Hello. We're four students of Experimental Publishing (XPUB). We made this catalogue for you, we made it for ourselves. It's all the work we made from 2022 to 2024, during our Master's programme at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. This book contains our theses and graduation projects. Following the projects, you will find the documentation of three Special Issues that were published during our first year of XPUB.
(could this be clearer?)
In Do you ever dream about work?, Stephen Kerr talks with graphic designers about their work and how they feel about it. His thesis ? documents these discussions and puts them in context of the spiritual traditions of modernism.
Talking Documents, made by Aglaia Petta, are performative bureaucratic text inspections that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. The graduation project holds hands with the written text Performing the Bureaucratic Border(line)s which attempts to unleash intuitively a conversation concerning the entangled relation between material injurious borders and bureaucracy.
Ada made a project called Backplaces. It's a web play exploring the relationship between bodies and intimacy, and how people share vulnerability online. The project consists of three backplaces— digital spaces for relief from societal discomfort—through three performances: Solar Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Good Pie. Each piece navigates shared loss, the desire for intimacy, and the merging of the physical and digital, offering a safe space for introspection and connection.
Wink, is a web platform made by Irmak Susan Erta?, a creative writing and reading toolkit that enables children to make their own stories or read the stories they want from the existing library. The text Fair Leads expands on the concepts of interactive fiction using knot theory practices.
Paragraph about common ground. performance, storytelling, words, memory feeling, loss, reflection, Intimacy, experience, narrative and memory, the public and the private. Memory (for example, and other themes), how it appears in the four projects. The written and spoken word as materials and actions that exist in society, technology, people. We care about this because (whatever goes here is important). The personal element in each project.
XPUB is the Master of Arts in Fine Art and Design: Experimental Publishing of the Piet Zwart Institute. XPUB focuses on the acts of making things public and creating publics in the age of post-digital networks.
XPUB’s interests in publishing are therefore twofold: first, publishing as the inquiry and participation into the technological frameworks, political context and cultural processes through which things are made public; and second, how these are, or can be, used to create publics.
