Tauba Auerbach, RGB Colorspace Atlas. (2011)
I once heard
Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College, compare books to stairs. ?They?ve
invented the elevator,? he said, ?but sometimes you still walk up.? There are
countless discussions on the future of the book?they are picked up in magazine feature
articles, in trade conferences, and in academic roundtables?and in all of
these, the future of the printed word seems certain: in a generation or two,
print will become obsolete. In this age of changing habits, if print is the
stairs and screens the elevator, then what could the escalator be?
This moment in time, and the awareness of the
possibilities electronic publishing grant, affect the manner in which we relate
to texts in a way that is under constant scrutiny. But images prove to be a
different problem. The separation between text and images has a long history.
In fact, images have posed a challenge for publishers from the early days of
print?be it the cost of printing them; the payments for illustrators,
photographers, and designers; or simply contextualizing the images and their
relation to the text?but they have become crucial to our understanding of
texts. When the Illustrated London News, the world?s first illustrated weekly
newspaper, began publishing in 1842, the relationship between the text and the
engraved images in the paper was such a novelty that it took the weekly about a
decade to stake a hold in that era?s news distribution channels. Once it did,
it became one of the most widely circulated newspapers in Victorian Britain.
The marriage of text and the engraved image marked a new level of fluency in
communication via images, which does away with staples of early print day, even
though the separation between image and text lasted for many decades later, and
can still be traced today. (Think, for example, of the plate pages, where
color images were glued onto the paper, so that the book or magazine would be
printed in black and white, adding the color pages later in a way that saves
money on printing, but also generates a wholly different relationship with
images. These are often associated with encyclopedias, but a large number of
artist?s monographs retained this design even after color printing became
widely accessible, creating the odd text-image relationship where an artwork is
described to the most minute detail, with a comment in parenthesis directing
the reader to ?color plate 3,? where the mentioned piece could be seen in
glossy print.)
The generations to come of age in the days of
digital publishing and reading on screens have a much more complicated
relationship with images. The human eye-brain system is capable of reading a
large number of high quality images in a matter of split seconds, and this,
alongside the hand-eye coordination?think about the pleasure of a touch screen
versus inky newspaper pages?is rapidly developing to mirror our changing habits
of consuming information. So much so that the contemporary heightened
sensitivity to the way we read images can lead to an ability to, at times,
ignore the quality of the images when inserted into a text, the way our brain
glides over a typo in the flow of reading. The way we read images online is
only one thing these magazines deal with in the process of publishing, but it
is surely an element that dictates a large portion of the reading experience of
these publications.
The first issue of the Illustrated London News (1842)
The endless discussions on the future of print
bring up the contemporary fluency with images on a regular basis. Aside from
the fact that digital publishing is often cheaper and always easier to
disseminate, many consider the role of the image in digital publishing to be a
key aspect in the contemporary experience of reading. The benefits of handheld
devices are considered time and again, especially in relation to embedding a
variety of image formats: slideshows, moving images, animated GIFs, and so
forth. A number of start-ups like Flyp bring screen-based reading beyond the
initial technology, and enhanced e-books are quite widely considered to be the
next major option offered by electronic reading devices.
Whereas
some of the aforementioned key possibilities that publishing online presents may
seem so pertinent to contemporary art publishing, they also bring up a
number of crucial issues in the relationship between the screen, the text, and
the image. In the past few years, contemporary art publishing has had to
somehow consider all of these questions?be it print publications that have to
strategize their web presence or online publications that need to carve out a
place for themselves in the web?s infinite possibilities for distraction.
Taking into consideration a number of web-based contemporary art magazines, I
asked editors to answer a number of questions about the way their editorial lines
react to the possibilities and restrictions of the internet environment.
Questions considered things like what online
distribution offered, the economies of attention on the internet, sourcing images
online, and finally, the relationship between print and web-based media,
especially considering current tendencies of online art publications to come
out with print readers.
Distribution: The
Internet?s Nuts and Bolts
Mousse iPad Screenshot
?Intention follows a platform that you can deal
with and afford,? says Mousse's Head
of Publications Stefano Cernuschi. Mousse
is printed in newspaper form, but also has extensive online presence and
recently launched a dedicated iPad app. The distribution of print publications
follows certain sets of rules?perfect binding, for example, helps?and a number
of print publications utilize the internet as another distribution platform. Artforum and Frieze, for instance, upload each issue?s table of contents but
only make a number of articles in each issue available online for free, thus
enticing readers to buy the print magazine. Frieze
uploads all older content, whereas Artforum
has a unique website too, which includes web-only features like certain reviews
and the infamous Diary section.
At
the early days of the internet, users became accustomed to getting things for
free, content especially, but once the first popular sites introduced paywalls,
many followed and many will trail. Online magazine Triple Canopy recently introduced a membership system, asking its
readers for $3 a month; the magazine will still be freely accessible to
non-members, but a system of remuneration is indeed being considered, a
complex idea based on a notion of community: That readers will pay for what
they can get for free because they would like to support the magazine. So what
about Cernuschi?s ?platform you can afford?? Clearly, publishing online comes
to a fraction of the printing costs, which is one of the obvious reasons to go online.
Another is distribution. While going viral on the internet is still a process
that is a mystery to many (not to mention the example of the somewhat
unexpected online popularity of cats), web readership, even if murky and
somewhat untrackable really, can be a constant surprise that is inexistent in a
print magazine, even when considering the idea that a print product might
circulate between more than the one person who pays for it at a given store.
And with online readership comes the new idea of participation. In ?The Journey
West,? his editorial and declaration of intent, Thomas Lawson, the Editor-in-Chief
of Los Angeles?based online magazine East
of Borneo, explains that the magazine?s ?genesis has been long and deliberative:
several years of thinking past the delights and constraints of the printed
page, and one very intense year of thinking through the actual possibilities of
current online publication.? [1] One of the publication?s
stated intents is to build up an ongoing archive about Los Angeles and its
cultural scene, and one way East of
Borneo found to do this is incorporate its readers. Thus, readers can
upload content to the site, contribute texts and source material,
and partake in the construction of the site as a resource. These examples
take the idea of the dated notion of web 2.0 user-generated content to a level
different than Facebook, to use the obvious example. While Facebook makes its
users work for it, they do not partake in a larger Facebook community (in fact,
the social network parcels out users? sense of community for them: a school
attended, a workplace, etc.). What these publications do is harness the
user-generated labor and value (monetary or cultural) in order to create a
sense of public.
What We Pay for Attention
The
internet gets confusing at times. We consume enormous amounts of information
online, the origins of which we often can?t point to, except for in our
browser?s history. Publishing online seems like such an obvious choice?it?s
cheap, widely accessible, and so ?of our time,? to paraphrase Baudelaire?s il faut être de
son temps?but it also means that online publications are
continuously fighting for the reader?s attention. Online attention is a
constant battle. Apart from the traffic of a site, web analytics
also measure how much time a given person will spend on this or that website.
Five minutes is not bad at all. The economy of attention online is radically
different than anything known in print. ?Though we all spent hours each day
scanning screens for information, what on the internet did we actually read??[2] Ask the editors of Triple Canopy, whose (much repeated) mantra is to ?slow down the
internet.? Text has a built-in duration: we take a few milliseconds to
recognize words; being image literate also means that even those seconds may
seem like much. ?Slowing down the internet? seems like one way in, both
textually and visually: ?Our thinking of images in
relationship to economies of attention is no different than how we consider
writing,? says Triple Canopy?s Hannah
Whitaker. ?The photographs that we publish might require more attention and
consideration than others online. We cater to a readership that accepts expending
time and effort on a piece.? The process of contextualizing online images,
among the amazing diversity of the web, takes time. Demanding that the reader
spend this time with the magazine is in fact quite refreshing and may push the
viewer to, indeed, read online.
Another possible answer to
the question of what content online do we actually read is built-in to mobile
devices? interfaces. Ironically enough, even though mobile devices are
supposedly designed to keep us company in transit (even considering the fact
that Apple now advertises the iPad as a handheld device meant mainly for people
who tend to sit on the couch most of the time, and don?t want to walk over to
their macbooks), the relatively new idea of apps actually introduces a new
sense of undivided attention online. iOS, Apple?s operating system, does not
really allow for simultaneous use of two apps. The result is that while on our
computer we always have another tab open on the browser, another program open
in the background, or another memo blinking on the calendar view, when we use
the internet on our mobile devices, we focus on the app we are using. Reading
the New York Times on its dedicated
app doesn?t allow for a quick change to look at the new email
that just came in without leaving the newspaper app and switching to the email
one?a decision much more conscious than that of switching tabs, for example. The iPad, iPhone, and
other handheld devices also rid themselves of the cursor, so that their users
are not really directed anywhere anymore. This is an interaction that designers
are apparently much challenged by?a way of looking at a page that is closer to
reading print. Where the cursor was a stand-in for the user?s finger, the
finger is now used again, and the eye follows a part of the body rather than an
element embedded in the screen.
Now
that such a screen-based platform exists, how to use it? ?No one reads Mousse from cover to cover?and I?d imagine the iPad app is the
same,? says Cernuschi. ?When it comes to attention, I think it is also a
derivative of the way in which information is presented graphically. We try to
work with reduction?when the quantity of textual and visual content you can
upload is limitless, it gets quite difficult?and we didn?t want to be a
Wikipedia kind of experience. We use one font across the range, keep the text
simple, and try to focus on the images.? Cernuschi moves on to explain, ?In a way,
we?re all children of the iPod.? The act of using a touch screen is so
pleasurable, such a radically different movement, scrolling with one?s finger
rather than flipping through paper, that it changes the user?s interaction with
the visual content. What the editors at Mousse
claim was difficult in the development of the app is its boundless nature. In
print, every addition might be translated to printing costs?so physical
constraints bring about the necessity of making choices, and with it, an
editorial line. Which led the editors to understand the iPad as a reading
platform??it?s still two-dimensional,? sayd Cernuschi?and so the app is not
completely based on multimedia, even though it does include a number of videos,
for example. But the shift from a printed copy of Mousse to its iPad app is not as sweeping as one may imagine.
The Location of the Online
Image
Screenshot from Red Hook, with images provided through Katya Sander?s Hard Drive (where images accompanying the texts are automatically pulled from the web, based on each reader?s hard drive as well as key words and themes in the articles).
When requesting
images for a print publication, some guidelines are quite clear: The digital
image needs to be 300dpi, it needs to be of a certain size, measured in inches
and centimeters rather than pixels, and (at least usually) the rights for it
need to be cleared.
[3] Online
publishing muddles all of these. While some of the publications contacted for
this article attested that they have a photo editor or image editor (the leap to
?image editor? in order to describe publishing in the online sphere is slowly
being made. As Whitaker noted, ?It points to an opening up of the field to
include the non-photographic image?), their role is more curatorial than that
of a traditional image editor. Are
there any rules as to which images are published, the way they are retrieved,
and their integration in the magazines? Surely, many images are harvested from
a variety of online repository, Google Images being the obvious example. This
nods to the flattening of the digital image in a complicated way. On screen,
the different kinds of images?say, film stills, digital or analogue photography,
digital renderings, and so forth?can be quite similar. While we are becoming
increasingly visually literate, few are the people who truly interact with the
distinction between the digital image and the physical print. No one is stunned
anymore by the idea of a collector buying a photograph based on an image sent
to him or her via email from a gallery. The printing process?moving from the screen to
the physical object, that is?becomes a formality. In
her introduction to
Triple Canopy?s
issue on photography, ?Black Box,? Whitaker points out the fact that a large
number of the images found online (be they images uploaded to social networks,
news-related ones, or commercial photographs) were shot digitally and uploaded
to the internet, without, according to her, ?so much as a passing consideration
of printing them in a physical form.?
[4]The Center for
Curatorial Studies at Bard College recently introduced Red Hook, an online journal for curatorial studies. Red Hook?s relationship with images is
one example that truly considers the magazine?s online existence and presence.
In the editorial for the first issue, its editor Tirdad Zolghadr states, ?Although this journal will certainly
attempt to do justice to opportunities for revisiting traditional hierarchies
between image and text, it will be careful not to imply that language is
diminishing in comparative importance, or that the online sphere can heal old
wounds. On the contrary, the idea is to highlight and complicate an enduring
hegemony in the hermeneutic food chain of online circulation.?[5]
One way to complicate those old wounds Zolghadr mentions?the text/image divide
being a painful one?is the magazine?s particular approach to images. Issue 1 is
fully illustrated by one artist project: Katya Sander?s Hard Drive, where all images accompanying the texts are
automatically pulled from the web, based on each reader?s hard drive as well as
key words and themes in the articles. Red
Hook does not have an image editor, but rather, it recruits artists to
think through and further explore the magazine?s relationship to images.
Zolghadr further explains, ?This was not meant to delegate
image-editing responsibilities, at least not in a lazy and self-effacing way, but
to avoid putting the cart before the horse. In a curatorial context, the
specific mode of knowledge production I find the most productive is one that is
developed and tested via an imbrication of theory and practice, saying and
doing?preferably though not necessarily in tandem with artists. When Sander was
invited to partake in the first issue, the instrumentalization of images in a
publication context?and the lack of online signposts that traditionally steer
this kind of process?was a cornerstone of the conversation.? The resulting
project is refreshing?I haven?t seen an image repeated twice in the issue?, and
also confusing?the images accompanying the texts on my screen varied from milk bottles in a crate to demonstrators in Eastern Europe, and the link to the
images' original contexts may be an interesting addition, but one that can be
distracting, in that it sends the reader back to the wilderness of online image
repositories, asking him or her to make sense of the images once those no
longer have any relationship to the original text where they were encountered.
It may be an interesting exercise in decoding images, but it?s also a losing
hand in the battle on online attention.
From Print to Screen and
Back Again
(from print to screen):
?When Triple Canopy was founded,? its editors recall, ?the content was
bounded in a box and you ?flipped? through the pages as you would a print
magazine. We hoped that this page metaphor would underline our relationship the
kind of serious content more associated with printed media?to (as we?ve often
stated) ?slow down the internet.? In the end, this format proved to be limiting
and, ultimately, anathema to our mission to consider the internet?s specific
qualities as a form. We eventually redesigned the magazine and scrapped the
page in favor of horizontally scrolling columns. In this new format, the
relationships between image and text are more fluid. A given image is seen in
the context of text that comes both before and after it and the bounds of the
magazine are constrained by the size of the browser window and by the
computer's screen size, or are in other words, set by the reader.? What this
description exemplifies is the way in which the design of web-based art
publications considers itself in face of print. The design of numerous online
art publications considers the history and tradition of print in a myriad of
nostalgic, more or less skeumorphic ways while bringing up old fears that
reading habits are almost unchangeable. Even though Triple Canopy is quite unique in its horizontal scroll, it shares a
similar attention to the print versus screen reading experience. One
interesting element of which is the persisting presence of the table of
contents in web-based publications: as part of the linking culture of the
internet, the links to the other articles in the same issue are visible across
the board. Another aspect of online culture that these publications have picked
up on is tagging by subject and ?for further reading? tabs, which try to
anticipate the reader?s interests according with the stated themes of a given
article.
Where
do images fall within these design questions? Triple Canopy?s editors attest that, ?One issue that came up in the
transition between the two formats [the flip box and the horizontal scroll] is
that you lose the impact of a photograph when it slides onto the page rather
than appearing in an instant. But, we do have a full screen function for those
images that require more white space around them.? Most other publications have
a vertical design that introduces images as sidebars or directly aligned in the
text, mainly without linking the images out or allowing for a full-screen
viewing option. I would argue that this is another remnant of print culture in
the digital sphere. Considering that the content of these online publications
generally sways toward the theoretical more so than the glossy-print-magazine
type, this brings forth a relationship with images where they are more illustrative
and do not require a very specific?say, full-screen view?attention. Mousse?s Cernuschi says, ?We have a
complicated relationship with images because we print in a newspaper format but
we?re a fine arts magazine. So we flirt with this idea of inaccurate
reproduction in the first place. The priority with images is not exactly to
?get it,??for that, I think paper printing is a very honest filter: it looks
cool, but not really good. On the screen, images look much better. I would much
prefer an image printed on appropriate paper than on a screen, but that?s usually
not the case. So for us it?s very different, especially considering that we can
reproduce media. You develop a so-called video still aesthetic on paper.?
(and back again):
When considering the multiplicity of
valid reasons why so many contemporary art publications choose to go online, it
is quite astonishing to see how extensively they consider print as an option.[6]
Take e-flux journal: It was launched by an organization that made its name and
brand by being the first to give a very specific?and much called-for?online
service. The journal, too, started in 2008 as a web-based initiative; but it
soon introduced a series of readers in book form, published in collaboration
with the Berlin-based publishing house Sternberg Press, and a print-on-demand
system that allows readers and institutions to print out full issues followed. e-flux journal?s distribution system includes art institutions and
bookstores around the world, who all download a PDF generated directly from the
online articles, in what is a nod to ideas of open circulation and
transmission of ideas on the internet, only in an offline, widely distributed
but still independent, version.
A
number of other web-based magazines seem inclined to follow e-flux
journal?s direction. Triple Canopy
published a first reader, Invalid Format,
in the end of 2011. The cover of the book reads ?Volume 1??and indeed, the
reader only covers issues 1 through 4, bringing up the amusing question of
whether Triple Canopy will forever
chase its own tail: Will the book-form readers catch up with the
online journals? And Red Hook editor
Zolghadr states that publishing a reader could be one direction for the
magazine, but according to him ?we?re taking these things
pedantically seriously, and are in no hurry to expand to other media just yet.
The journal will first need to take its time to familiarize itself with its
technical and institutional specificities.?
So
what does it mean to print out the internet? In the introduction to Invalid Format, the editors of Triple Canopy discuss their initial
speculations as to the possible longevity of a web-based publication: ?We had a
sense of the inevitability of obsolescence?think of cassette tapes, LaserDiscs,
Mosaic Netscape 0.9?and of the need to safeguard our work being reduced to so
many broken links and 404 errors.? The idea of publishing books based on the
online journal came up as a way of ?artful archiving.?
Downloading,
so to say, the content of these publications from the online sphere to print
can also introduce new problem of design. When taken offline, the images gain a
new visual character: whereas on the screen, all images are in color but are
indiscernible in context (especially when linked out of the specific journal?an
image used in an online publication is totally different when viewed through
Google Images) and in origin, in a printed form it is tied in with the text
and the design in a way that relates to the history of publishing and to our
expectations as readers in a wholly different way. Take, for example, Boris
Groys?s article, ?The Weak Universalism,? in e-flux journal. The piece, where Groys considers avant-garde?s
nondistinction between artists and non-artists, is accompanied by a number of
images, like a photograph of Kasimir Malevich teaching a class, a painting by
Kandinsky, and a screenshot of Andy Warhol?s Facebook page (?Sign up for
Facebook to connect with Andy Warhol!?). The randomness of the screenshot may
seem more intentional in print?in the print version of that issue, for example, it sits on the same spread as a
still from Empire?and it loses its
interconnected nature that it may have with its online home (imagine reading
that article on one browser tab while keeping Facebook open in another tab).
And, unlike traditional print, where a screenshot or a video still may be of
visibly lesser quality than a high-resolution photograph of a Kandinsky, the
printed versions of online art publications tend to retain the flattened-out,
non-hierarchical nature of the image as it was seen online. But whether images
printed in poor quality, off the internet, become simply signifiers or rather,
an ?aesthetic of screenshots,? remains with the reader.
To end at the
beginning, let me bring up the question of the escalator one more time. Unlike
an elevator or stairs, which can be featured in private homes or apartment
buildings, an escalator is generally inherently public. It?s not the exact
middle ground between the stairs and the elevator because it picks up on
certain elements of both while remaining a different variant of them as a mode
of transport. Like the stairs, it considers only the human body (it will barely
tolerate a baby carriage or luggage); and like the elevator, it has a built-in
sense of pace. It seems pertinent here that the escalator is a trope of public
space?train stations, airport, department stores, and so forth. What are the
needs of the escalator riders? It allows them the possibility of cutting
distances short while eliminating the sense of a group that an elevator may
create.
The specificities of contemporary art
publishing initiatives online may echo the escalator at times, while also
embodying certain characteristics of the stairs and the elevator. We are only
getting more image-savvy with time, which confuses and collides the
relationship between text and images. The current decade is a very particular
one in the history of publishing, as it will be full of moments that will be
declared to be decisive for the ?fate of the book.? And maybe books are like
taking the stairs?it may be old-fashioned, but still seems natural, and our
brain-eye coordination is accustomed to it in a way similar to how quickly
toddlers learn to crawl and walk up and down stairs. But the elevator? Standing
in a slow-moving elevator seems more nerve wrecking than walking up the stairs.
This is what reading an old e-book will be like one day. The need for constant
reinvention in digital publishing calls for a certain flexibility, and one that
online art publications seem to be offering simply by the sheer fact of their
constant consideration of what publishing online means. A hybrid model of
print-to-screen-and-back-again might teach us much about our relationship with
images, which will define and shape the history of art and the way it is taught
and written about in coming years. This might just be the equivalent of the
possibility to run up or down the escalator in the opposite direction than it
is heading. It?s possible, even if exhausting. But sometimes, you just want to
stand there on the escalator and see the ground distance itself from you while
you take in the view.
[1] See Thomas Lawson
introduction-cum-editorial statement, ?The Journey West,? on East of Borneo (October 10, 2010).
[2] See Triple Canopy?s editors? article, ?The Binder and the Server,? at the College Art
Association?s Art Journal (vol. 70,
n. 2: winter 2011), 40?57.
[3] The ?wild west? of
online reproduction and intellectual property rights in the internet
environment is an incredibly complex subject that is currently tackled by
people in many fields in a constant attempt to define it for themselves at the
moment. The question of best practices for online reproduction and online
intellectual property rights is too large to consider seriously here and the
literature about it is slowly building.
[4] Whitaker?s introduction
deals with the space of photography in contemporary society a way that the
elusive terminology of ?images? (therefore converting all photographs,
illustrative drawings, film stills, and so forth to one all-encompassing
class?which can mainly be characterized by the fact that the people who view it
do not often think about those images?
origins) in a way this article could never do. See her essay, ?A Note on Black Box,? in Triple Canopy, issue 12.
[6] The idea of the
possible obsolescence of online media and the fact that technology seems to be
developing at a pace much more rapid than the pace of editorial decision is
cheekily picked up by Zolghadr in his editorial: ?Curatorial education aside, a
second moving target here, one that is at least as mystifying, perhaps even
more so, is the new field of online publishing. This is where you get an even
clearer sense of the privilege and vertigo of inhabiting a historical
threshold, leading to a constant suspicion that you?re missing key
conversations unfolding concurrently all around you, coupled with yet another
nagging suspicion, that much of your eagerness and anxiety will be considered
quaint only a few years from now.?
Sister Unn's, 2011
Chema Cobo
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
