Welcome to all empyre subscribers and, especially, this months moderators and discussants, Penny Travlou, Smita Kheria, Tiziana Terranova, Dmytri Kleiner, Adam Hyde, Salvatore Iaconesi, Joss Hands and Marc Garrett. We have the collective responsibility of welcoming in 2012, during the year's first monthly theme. For much of the world 2011 was, at best, a challenging year, and 2012 looks like more of the same. This appears to be a period of socio-economic change as the shifting tectonic plates of geo-political power grind against one another. I've never been keen on futurology or fortune-telling but am confident 2012 will be another year of turbulent events that will have us end up in a different place to where we started.
In this globalised and highly mediated context, during the month of January, we wish to focus empyre discussion on how writing and publishing are currently evolving in the context of global networks. We wish to engage a debate about open models of writing and publishing. We hope to gain some insight into how changes in notions and practices of authorship, media, form, dissemination, intellectual property and economics affect writing and publishing as well as the formation of the reader/writerships, communities and social engagement that must flow from that activity. Specifically, we wish to look at examples of open publishing, whether they be FLOSS manuals, copyLeft or CopyFarLeft or other publication models, in order to look at new methods for knowledge making and distribution. We also wish to consider how communities of shared-value emerge through such initiatives and how their members are able to identify themselves to one another and others. As usual, the month (the next three weeks) will be structured into weekly bite sized chunks, each led by a moderator and involving two discussants. Participants can choose to post to the list at any time but the discussants for each week will have the opportunity to focus the debate for that period. We hope that as many empyre subscribers as possible will feel engaged and contribute to the discussion. Our guests are, in the order of the weeks they will participate: Tiziana Terranova lectures and researches cultural studies and new media at the Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'. She is the author of Network Culture (Pluto Press, 2004) and has recently co-edited, with Couze Venn, a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society on Michel Foucault's recently published courses. She is currently working on a book about neoliberalism and digital social media. Dmytri Kleiner describes himself as a Venture Communist. He creates miscommunication technologies, including deadSwap, Thimbl and R15N and is the author of the Telekommunist Manifesto. He lives in Berlin and his url is http://dmytri.info Simon Biggs is an artist, writer and curator. His work focuses on interactive systems, new media and digital poetics (http://www.littlepig.org.uk). He is involved in a number of research projects, including the EU funded project Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (http://www.elmcip.net). He is Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, directing the MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices, at the University of Edinburgh. Adam Hyde lives in Berlin. In 2007 Adam started FLOSS Manuals, a community for producing free manuals for free software. Through this work he also started Booki (a book production platform) and has been pioneering Book Sprints - a methodology for collaboratively producing books in 5 days or less. Previously, as an artist, he was 1/2 of r a d i o q u a l i a, Simpel and other artistic projects engaging open source and free media. Salvatore Iaconesi teaches cross media design at “La Sapienza” University of Rome, at Rome University of Fine Arts and at ISIA Design in Florence. He is the founder of Art is Open Source and of FakePress Publishing, focusing on the human beings' mutations through ubiquitous technologies and networks. Penny Travlou is a social geographer and ethnographer lecturing in the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. Her research currently focuses on studying emergent network-based creative communities. She is Co-Investigator on the ELMCIP project. Marc Garrett is an activist, artist, writer and co-director/founder (with artist Ruth Catlow) of internet arts collective http://www.furtherfield.org (since 96) and the Furtherfield Gallery & social space in London. Through these platforms various contemporary media arts exhibitions and projects are presented nationally and internationally. Marc also hosts a weekly media arts radio programme on Resonance FM, co-edited the publication "Artists Re: thinking games" and is editing a new publication "Conversations As We Leave The 21st Century". He is currently undertaking a PhD at Birkbeck University, London. Joss Hands is a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University where he is Director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ARCDigital). His research interests are at the intersection of technology, new media, politics and critical theory. His focus has been in two main areas. The role of technology in providing an arena for the expression of dissent and the organisation of resistance movements and the role of technology in more formal democratic procedures, specifically the role of the Internet in contributing towards the development of deliberative democracy. He has recently completed a book on digital activism, @ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture, published by Pluto Press. Smita Kheria is a lawyer and lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh. Her focus of interest is intellectual property law and issues around authorship, especially concerning artists' practices with new media. Smita is an associate of SCRIPT: the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology and is Supervising editor (Intellectual Property) for SCRIPT-ed, the journal of Law, Technology & Society. best Simon Simon Biggs si...@littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk s.bi...@ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/ _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
