Theory on Demand

The multilingual Theory on Demand (ToD) book series was initiated by our Amsterdam-based research centre, the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), back in 2009, five years after its founding. The main reason for this were the increased costs to publish paper books with established publishers in the Netherlands, like NAi and Valiz, that have demanded in the past up to 20.000 euro per title in subsidies in order to make it economically viable to edit/translate, design, print and distribute a book, including the overhead of the publishing house with paid staff, rent, etc.—money to be organized by the authors, together with the INC. After the right-wing Rutte government implemented a budget cut of 50% in culture and arts during the post-2008 austerity wave, it became all but impossible for an applied science institution like the Hogeschool of Amsterdam (where INC is based) to apply for cultural grants. From now on funding in arts and education were firmly separated by an apartheid wall, aimed at ‘separate development’ of the two, once close sectors. In the cultural sector, even more than in the past, it’s state-controlled funds that decide which books are going to be published in the Netherlands. INC was thus forced to investigate ‘free’ digital publishing formats as ‘academic’ research grants were unwilling to finance free-floating theory publications. The other implication of this model is the increased dependency of the entire sector on free or cheap interns.

The philosophy of the ToD series was—and still is—relatively simple. Instead of pretending to be a full-fledged publishing house, the INC was going to do publishing experiments in a serialized form. In this way, technical knowledge could be transferred from one generation of staff and students to the next, which is all but impossible with on-off publications. Initially Margreet Riphagen set up the series, working together with the designer Katja van Stiphout, who is still designing the ToD book covers. Miriam Rasch also considerably contributed to the further development of the series, as have Sepp Eckenhaussen and Tommaso Campagna lately. Initially, the series offered a pdf version, a print-on-demand option to purchase a paper copy via lulu and the dispersion of the content via a variety of so-called web readers (such as Issuu). The rise of e-readers and smartphones urged us to start to experiment with the e-pub format (which was later on dissolved and integrated into the HTML5 standard). In the early years of the e-book separate version had to be made—and tested—for readers such as Kindle (Amazon), Kobo and others.

The experiences of staff, designers, programmers, writers and interns are stored in an internal manual plus a separate one for authors. Over the years, three generations have worked to refine the ‘markdown’ workflow. Sometimes, ToD titles are printed in small quantities, like 200 or 500, when funding for this has been available. In such a case, the INC would distribute these paper books for free, worldwide, via the postal service, much like is still happening in the case of its oldest series, the INC readers. Different from most others, the INC is not collecting data about downloads, views, likes on social media etc. As one of the first research centres in the world, INC declared itself data-free. Publications are gifts to the universe, in the spirit of Adilkno’s description of sovereign media that have emancipated itself of any possible audience (and its deadly boring statistics). The impact and ranking logic in academia has all but destroyed stylistic diversity and literary experimentation and led to a bureaucratic monoculture, aimed at eliminating all modes of critical and speculative thinking.

Three Dutch applied sciences grants have so far helped to finance the further development of the Theory on Demand series: the Hybrid Publishing Toolkit (2013-2014), which resulted in the e-pub manual with the same name, Making Public, which produced the Urgent Publishing Toolkit (2018-2020) and Going Hybrid (2022-23), which introduced a broader multi-media ‘expanded publishing’ approach, including online video and podcasting as grown-up, stand-alone publishing practices. In all these projects, the collaboration with the Rotterdam art academy Willem de Kooning, has been intense, in particular with Florian Cramer, Aymeric Mansoux, Michael Murtaugh and their Experimental Publishing (XPUB) master degree.

Editor:Geert Lovink

Now showing 1 - 20 of 46

Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture (1994-2001)
Lovink, Geert (2009)
This study examines the dynamics of critical Internet culture after the medium opened to a broad er audience in the mid 1990s. The core of the research consists of four case studies of non profit networks: the Amsterdam community provider, The Digital City (DDS); the early years of the nettime mailinglist community; a history of the European new media arts network Syndicate; and an analysis of the streaming media network Xchange. The research describes the search for sustainable community network models in a climate of hyper growth and increased tensions and conflict concerning moderation and ownership of online communities.
Imagine There Is No Copyright and No Cultural Conglomorates Too…
Smiers, Joost; van Schijndel, Marieke (2009)
Victims Symptom (PTSD and culture)
Peraica, Ana (2009)
Spatial Aesthetics. Art, Place and the Everyday
Papastergiadis, Nikos (2010)
This book examines the most recent shifts in contemporary art practice. By working with artists and closely observing the way in which they relate to urban space and engage other people, lo cally and globally, Nikos Papastergiadis provides a critical account of the transformation of art and public culture. He shows art has sought to democratise the big issues of our time and utilize new information technologies. While the concept of the everyday highlights the potential for transformation at the level of the individual, at the same time it has to be seen as a critique of broader structures; in this book Papastergiadis stresses the importance of situating a work within art history as well as relating it to its social context. Spatial Aesthetics will help artists, curators and cultural workers think about the ways they inter vene in public life. Challenging recent declarations in the art world that theory is obsolete, it seeks to show how art uses ideas, and how everyone can be involved in the ideas of politics and art.
Gaming Rhythms. Play and Counterplay from the Situated to the Global
Apperley, Tom (2010)
Jugendjahre der Netzkritik. Essays zu Web 1.0 (1995-1997)
Lovink, Geert; Schultz, Pit (2010)
Beyond ICT4D. New Media Research in Uganda
Balunywa, Ali; van Diepen, Guido; Dijkstra, Wouter; Henriquez, Kai; White, Ben; Lovink, Geert (2011)
Beyond ICT4D: New Media Research in Uganda is a collection of ethnographic reports from diverse perspectives of those living at the other end of the African ICT pyramid. Crucially, these texts refocus on the so-called “ICT4D” debate away from the standard western lens, which depicts users in the developing world as passive receivers of Western technological development, towards Ugandans whose use and production of technologies entail innovations from the ground up. It is this ‘other’ everyday point of view that is too often missing in the ICT4D debate: valuable voices that put technologies, projects and organizations into their proper context. Conducted in 2009 by a group of five Masters in New Media (humanities) students from the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Geert Lovink the research examines both the role and implementation of ICTs in Uganda, covering a wide range of subcultures and projects, including internet cafe usage, print media, NGOs and communities, software subcultures and civic new media. The book argues that now is the time to look beyond the technology layer and instead focus on the social implications and local consequences of digital media’s widespread use. By recognizing the impact that ICTs have on society and identifying what functions currently and what needs to be improved, we can more effectively understand and develop these technologies in the future.
My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in Transition
Lovink, Geert (2011)
My First Recession starts after the party is over. This study maps the transition of critical Internet culture from the mid to late 1990s Internet craze to the dotcom crash, the subsequent meltdown of global financial markets and 9/11. In his discussion of the dotcom boom-and-bust cycle, Geert Lovink lays out the challenges faced by critical Internet culture today. In a series of case studies, Lovink meticulously describes the ambivalent attitude that artists and activists take as they veer back and forth between euphoria and skepticism. As a part of this process, Lovink examines the internal dynamics of virtual communities through an analysis of the use of moderation and “collaborative filtering” on mailing lists and weblogs. He also confronts the practical and theoretical problems that appear as artists join the growing number of new-media education programs. Delving into the unexplored gold mines of list archives and weblogs, Lovink reveals a world that is largely unknown to both the general public and the Internet visionaries.
Image, Time and Motion. New Media Critique from Turkey
Treske, Andreas; Onen, Ufuk; Büyüm, Bestem; Degim, I. Alev (2011)
Creative Networks, in the Rearview Mirror of Eastern European History
Smite, Rasa (2012)
Creative Networks explores the dawn of the Internet culture in the age of network society from the perspective of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical angle the networks are introduced and interpreted as complex socio-technical systems. The author analyzes the development of these networked self-organized formations starting off with ‘virtual communities’ of ‘creative networks’, which emerged during the early phase of the Internet, up to the phenomena of today’s online ‘social networks’. Along with the translocal case studies of Nettime, Syndicate, Faces and Xchange networks (as well as with the other important facets of the 1990s network culture in Europe), the author studies also local community networking case of alternative and digital culture that evolved around E-Lab in the 1990s in Latvia. By focusing primarily on the network culture of 1990s, this study reflects those changes in the social structure of today’s society that are occurring under the process of socio-technical transformation.
Depletion Design. A Glossary of Network Ecologies
Wiedemann, Carolin; Zehle, Soenke (2012)
Depletion Design suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages. We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the horizon of depletion, to ask what it means to sustain ourselves, each other, again. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps.
The Dark Side of Google
Ippolita (2013)
In The Dark Side of Google Italian writers’ collective Ippolita provides a thorough, fresh analysis of what is behind the universe of Google and the metadata industry. In recent years Google has established itself as a major point of Internet access. We have progressively adapted to its sober, reassuring interface and its advertisements (discretely off to the side, yet always present). We have adopted its services and the habit of using it to the degree that ‘googling’ has become a form of behavior: ‘If you don’t know what it is, Google it!’ Google shows mastery in taking advantage of our need for simplicity. We sit in front of a colossus, an incredibly pervasive system of managing knowledge, comprising aggressive marketing and shrewd management of its own image, and the propagation of highly configurable interfaces that are still implacably recognizable. What is more, Google co-opts methods for developing Free Software, the use of futuristic systems for gathering and storing data. What lies behind the most consulted search engine in the world?
Variant Analyses, Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture
Lichty, Patrick (2013)
Lichty’s range of commentary and analysis dissects nearly two decades of what has now become new media society. Before Facebook’s IPO and Wikileaks’ media storm, artist-as-activists experimented with data gloves, virtual world performance, and anonymous, anarchic disruptions determined to bewilder traditional enclaves of art and political society. In this collection Lichty presents several such experiments in distributed creativity: collaborations across a range of technologies and platforms, where authorship becomes a vague placeholder and sometimes acts as a performance in of itself, and the artwork is equally in flux, always in process, and often disappearing into bits. These essays provide an extensive and timely overview of critical thought on new media culture, written by an observer-participant who has made major contributions to the sociopolitical movements he archives. Spanning art and new media theory, activism and literary criticism, this assembly seeks to understand the networked society in flux: what it means when the virtual integrates with the physical, and when newer, uncategorized media works prompt major shifts in cultural production and change the very definition of art and protest. As a veteran observer of the technological society, Lichty has produced the ideal guidebook for exploring the wilderness of our digital mediascapes, both past and present.
Transcoding the Digital. How Metaphors Matter in New Media
van den Boomen, Marianne (2014)
Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media by Marianne van den Boomen is a material-semiotic inquiry into the constitutive role of metaphors in our daily encounters with computers and networks. While interface concepts such as desktop and windows are easily recognized as metaphors, this research shows how in fact all digital sign-tool-objects – ranging from icons and email to Facebook friends, from hyperlink and tweet to Pirate Bay – are digital-material metaphors. They frame and organize how we access the black boxes of software and machinery, which in turn organize and reconfigure society. The same holds for discourse metaphors such as virtual community, cyberspace, Web 2.0, and social network. Metaphors matter in digital praxis, literally. This study makes an intervention into the contemporary theory of metaphor by extending it with the notion of material metaphor, including a manifest for hacking digital-material metaphors.
The Gray Zones of Creativity and Capital
Nikolić, Gordana; Tatlić, Šefik (2015)
What is the correlation among the creative industries, creative industry policies, new media paradigms and capitalism as colonial relations of dominance? What is the role of these industries in the prioritization of the interests of capital at the expense of those of society and how can these paradigms be criticized in the context of the actual, neoliberal, flexible regime of reproduction of capital? To what measure is this regime ‘flexible’ and to what measure it is just an extension of rigid, feudal and racial logics that underline (post)modern representational discourses? To what measure do the concepts of creativity, transparency, openness and flexibility conceal the hegemonic nature of modern hierarchies of exploitation? This publication brings together six essays that offer a critique of the relationship between the creative industries and capital. It treats ‘the networked world’ — its democracies, cognitivities, its attention and its paradigmatic cultural discourses — as one of the domains wherein and by which capitalism and its colonial relations of dominance are being reproduced, reorganized, perpetuated and ‘modernized’.
Online Courtship – Interpersonal Interactions Across Borders
Degim, I. Alev; Johnson, James; Fu, Tao (2015)
Computer mediated interpersonal interactions are defining our daily lives as we know it. Studying this phenomenon with various methodologies, across different cultures and traditions is a crucial component in understanding social ties. This book brings together articles that approach online dating from a range of cultural and critical perspectives. The research decodes the level of engagement and manner of approaching online dating in various countries such as France, India, China, Turkey, Cuba, USA and Portugal. Mapping the history of dating and courtship shows the evolution of these practices even before the introduction of the online medium and traces parallels and differences between old and new traditions.
In the Facebook Aquarium: The Resistible Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism
Ippolita (2015)
In their new work research collective Ippolita provides a critical investigation of the inner workings of Facebook as a model for all commercial social networks. Facebook is an extraordinary platform that can generate large profit from the daily activities of its users. Facebook may appear to be a form of free entertainment and self-promotion but in reality its users are working for the development of a new type of market where they trade relationships. As users of social media we have willingly submitted to a vast social, economic and cultural experiment. By critically examining the theories of Californian right-libertarians, Ippolita show the thread connecting Facebook to the European Pirate Parties, WikiLeaks and beyond. An important task today is to reverse the logic of radical transparency and apply it to the technologies we use on a daily basis. The algorithms used for online advertising by the new masters of the digital world – Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon – are the same as those used by despotic governments for personalized repression. Ippolita argues we should not give in to the logic of conspiracy or paranoia instead we must seek to develop new ways of autonomous living in our networked society.
Geoblocking and Global Video Culture
Lobato, Ramon; Meese, James (2016)
How do global audiences use streaming platforms like YouTube, Netflix and iPlayer? How does the experience of digital video change according to location? What strategies do people use to access out-of-region content? What are the commercial and governmental motivations behind geoblocking? Geoblocking and Global Video Culture explores the cultural implications of access control and circumvention in an age of VPNs. Featuring seventeen chapters from diverse critical positions and locations – including China, Iran, Malaysia, Turkey, Cuba, Brazil, USA, Sweden and Australia.
Internet on the Outstation. The Digital Divide and Remote Aboriginal Communities
Rennie, Ellie; Hogan, Eleanor; Gregory, Robin; Crouch, Andrew; Wright, Alyson; Thomas, Julian (2016)
Internet on the Outstation provides a new take on the digital divide. Why do whole communities choose to go without the internet when the infrastructure for access is in place? Through an in-depth exploration of the digital practices occurring in Aboriginal households in remote central Australia, the authors address both the dynamics of internet adoption and the benefits that flow from its use. The book challenges us to think beyond the standard explanations for the digital divide, arguing that digital exclusion is not just another symptom of social exclusion. At its heart, Internet on the Outstation is a compelling examination of equality and difference in the digital age, asking: Can internet access help resolve the disadvantages associated with remote living? Internet on the Outstation is the result of a multi-year research collaboration, which included a trial of internet infrastructure, training and maintenance in three small Aboriginal communities (known as outstations). During the research phase, Ellie Rennie, Eleanor Hogan and Julian Thomas were based at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research in Melbourne. Robin Gregory and Andrew Crouch worked at the Centre for Appropriate Technology, an Indigenous-owned research and training organization in Alice Springs. Alyson Wright worked for the Central Land Council, the representative body for traditional owners of the central Australia region.
The New Aesthetic and Art. Constellations of the Postdigital
Contreras-Koterbay, Scott; Mirocha, Łukasz (2016)
The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital is an interdisciplinary analysis focusing on new digital phenomena at the intersections of theory and contemporary art. Asserting the unique character of New Aesthetic objects, Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha trace the origins of the New Aesthetic in visual arts, design, and software, find its presence resonating in various kinds of digital imagery, and track its agency in everyday effects of the intertwined physical world and the digital realm. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha bring to light an original perspective that identifies an autonomous quality in common digital objects and examples of art that are increasingly an important influence for today’s culture and society. Influenced by a diverse range of figures, ranging from Vilém Flusser, Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, David Berry, Lev Manovich, Olga Goriunova, Ernst Mayr, Bruce Sterling and, of course, James Bridle, The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital doesn’t just propose a description of a new set of objects but radically asserts that New Aesthetic objects analogously function as organisms within a broader digital-physical ecosystems of things and agents.

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