I don't know what its future might look like. And I love working between print and digital.
And so, I guess that's one thing I'd love to sort of finish off thinking about is, you
know, futures of distribution. And you've both
given some great models of walking around
town and leaving them in little public libraries, or on this side of the street or whatever.
And handing them to other folks. But then again, the personal system is still out there.
Even if it's limping along, maybe. >>MARC FISCHER: It's still astonishingly effective.
I mean, very, very few things get lost for me. But yeah, during, during lockdown, when
I was publishing this double-sided piece of paper, you know, eight and a half by eleven,
sheet of pap
er. Yeah, I would walk around and tape those to phone poles. And metal dumpsters
were like a great surface to tape things to. And I would just tape the front and back.
And it was such a quiet time in the city. So few people were out there when they were,
I think there was this kind of this more receptive space to reading something if it was in public,
that maybe would be less successful now that everything is kind of like, humming along.
But yeah, all of the, you know it was hyperlocal. I didn't
try to like put things, paste things
all over the city. You know, it was really, it was either very local in my neighborhood,
or it was through the mail. And now, you know, there are libraries like even like MoMA that
have a complete set of every issue, because they valued it. But yeah, I mean, there are
all sorts of of distribution channels that can be highly effective. I, I never have any
interest in the content of religious tracts, but their design and efficiency, I mean, it's
the smallest b
its that you could possibly print, that is like a complete self-contained
text and piece of design. Yeah, they're I mean, they're genius, like, you know, for
these things that are left on buses, and yeah, how you sort of find people and kind of cut
through this space that normally, you know, is only reserved for commercial advertising,
with sharing things, you know, in this public guerilla fashion. But also, I mean that, you
know, there are all of these, you know, classrooms, school libraries, s
tudent lounge, inspirational
libraries, you know, all kinds of things. >>ANNE PASEK: I'll briefly add, too, that,
for me, like accessibility is a really important kind of question to bring into this, too.
And the way that it always resolves for me is to say that like universal design, is a
great idea, but it's never actualized. And so, I don't have the goal of making something
that absolutely everyone can, can experience. I think it's more important to consider who
my audience is, and then make
a couple of different versions, but that can be seen by,
you know, a couple different kinds of people. And so having a print version, and a digital
version is a kind of easy way to be prompted to do that. And they will circulate in different
ways and do different things. And my cat has just got here and is bumping my mic, which
is maybe a great sign that I should stop speaking. >>STEPHANIE SADRE-ORAFAI:
I want to thank everybody that's here, both of our panelists, and Craig, the SVA, the
Taft Re
search Center, the Department of Anthropology, and my collaborators in CoMMPCT. Thank you
all. And please be on the look out, this will be posted in November, along with our curated
resources, please send us a pitch. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye, everyone.
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