# XPUB
SPECIAL
ISSUES

A Special Issue is a tri-annually released publication created by the XPUB master's students, allowing students and staff to explore not only the individual themes of each edition, but also the definition of what is or can be a publication.

Each Special Issue addresses a specific "issue", often coordinated with outside events and collaborations, and culminates in a release party. The organisation, tools, and workflows are reset every trimester to both allow the rotation of roles within this publishing experiment, but also permit to explore novel collaborative methods beyond their archetypes and stereotypes.

Special
Issue 18
April/July 2022

Special
Issue 17
January/April 2022
This box found you for a reason

Dear Player,

I found you for a reason.

Welcome to my productive space. Here play meets work. Time is ordered in unusual ways and patterns unravel. Together, we mess with the boundaries between leisure and labour.

How are your boundaries? Maybe you shouldn't go to work tomorrow. But could you really follow your own schedule? Would you be more productive if you chose when to work?

Ål Nik (Alexandra Nikolova), Carmen Gray, Chaeyoung Kim, Emma Prato, Erica Gargaglione, Francesco Luzzana, Gersande Schellinx, Jian Haake, Kimberley Cosmilla, Miriam Schöb, Mitsa Chaida, Supisara Burapachaisri

Special
Issue 16
September/December 2021
Learning How to Walk While Catwalking

Dear friend and online scroller,
Beloved internet user,
Dearest binge watcher and human being IRL,

We welcome you to our publication on vernacular language processing!

Be confident, be ambitious and be ready to fail a lot. Our Special Issue is a toolkit to mess around with language: from its standard taxonomies and tags, to its modes of organizing information and its shaping knowledge. With these tools we want to legitimize failures and amatorial practices by proposing a more vernacular understanding of language.

We decided to release the publication in the form of an API (Application Programming Interface).

Ål Nik (Alexandra Nikolova), Carmen Gray, Chaeyoung Kim, Emma Prato, Erica Gargaglione, Francesco Luzzana, Gersande Schellinx, Jian Haake, Kimberley Cosmilla, Miriam Schöb, Mitsa Chaida, Supisara Burapachaisri

Special
Issue 15
April/July 2021
Radio Implicancies

If technological systems are implicated in the structuring of knowledge and knowledge systems are implicated in how technology operates … how do we start to think the world otherwise?!
testing 2, 1, 4. test. test.
This is the first ever broadcast of XPUB year of 2021/2022. Tune into a compilation of obscure sounds and voices of the moment. Laying the ground for many more experimental streams to come.
Eight weekly broadcasts emit the signals of different constellations within the ten of us, bringing forth different responses and creating new approaches to the way knowledge and technology interplay and create inherent structures.

Kendal Beynon, Martin Foucaut, Camilo García A., Clara Gradel, Nami Kim, Euna Lee, Jacopo Lega, Federico Poni, Louisa Teichmann and Floor van Meeuwen

Special
Issue 14
January/April 2021
I Don't Know Where We're Going, But...

Another lockdown; shops closed, museums closed, bars closed, cafés closed, restaurants closed. You turn to escapist media, in another attempt to climb the inner walls of a deflating castle. All that is left is the city in its rawest form and the people inhabiting its shut down structures. Where can you go if everything is closed? What could you encounter along the way? Locked within the walls of a comatose town, you are missing direction. If the city is your new playground, who are the players and what is the objective?

Kendal Beynon, Martin Foucaut, Camilo García A., Clara Gradel, Nami Kim, Euna Lee, Jacopo Lega, Federico Poni, Louisa Teichmann and Floor van Meeuwen

Special
Issue 13
September/December 2020
WOR(L)DS FOR THE FUTURE

Words have the power to shape reality. Wor(l)ds for the Future is a set of map making tools to re-imagine and collect wor(l)ds, and to re-publish an everchanging atlas. We invite you to delve into the materials and traverse the texts in any way you desire: by cutting and pasting the printed matter, or by unravelling the texts online. The choice is yours. You can reconstruct images and reinterpret words to create Wor(l)ds for the Future.

Kendal Beynon, Martin Foucaut, Camilo García A., Clara Gradel, Nami Kim, Euna Lee, Jacopo Lega, Federico Poni, Louisa Teichmann and Floor van Meeuwen

Special
Issue 12
May/June 2020
Radio Implicancies

Radio Implicancies is a weekly broadcast of recorded and live matter brought to you by Piet Zwart Institute's Experimental Publishing programme. Radio Implicancies starts in the middle. Each broadcast means to engage with the way technologies are worlding the world. Take a deep breath and jump in on other ways of calculating, validating, ordering and framing collections of digital material. Let’s not wait for tomorrow to pay attention to the colonial conditionings of contemporary techno-cultures!

Avital Barkai, Damlanur Bilgin, Sandra Golubjevaite, Tisa Neža Herlec, Mark van den Heuvel, Max Lehmann, Mika Motskobili, Clara Noseda, Anna Sandri, and Ioana Tomici

Special
Issue 11
April 2020
Post-Digital Itch

From the other side of the world we were given data about a past dictatorship. A portion of an archive that exists to keep history truthful, educating the present, the recurrent time of political urgency and authoritarian repression. We were entrusted to secure it, manage it and publish it anonymously. Here, we cannot share the archive itself, but we can share our stories (experiences) and the process (tools, methods) we underwent while working with it. If the political situation sharpens and censorship and repression over meaning endanger our beings, this collectively assembled website is the place that offers an insight into possible solutions that do everything to keep our voices heard and our bodies intact.

Avital Barkai, Damlanur Bilgin, Sandra Golubjevaite, Tisa Neža Herlec, Mark van den Heuvel, Max Lehmann, Mika Motskobili, Clara Noseda, Anna Sandri, and Ioana Tomici

Special
Issue 10
December 2019
INPUT / OUTPUT
Tales from another module

Dear operators,

We would to invite you to combine, modulate, compose, and play with our 10 unique contributions to the common assembly of the modular publication INPUT-OUTPUT. Each contribution consists of one or more modules. Each of them represents our individual interests in the matter of signals, circuits, language and interfaces, while using modular synthesis as a means to explore these concepts and systems. Outputs vary between sound, image and text. Assemble and use at your own risk.

Avital Barkai, Damlanur Bilgin, Sandra Golubjevaite, Tisa Neža Herlec, Mark van den Heuvel, Max Lehmann, Mika Motskobili, Clara Noseda, Anna Sandri, and Ioana Tomici

Special
Issue 9
June 2019
The Library Is Open

Dear readers,

The Library Is Open invites you to an afternoon of workshops that make the operations within libraries visible. Join us in exploring the actions and roles of legal and extra-legal libraries (municipal, pirate, academic, +++), their custodians, and the public that form a community around collections of texts.

Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Biyi Wen and Bohye Woo

Special
Issue 8
April 2019
The Network We (de)Served

Dear guest,

We traveled from home to home by bicycle, setting up homeservers. As friends and companions on this Infrastructour, we studied our routers over drinks served by our hosts. Where possible we installed our servers in our homes, in other cases we had to depend on another member of the group. While self-hosting together we questioned our understandings of networks, autonomy, online publishing and social infrastructures, where each of us departed from a different question. We would like to share our personal (yet interconnected) routes with you, tell you a story, present our web- and printed zines, and invite you to explore our homebrewed network.

Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Biyi Wen and Bohye Woo

Special
Issue 7
December 2018
Start up, Burn out: Life Hacks

Dear Entreprecarious Life Hackers,

(◕‿◕) Take your time to reflect on this: Are you doing what you truly want to do? (◕‿◕) ị̞͍s̯̩̠ ̴̩͉̫̗͇ț̠ͅh̪̼̟̪̕i͠s͎̝̩̯̩̠ ̗̘̰̟̩͕p̻̘͙͓á̩̭r̳͚͕̘͖ṯ̤̼͔͖ͅ ̜̱o̯̩̦̗̮̖̣f ̺͝y̥͡o̧̺͚͉̠͙̗ͅu̧̜͖̥r̸̘ ̹̤͙̳j̴̙̗o̵̼̲͉͖̮b̥͖͘ ͕͓ḏ̷̩e̫s͖̭͕̙̱͉ć̖͉̯̙̫̪r̶̠i̖p̨̜t̨̼͓ͅi͖͈͇͙͞o͏̹̠̬̻n͍̩͇̱͞? (◕‿◕) If happiness is a currency, how rich do you think you are? (◕‿◕) ♪♬ ғɪx ᴡᴏʙʙʟʏ ᴏғғɪᴄᴇ ғᴜʀɴɪᴛᴜʀᴇ ʙʏ ᴜsɪɴɢ ᴏʟᴅ ᴄᴅs ᴛᴏ ᴀᴠᴏɪᴅ ᴡᴏʙʙʟᴇs ᴀɴᴅ ᴘʀᴏᴛᴇᴄᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴀʀᴘᴇᴛ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴀʟsᴏ ᴍᴀᴋᴇ ɢʀᴇᴀᴛ ᴄᴏᴀsᴛᴇʀs. ♪♬

Gill Baldwin, Simon Browne, Tancredi Di Giovanni, Paloma García, Rita Graça, Artemis Gryllaki, Pedro Sá Couto, Biyi Wen and Bohye Woo

Special
Issue 6
June 2018
Interfacing the law

Dear potential pirate,

You're welcome to share your books with us, regardless of where you got them from. XPPL is a platform for potential pirate librarianship where knowledge comrades share information freely. The library gathers all the books and articles floating around on our shelves, hard drives, memory sticks and bathroom floors. It starts at XPUB, but it can go anywhere you want it to.

Natasha Berting, Angeliki Diakrousi, Joca van der Horst, Alexander Roidl, Alice Strete and Zalán Szakács

Special
Issue 5
March 2018
OuNuPo

Dear OuNuPian,

In the Ouvroir de Numérisation Potentielle (the workshop of potential digitisation, or OuNuPo) the XPUB practitioners reflected on several topics: how culture is shaped by book scanning? Who has access and who is excluded from digital culture? How free software and open source hardware have bootstrapped a new culture of librarians? What happens to text when it becomes data that can be transformed, manipulated and analysed ad nauseam? To answer these questions, the XPUB practitioners have written software, built a bookscanner and assembled a unique printed reader.

Make ocr/output/publication.txt

Natasha Berting, Angeliki Diakrousi, Joca van der Horst, Alexander Roidl, Alice Strete and Zalán Szakács

Special
Issue 4
December 2017
A BED, A CHAIR AND A TABLE

Dear active archivist,

Can an archive save the Poortgebouw? This former squat and vibrant living community is facing a key moment in the future. In this publication, oral histories from the building’s illustrious past interact with material from various collections, including the Poortgebouw’s own Autonomous Archive. Here, archiving is not the end, but the beginning of a debate.

Join us.

Natasha Berting, Elisa Chaudet, Angeliki Diakrousi, Joca van der Horst, Alexander Roidl, Alice Strete and Zalán Szakács

Special
Issue 3
June 2017
Interfacing the Law

Pirates come ye!

Yaar be welcome amongst there books wit rum. We call on ye to battle the terror of the mind, produced by there current intellectual property regime? Transcend the juridical binary of illegal vs. legal, and claim political legitimacy on the digital seas of grey!

All hands ahoy!

Emily Buzzo, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Francisco González, and Nadine Rotem-Stibbe.

Special
Issue 2
March 2017
TGC #3

Dearest listeners,

Come Adopt a Walk or Rock Step Triple Step Triple Step along, a Fine Line, and discover Euclid in Motion towards A Sonification of the Dutch Elections 2017, to finaly embrace the Drone Oddities 1, 2 and 3 to Rest.

Concretely yours,

Emily Buzzo, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Francisco González, Margreet Riphagen, Nadine Rotem-Stibbe, and Kimmy Spreeuwenberg.

Special
Issue 1
December 2016
OP=OP

Dear gamers,

Pick the Pig, you are a risky trader. Pick the Chicken, and you'll sit on your eggs until they hatch. Maybe you'll be lucky and get a Bull market, or maybe not and have to deal with the Bear. Tear up a book, and get dealing with the free market, exploitation, taxation and the privatization of services. Pit resources and economics against each other and feel the Artifical Scarity burn.

Looking forward to ruin you!

Emily Buzzo, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Clàudia Giralt, Pleun Gremmen, Francisco González, Julia Kul, Margreet Riphagen, Kimmy Spreeuwenberg, and Noémie Vidé

# XPUB

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 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 by expanding the means of discourse circulation beyond print media and its direct digital translation.

xpub.nl