xpubliverse

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.

2023

Special Issue #21: Interim Release

Special Issue #21 starts from a single technical object: a teletype machine. The teletype is the meeting point between typewriters and computer interfaces, a first automated translator of letters into bits. Equipped with a keyboard, a transmitter and a punchcard read-writer, it is a historical link between early transmission technology such as the telegraph and the Internet of today.

Guest Editor: Martino Morandi

Course syllabus
Video documentation

Special Issue #20: Console

Special Issue #20: Console, was launched March 31, 2023, at Page Not Found in Den Haag.

Course syllabus
Video documentation
Mini site

not-just-a-fair: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 7-9 April

XPUB students + staff will be on hand at the not-just-a-fair .

Come meet students + staff in person, and sample recent and in-progress publications!

public servers

Special Issues

Special Issues are multi-form publications related to a theme initated by a guest editor and produced collectively by XPUB first year students.

Graduation projects and theses

Screenshot of project.xpub.nl

Graduation projects and theses; representing the culmination of their two year Masters study, each XPUB student produces a graduation work and a thesis.

Course wiki

Wiki

The wiki is the lifeblood of the course: visit the calendar to get an idea of a typical week, or see the list of current students to see traces and sketches of work in progress. NB: The wiki is shared with the lens-based master, items specific to XPUB are indicated by XPUB1 and XPUB2 (to indicate the first and second years). The wiki is an example of a self-hosted instance of mediawiki, the free software that underpins Wikipedia.

Piet Zwart Institute

XPUB is one of six masters programs collectively known as the Piet Zwart Institute.

Willem de Kooning Academy

XPUB is a part of the Willem de Kooning academy, and can be found on the fourth floor of the Wijnhaven building, with convenient access to the many facilities of the Art academy.

Gitea

XPUB self-hosts a gitea code respository. This provides a public outlet to support the many code works done within the course such as this page.

Etherpad

The XPUB etherpad is another crucial piece of course self-hosted infrastructure. Etherpads are all about realtime group collaboration with a minimum of prescriptive structures. Pads are used heavily in the course as a means of collective note taking, planning, writing and annotation.

servers for students & staff

Hub

The xpub hub is a public relay to a collection of self-hosted and student-maintained local servers. Using a combination of VPN (virtual private network) and reverse proxy, the hub enables experimentation with self-hosting, server portability, local-first and low power infrastructure and convivial and feminist server practices.

Zulip

The zulip server functions as a private bulletin board system for the XPUB community, and as a self-hosted free software acts as an alternative to centralized proprietary services like Slack and Discord.

Mailing list

The course uses a mailing list provided by neighbor network lurk.org.

Hotline

The hotline is a self-hosted Jitsi Meet server, an alternative to proprietary services like Zoom, Teams, and Meet.

2022

XPUB@zinecamp

XPUB was a proud participant in 2022’s edition of zinecamp Rotterdam @ WORM. Watch the video impression, featuring current and past XPUB/Media Design staff and students: Clara Balaguer, Aymeric Mansoux, Mara Karagianni, joak and a plotter, and more!

Video documentation

Walkie Talkie

The XPUB 2022 graduation was hosted at Worm and the academy.

Project pages and theses
Video documentation
Catalog Collective publication made with pagedjs

Special Issue #19: garden ? @ leeszaal

Special Issue #19 was launched in December, 2023 at Leeszaal, a local library and community center in Rotterdam West.

Online publication
Video documentation

Queerying Wikidata

queerying wikidata

XPUB, Anaïs Berck and queer artivist/wikimedian Z. Blace join forces to explore automatic writing experiments querying and queering Wikidata.

Workshop announcement
Recorded video presentation
Archived notes

Paged.js Workshop

Julie Blanc and Julien Taquet from the paged.js project share their experiences at the intersection of design practice and technical standards.

Paged.js is a rendering tool for previewing, inspecting and designing a PDF in the browser, that is known for specifically accommodating designers using web-to-print techniques in their publications and book making practice. Julie and Julien both work (or have worked) as developers on the project, so the workshop gave students an opportunity to ask them about Paged.js as an open source project, and what it means to develop and maintain it. A nice example of paged.js in action is Walkie Talkie, the 2022 XPUB graduation catalog.

Workshop announcement
Recorded video presentation

X-unPub

XPUB first years students presented their work during Special Issue #18 at a residency in Paris.

Recorded audio presentation

2021

SWAAT #00

Software with an Attitude (SWAAT), Issue #00

Zine edited by Manetta Berends and Michael Murtaugh reflecting on the experiences of teaching programming and alternative tools in the context of the XPUB Prototyping class.

Zine (pdf)
Printable A5 booklet (pdf)

Screen Walk with Aymeric Mansoux and Roel Roscam-Abbing

Online presentation by Aymeric Mansoux & Roel Roscam-Abbing including a description of XPUB as an example of making “systemic shifts” with alternative infrastructure.

Recorded video presentation