Making Public (2015)
In 2015, Fondation Galeries Lafayette held a symposium and workshop in Paris to strategize for the opening of their new headquarters in Le Marais, designed by OMA. I was invited to participate by leading a workshop and delivering a talk about experimental publishing for the artists, curators, and museum officials who were planning the new building. The talk is organized into four sections—1 Is posting publishing? 2 Malls, bedrooms and balconies, 3 Designing the place of memory, and 4 Poor media and physical space. Later, these efforts led to the realization of The Publishing Workshop.
“Is our publishing platform loosely bound by codes of behavior like a pedestrian navigating a busy street or more tightly controlled, like in an airport. Is there space for surprise or risk—chaos, even—Twitter and Reddit come to mind—or more like a closed, gated community for friends who ‘make public’ around the performance of identity—the publishing spaces of Facebook or Slack, or group DMs. Or is it a police state, and maybe this is Wikipedia, where publishing is a highly regulated activity, surveilled and monitored by editors and algorithms who keep ideas formatted and filed, with controlled vocabularies and little or no room for creative expression. Or is it a place of commerce, like Amazon or ebay.
Recently, at the New Museum’s Ideas City festival in New York, performance artist Penny Arcade said that ‘the strategy of a mall is to fill all possible space, materializing desire and fear, so that visitors have no option but to engage (or leave). A mall is a site of extreme visibility.’ It’s not too difficult for me to imagine a publishing scheme with a disposition for making everything available, sharable and ownable; the ability to add anything to the cart. A site of promiscuity, if you will, where everything is networked and possible; I’m thinking specifically of Alexander Galloway’s Google Deleuzians. Why not.
The archive as network as mall, as site for infinite desire, curation and availability, where all possible commodities are indexed and exchanged, we could even say purchased, sold or published.”