Toward a Minor Tech:Soon-500

1. Writing a Book As If Writing a Piece of Software

The term “computational publishing” has emerged in recent scholarship (Adema 2021; Bowie 2022; Soon 2022), and is used specifically to describe books as dynamic and computational objects that are open to re-versioning. In contrast to more conventional or mainstream forms of book production and distribution, computational publishing challenges the way in which we understand books and archives as more than “discrete objects” (Batchen 1998: 47). Books are regarded not as a final format, or concluding result, as finished artefacts ready for consumption, but as “a continuous stream of data […] without temporal restriction” (ibid). According to Adema (2021), a computational book is an "ongoing iterative process." More importantly, people can fork, download, study, modify and republish a book as if it were a piece of software, producing multiple versions through computational techniques and under free and open-source licences. In other words, modifying and executing programmable scripts can generate different versions of a book, thereby disrupting the fixed linear nature of print.

This short article seeks to shift our attention to a book from end results (either it is a physical or an online book) to generative and programmable processes. This is similar to writing a piece of software with countless updates, unexpected bugs and continuous fixing in which it is more dynamic and unsettling. Such a perspective reminds some of the former discussions around software art, which might be useful here to open up the debates around a computational book as a piece of software art. Software art is a genre in which the creation and production of software address its materiality (Cramer 2003; Cox 2010) and expressivity (Soon 2016), promoting our critical awareness of software culture instead of merely seeing and using software as a practical tool. The materiality of Software art points specifically to "the written instructions" (Paul 2003) and the agency of code (Soon 2016) that engage with the social, political and critical dimensions that are “devoted to code and computational processes" (ibid: 65). Indeed, the kind of computational book that is addressed here is more about the dynamic of programmable processes, such as the execution of code that generates new versions, and the possibility of forking and modification by others to produce something new. In this way, publishing a book computationally focuses on these processual qualities and cultural circulation beyond the content of a book (which has been written for reading). Perhaps we may start to see the production of a book computationally as a form of software art that reflects wider cultural and political parameters.

Considering minor technology as something experimental and contingent, what challenges and potential have opened up if we start thinking of writing a book as if writing a piece of software? Beyond the focus on digitisation, how might institutional libraries and academic publishing collect and archive these new and experimental forms of cultural books in multiplicities, which are more process and computationally-oriented?

Ref:

- Adema, Janneka. “Publishing Strategies and Experimental Publishing.” Contemporary Aesthetics and Technology Research Programme, Aarhus University, 16 Dec 2021, Aarhus University (online). Lecture.

- Bowie, Simon. “What Is Computational Publishing?” Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), 7 July 2022, https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/computational-publishing/release/1?readingCollection=c2b231d4.

- Batchen, Geoffrey. "The art of archiving." Deep Storage: collecting, storing, and archiving in art (1998): 46-49. Munich: Prestel. Cox, Geoff. Anththesis: The Dialectics of Software Art. Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus University, 2010.

- Cramer, Florian. “Ten These about Software Art.” http://cramer.pleintekst.nl, 23 Sep. 2003, http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/all/10_thesen_zur_softwarekunst/10_theses_about_software_art.txt

- Paul, Christiane. “Public CulturalProduction Art(Software){“ Code - The Language of Our Time, edited by iGerfried Stocker & Christine Schöpf. Ars Electronica, Linz: Hatje Cantz, 2003, pp. 129-135.

- Soon, Winnie. “Software Publishing.” Experimental Publishing VI, Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, 24 Mar 2022, Coventry University (online). Lecture.