Collecting stories, reflections, and ideas from pursuing the master in Experimental Publishing (XPUB), in Rotterdam.
Prologue
On November 7st 2024 I was aimlessly wandering around nettime-l emails, looking for some motivation and inspiration as I was very sad and unsatisfied with AISS, the master that I was doing at the time. After a while, I found an email dated November 1st, where a person named Doriane shared her work with a project called declarations.style. As soon as I landed on the website, I fell in love. I really wanted to get involved. I sent Doriane an email sharing my admiration for the research she was doing, asking if and how I could join. Doriane replied that, being a project about the materiality of CSS, there wasn’t much I could do if I was not in the Rotterdam/Bruxelles area. She shared that she was working with the students at XPUB for the semester.
This led me to XPUB’s website, and I immediately knew that it was what I should have been doing.
The beginning
After months of doubts, confusion, frustration, uncertainty, and other adventures, here I am, a first year XPUB student.
The first day of classes, instead of merely giving us credentials for our university accounts, and explaining us what to do, our teachers Michael and Manetta gave us the Infrastructour.
It started with the word infrastructure
written in the middle of a blackboard, and we were asked to write related relevant words around it. Later, we were asked to find connections between the concepts that emerged and access
.
The first day of my master started by questioning the very infrastructure that makes XPUB, both technically and institutionally. I immediately got the confirmation that I was in the right place.
I love this master, I am super interested by Writing Machines–Protocols–Feedback, the topic we are exploring this trimester, the Methods deepens the concept of annotation
and collective note sharing, something I have been interested on for the past seven years. Above all, I am so glad that my classmates are an intercontinental and cosy group of 14 incredible, curious, and lovely humans.
Finally, I am doing what I always dreamed of doing, and I am super enthusiastic about what I will be learning and making for the next two years, collectively.
Research questions
Open challenges
- The whole XPUB program, its classes, and some of its resources are open and publicly available on the insanely cool XPUB Wiki. Therefore, most of what I will be exploring, my notes, and the collective work we will be doing will be there. I intend to play with MediaWiki APIs to find a way to bridge or, even better, synchronize in both ways, the XPUB wiki and this website, so that my personal notes on The Jam get on the wiki and relevant wiki pages are at least referenced here.
- Create a CalDAV feed from the XPUB Calendar on the wiki
- Set up and self-host an Obsidian Relay server and remove any authentication
Ideas
- :
locked-in
sign as theon-air
one to add in the studio