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 52

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.
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.
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.
Archiving Activism in the Digital Age
Salerno, Daniele; Rigney, Ann (2024)
The archiving of social movements has long contributed to their cultural impact. Given the wide availability of digital tools for the making and storing of records, ‘autonomous’ archiving is today becoming a significant part of the activist toolkit itself. In parallel, professional archiving has undergone significant change, leading to more participatory and community-based practices that belie the idea of ‘the Archive’ as an institution merely serving the interests of the state. This collection brings together academics, archivists, and activists to explore some of the many new sites where activist archives are being produced at the present time. With case studies ranging between Turkey, Afghanistan, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, and the US, it offers new insights into the opportunities and challenges posed by digitization as well as into the tensions between autonomy and long-term sustainability. It shows above all the potential of archives to become sites of renewed critical engagement.
Failurists - When Things go Arwy
Lammes, Sybille; Jungnickel, Kat; Hjorth, Larissa; Rae, Jen (2023)
Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in fields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies, privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, film, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds. Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored. In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways. In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated?
Communities at a Crossroads. Material Semiotics for Online Sociability in the Fade of Cyberculture
Pelizza, Annalisa (2018)
How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialisation of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture’s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today. Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages after the ‘golden age’ of online communities. Communities at a Crossroads draws upon the analysis of Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities archive, which is the largest of its kind worldwide, and in doing so presents a multi-faceted picture of internet sociability between the two centuries. Privileging an anti-essentialist, performative approach over sociological understandings of online communities, Communities at a Crossroads proposes a radical epistemological turn. It argues that in order to conceptualize contemporary online sociability, we need first to abandon the techno-libertarian communalist rhetoric. Then, it is necessary to move beyond the foundational distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and adopt a material semiotic approach. In the end, we might have to relinquish the effort to define online or digital communities and engage in more meaningful mapping exercises.
Listening into Others. An Ethnographic Exploration in Govindpuri
Chandola, Tripta (2020)
The essays collected here are based on two decades of engagement with the residents of the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi. The book presents stories of many kinds, from speculative treatises, via the recollection of a thousand everyday conversations, to an account of the making of a radio documentary. Zig-zagging through the lanes of Govindpuri, Listening into Others explores the vibrant sounds emanating from slum culture. Redefining ethnography as listening in passing, Chandola excels at narrating the stories of the everyday. The ubiquity of smartphones, sonic selfies, wailing, the ethics of wearing jeans, the crossroad rituals of elections, the political agency of slum-dwellers, the war of the sexes through bodily gestures, and conflicts over ownership of both property and sound generated in the slums — these are among the many encounters Chandola opens up to the reader. Slums are anxious spaces in the materiality, experience, and imagination of a city. They are the by-products of the violent and exploitative mechanisms of urbanization. What becomes of the slum-dwellers, who universally, across centuries, cities and continents, befall similar fates of being discriminated, reckoned to be the scum of the earth, and a burden on society? By listening to identified others and amplifying their voices in their own vocabularies and grammar, Tripta Chandola’s praxis creates a methodological, political, and poetic rupture. Slums, she finds, are not anathema to the city’s past, present, or future. They are an integral component of urbanization and a foundational part of the city. With Listening into Others, Tripta Chandola poses the question: ‘Who owns the slum, and who determines which voices are heard? From where you are, listen with me.’
Good Data
Daly, Angela; Devitt, S. Kate; Mann, Monique (2019)
Media Do Not Exist. Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures
Larrue, Jean-Marc; Vitali-Rosati, Marcello (2019)
Media Do Not Exist: Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures by Jean-Marc Larrue and Marcello Vitali-Rosati offers a radically new approach to the phenomenon of mediation, proposing a new understanding that challenges the very notion of medium. It begins with a historical overview of recent developments in Western thought on mediation, especially since the mid 80s and the emergence of the disciplines of media archaeology and intermediality. While these developments are inseparable from the advent of digital technology, they have a long history. The authors trace the roots of this thought back to the dawn of philosophy. Humans interact with their environment – which includes other humans – not through media, but rather through a series of continually evolving mediations, which Larrue and Vitali-Rosati call ‘mediating conjunctures’. This observation leads them to the paradoxical argument that ‘media do not exist’. Existing theories of mediation processes remain largely influenced by a traditional understanding of media as relatively stable entities. Media Do Not Exist demonstrates the limits of this conception. The dynamics relating to mediation are the product not of a single medium, but rather of a series of mediating conjunctures. They are created by ceaselessly shifting events and interactions, blending the human and the non-human, energy, and matter.
Dispatches from Ukraine. Tactical Media Reflections and Responses
van der Togt, Maria; 11111 &23%#719 (2022)
This publication marks the first results of the Tactical Media Room Ukraine project, launched in February 2022 in Amsterdam after the shocking Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Tactical Media Room is a network of activists, journalists, scholars, and artists linked by the exchange of ideas and practices—all aimed at supporting Ukrainian media and confronting Russian state propaganda. Together, the network of experts initiated a screening and a series of meetings that took place mainly in Amsterdam. Based on these meetings, Dispatches from Ukraine: Tactical Media Reflections and Responses showcases initiatives, critique, and essays that provide insights into the ways information circulates in time of war. This edition also aims at overcoming the Eurocentric approach through inviting Ukrainian journalists, artists, and thinkers to share their observations and personal experience of living through war in the digital age. It allows the collected reflections to be grounded and situated within the certain context of Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian long-lasting conflicts. While on the one hand, perspectives on info-war and the array of urgents matters at a distance are presented, on the other hand, this publication also focuses on what is missing from outside of the war-zones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pandemic Exchange. How Artists Experience the COVID-19 Crisis
Bosma, Josephine (2021)
News reports on the Covid-19 pandemic seldom include how the virus and the societal lockdowns affect artists. A lively circuit of cultural events, meetings, and exhibitions has come to an almost complete stop, leaving artists often not just with a significant drop in income but also bereft of their vital and supporting social communities. Art writer and curator Josephine Bosma, feeling quite cut off herself after a year of lockdowns and too much screen time, saw both desperate and relieved outcries from artists popping up through the glossy algorithmic veneer on social media. She decided to reach out to some of the more outspoken voices. From this an interview project was born, which grew into this collection of heartfelt stories and brief reports from artists trying to survive the pandemic and sometimes finding unexpected ways to do so.
Videoblogging Before YouTube
Bjørkmann Berry, Trine (2018)
In Videoblogging Before YouTube, Trine Bjørkmann Berry offers a cultural history of online video, focusing on the critical moment when the internet moved from being a mostly textual medium to a truly multimedia one. Through a close analysis of the early videoblogging community and their creative practices, she argues that early in the new millennium a new cultural-technical media hybrid emerged. This coalesced around the short-form digital film whose aesthetic, technical form and content is a predecessor to, and anticipator of our current media ecology.
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.
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.
Imagine There Is No Copyright and No Cultural Conglomorates Too…
Smiers, Joost; van Schijndel, Marieke (2009)
The Age of Total Images. Disappearance of a Subjective Viewpoint in Post-digital Photography
Peraica, Ana (2019)
In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’. By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind the reappearance of flat Earth theories. Through an adventurous exploration of the ways the Earth has been represented in sculptural globes, landscape painting, aerial photography, and even new media art, she proposes that a significant reason for the reemergence today in the belief that the world is flat lies in processes and practices of representation which flatten it during the compositing of photographs into ‘total images’. Such images, Peraica argues, are principally characterized by the disappearance of the subjective point of view and angle of view from photography, as the perspectival tool of the camera is being replaced with the technical perspective of the map, and human perception with machine vision, within a polyperspectival assemblage. In the media constellation of these total images, photography is but one layer of visual information among many, serving not to represent some part of the Earth, but to provide an illusion of realism. Ana Peraica is an art historian whose research focus is on post-digital photography. She is the author of the books Fotografija kao dokaz (Multimedijalni Institute, Zagreb, 2018) and Culture of the Selfie (Theory on Demand #24, 2017), among others, as well as the editor of several readers, including Smuggling Anthologies, Victims Symptom (PTSD and Culture) (Theory on Demand #3, 2009), and Žena na raskrižju ideologija. She teaches at Danube University near Vienna, Austria, and is a visiting lecturer at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, in addition to continuing to run a photographic studio in Split, Croatia, founded in 1932 by her grandfather.

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