Challenges and Opportunities of Publishing in the Digital Age
The architecture historian Beatriz Colomina points to the practice of Le Corbusier, stating that namely the works of this architect mark the period in the modern era, when architecture became a part of the creative industries. According to Colomina, Corbusier understood and analysed the connection between architecture and the technology of the popular media — photography and publishing — in his works. This can be well-illustrated by his publications, representing architecture using drawings, retouched photos and other measures, as well as conveying architectural ideas and architectural thinking. Almost a century after the newspaper L‘Esprit Nouveau, published by Le Corbusier and his colleagues, both researchers focusing on architecture and architects themselves focus on the same key issues — conveying architectural ideas using contemporary technology.
Rethinking publishing of architecture and spacial practice is interesting and important namely now, with emerging influence of the post-digital era (when digital technology becomes an inseparable part of the daily life) on conventional communication formats. Since the internet and other types of digital technology took over all areas of people’s lives, the death of a book, text, press and media seemed to be inevitable. When, a decade ago, the visual and user-based network format was only making its first steps (the boom of bloggers and the beginning of social networking), even the largest and most-acknowledged newspapers were foreshadowing the upcoming difficult times for the press media, particularly the investigative journalism, which requires a lot of time and human resources. Even the world-known and acknowledged The New York Times had to admit the fact that the number of subscribers and sales volumes experienced a gradual downturn (according to the data of 2009, the 30% decline in advertising revenue was recorded this year as well [1]). The process of adaptation of this media institution was shown in a documentary Page One. Inside the New York Times, made in 2011. It seems that just like the majority of other traditional editorial offices that received fame in the 20th century, The New York Times had to tighten their belts by reducing staff numbers and rethinking their ordinary course of business.
The documentary features the media giant struggling against the challenges of the information age, when, according to Peter Thiel, the investor and founder of the PayPal company, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”[2] It seems that the narrowed and template-based contemporary space of information is ruled exclusively by click counters. What opportunities does this new situation of publishing and communications bring to the fields of creative industries and, at the same time, architecture? Is giving in to the clickbait dictatorship the only way?
The challenges of the digital age received several interesting approaches from the word of art and design. In 2008, just before the beginning of the global economic crisis and the discourse of saving policy, a group of young people in New York, the USA, founded the Triple Canopy, a magazine of a rather wide profile, focusing on cultural events, literature and art reviews. As the circle of dedicated readers increased and the magazine was acknowledged by professionals, its primary mission seems to remain the same and “Slowing Down the Internet” — the slogan of the magazine’s editors — important now more than ever. The editors developing their magazine chose to approach the inevitable synergy between printed, digital and internet formats as an opportunity for the emergence of new forms of expression, rather than a threatening inevitability.
[Il. 01, 02: Lisi Raskin article Triple Canopy]
The example of Triple Canopy shows a way to use the opportunities of digital formats to reorganise the working process of the editorial office, as well as make a connection with the audience — the readers. Interestingly, this process begins in the digital space, instead of the ordinary mechanism of press. The model of Triple Canopy is based “on the development of publishing systems that incorporate networked forms of production and circulation. Working closely with artists, writers, technologists, and designers, Triple Canopy produces projects that demand considered reading and viewing. Triple Canopy resists the atomization of culture and, through sustained inquiry and creative research, strives to enrich the public sphere.”[3] That is firstly a team of producing content. The major part of this production consists of articles and essays, developed in cooperation with authors (according to the editorial office), as well as related user interfaces (both ordinary texts and virtual pieces of art or literature — audio stories, interactive links and other forms of multimedia). Yet the editorial office is so much more: they organise readings, events, creative workshops, cooperation projects with various institutions, as well as membership events that provide financial support for the magazine.
Triple Canopycontents
Aside from new forms of collective publishing and distribution, suggested by Triple Canopy, the materiality of press can also be reorganised. According to Mute, the British on-line magazine focusing on culture and politics, there is more than just using the so called print-on-demand system. It can also change the perception of the concept of a book — a collection. Mute invites its readers to become the makers of the publication by using the print-on-demand service, compiling and printing a collection of their favourite or most needed articles.
Interestingly, both Triple Canopy and Mute accept the challenge of the digital world and the age of information not by merely transferring their printed content to the electronic format, but on the contrary. Only the collection of the best and most interesting articles get to be printed in Invalid Format, Triple Canopy‘s series of publications. At the beginning of their activity, Zero Books, the Anglo-Saxon print house focusing on culture studies and philosophy, have set a goal to use the printing format for systematising what the initiators of the print house perceived as discussions that take place in blogs, which do not receive sufficient attention from academicians and other professionals, or a certain writing practice, which emerged together with blogging (Zero Books began their career by printing the writings of Mark Fisher, while the book Capitalist Realism, according to the representatives of the print house, remains their best seller.)
Before getting back to the issue raised by Corbusier’s example — what media formats could be used by architects and how — it would be useful to take a look at the experiments implemented by practitioners working on a very similar principle (groups of people gathered by graphic design studies, whose education is based on printed communication). Metaheaven, Experimental Jetset, Dexter Sinister — these are only a few examples of such groups, which, as phrased by the designer Stuart Bailey, take the “mechanics of contemporary publishing” on a new interdisciplinary level. Dexter Sinister have been consistently doing that in their publication Dot Dot Dot, which circulated in 2000-2010 [4]. In the interview published in the last issue of the Dot Dot Dot, the authors of the magazine described their ideas as a “catalyst for a reader to consider the possibilities of graphic design in a new light, without the usual canon in mind, or the usual ways of writing about graphic design in terms of the classic eras, or in terms of masterful composition, and so on.” Discussing the future of publishing in the context of incredible activation of independent publishers, art books and other niche publications, as well as their participation at certain book fairs, etc., they indicated a key issue of finding a way through all the material and present the quality within the quantity. The team of the Dot Dot Dot authors has mutated and currently develops another of their incarnations — The Serving Library project, which, contrary to the printed Dot Dot Dot, is based on publishing .pdf articles on the internet and then printing and distributing them. The Serving Library is a title of an on-line platform and at the same time it is a physical and mobile space of a small library. Articles in .pdf format, written by different authors, are accumulated on the on-line platform and then printed and distributed in the USA and Europe at the end of a certain semester, while a new topic is slowly developed over the upcoming half a year.
After a small tour around the avant-garde practices focused totally not on the popular media, we can return to the investigative journalism, mentioned at the beginning of the article. More detailed analysis of the changes in this field should be left for experts and professionals of the communication studies. However, looking from the amateurish perspective, the new format, sometimes developed by the mass media, including detailed multimedia investigations and articles, sometimes involving an entire team of producers as if in television, raises curiosity too [5]. We could get back to the previous example of The New York Times, which introduced the format of interactive storytelling in 2012 — “Snow Fall. The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” [6] — and claimed that they have created a format, specifically tailored for the internet use, reminiscent of a virtual magazine or a program. The “application type content experience” (as described by one of the experts) received a Pulitzer Prize.
The New York Timesinteractive story “Snow Fall. The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek”
Namely this format raised a discussion in the architectural community this year, as it was used for a review of the new building of the Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo PIano, published by the very same The New York Times on 19 April this year. A team of seven people presented the new building by using not only narrative text, but also visualisations and 3D illustrations, created especially for introducing the context of the building. The ArchDaily referred to this work as the architectural event of the year, marking a new era of spacial practices, representing architecture and journalism [7], which will allow the profession to react to its own image, offering as if a new kind of visual consciousness of architecture. The format of “Snow Fall” investigative journalism spread to the other countries as well. In 2012 the German on-line portal Baunetz.de established English Uncube magazine “for architecture and beyond”, which is exceptionally virtual, adapted to the demands of a reader living in a digital age and has already won numerous awards and nominations of on-line media and design. Uncube presents topics and articles in a similar principle as the Snow Fall or Triple Canopy — the user interface of each of the articles is optimised and visualised based on very similar principles of interactive storytelling.
Uncubemagazine
Although Uncube keeps pacing in the foots of the newest tendencies of on-line publishing, the full perspective of what opportunities these multimedia platforms will offer the architectural discourse, remains in the future. We can only tell that this tendency will offer a new critical discourse in the field of architecture, which makes use of the smooth and flawless images as much as other types of mass media and where visualisation of one newest project is quickly replaced by another (e.g. the ArchDaily publishes new material almost every hour [8]).
Will the variety of measures and organisation create opportunities to develop a more diverse architectural discourse? Perhaps even a wider range of public relations? Will the information channels of the architectural community continue to function only as a continuous flow of self-advertising? What new directions would be opened by various design initiatives, such as the Dexter Sinister, reflectively opening opportunities and limitations of these formats? Various cultural practices, as well as spatial practices communicating about themselves, perhaps would finally have to return to political (in the wide sense) effects of such actions, in order to enable the Dexter Sinister quality content selection and distribution in the era of rapid information cannibalism.
In addition to the information portals carrying out their role, we could also draw inspiration from the cultural and artistic examples, which use new measures for creating a strong and long-term connection with their audiences, questioning and revealing mechanisms of creating the discourse. For the conclusion — an example of one recent initiative — Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon [9]: the event held on the 15 October by the international network, consisting of such institutions as the Guggenheim Museum, Getty Research Institute, University of Chicago, The Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, AA in London, etc., focused on the issue of gender imbalance dominating the history of architecture and even contemporary architectural society — although the number of women studying architecture is more or less equal, a very small share of them receive global recognition and attention. This event was inspired by the fact that although Robert Venturi was awarded with the Pritzker Prize, Denise Scott Brown, his long-term colleague and co-author of books, did not receive one. A signature collection campaign, organised by several architects evolved into the Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon initiative, which became as if a gathering of temporary editorial colleagues from various parts of the world. During the event the Wikipedia article base has been collectively supplemented with records about women architects thus creating a precedent to rewrite the history of the overly patriarchal profession.
Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon: Women in Architecture
Talking about such editorial activities, which enable the action of many researchers, citizens and activists, we could also review a number of cases of civic media, inseparable from various specific city development projects. However, this topic deserves an individual research and a separate article. In the abundance of contemporary information and in the context of social media flattening and trivialising our information field, there is the other side of the coin — the participation opportunities of various interest groups and their political power, enabled by the very same digital communication technology, has been very well-described by the Arab Spring and other similar global events. According to the discussions of the presenters at the “Postdigital Scholar” conference, held as a part of the Hybrid Publishing Lab research project at Leuphana University (Germany) in 2014, it could be said that currently we are experiencing a certain renaissance of publishing practices, which involves open experiments with a number of different forms of platforms and when there is no single practice, universally-accepted as the right one. We should expect that this moment that has not yet received any final conclusions and resolution, will create opportunities and space for interdisciplinary production research and their long-term distribution and self-reflection, while the continuous and consumer-oriented flow of information about the new skyscraper in Dubai or de-contextualised suburban villa will find a way to coexist with new formats of thinking about architecture, inspired by art, design, culture and media studies.
Viktorija Šiaulytė
Endnotes
[1] Access on the internet.
[2] Reference to the limit of text posted on Twitter.
[3] Access on the internet.
[4] Access on the internet.
[5] Access on the internet.
[6] Access on the internet. More on the Interactive Storytelling.
[7] I am grateful for the link to this article to my colleague of the Architecture [Publications] Fund, architecture historian PhD Marija Drėmaitė.
[8] More detailed Archdaily criticism and how clickbait tendencies affect the architectural press, is available in the review by Phineas Harper. Access on the internet.
[9] Access on the internet.