Publication details
| Further contributors | Alessandro Ludovico (with an afterword by Florian Cramer) |
| Publication | The book was published by Onomatopee in 2013 and is currently in its third edition. It has also appeared in French, Italian and Korean translations. Wikipedia has an article on it. A PDF is available here. |
The book is the outcome of Alessandro Ludovico’s 2008/2009 research fellowship in the lectoraat Communication in a Digital Age (the precursor of the lectoraat Autonomous Practices) and part of a series of our research conferences and projects on hybrid analog-digital and experimental publishing from 2009 to today.
In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.
Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?
Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.