LABORATORY #1 – LYING FALLOW 2019

Participants of the 2019 Laboratory: Eugenia Antoniou, Nikos Arvanitis (ASFA Professor), Ash Bulayev (Οnassis AiR), Theodora Charalampopoulou, Elpida Fragkeskidou, Hatem Imam (Mentor), Kleitia Kokalari, Danai Kriκi, Polyxeni Michalopoulou, Nefeli Myrodia (Οnassis AiR), Angeliki Papageorgiou, Nektarios Pappas, Antigoni Santorinaiou, Christina Zacharaki

Lying fallow: the economy of care

We will unfold the meaning and boundaries of making something public. We will map the boundaries we have traced, navigate through them, expand them and overthrow them if necessary. We will test their surfaces, acknowledge their textures, stories and histories, and identify their current status. If necessary, we will open passages, ruptures from which to view different perspectives. Our intent running through the whole workshop-event will be to envision our own temporary codes of conduct, viable and radical ways to publish. In order to do that, we will have to register in a special time-frame; that of offering, of abundance, of exchange without specific expectation. Of impossible things that might come or might not come. This is the time of lying fallow.

Questions of representation, presence and re-enactment, transparency and exposure, information and saturation, will be explored among curiosity for encryption, coding, filtering, all of them entangled together in the predicament of constructing ever more focused tactics.

The nine-day program will explore the meaning of the act of publishing through breaking it down to three sets of parameters: process, realm, and platform.

PROCESS

According to Wikipedia, publishing is the dissemination of literature, music, or information. It is the activity of making information available to the general public.The steps one needs to take can be simplified to three stages, three actions: acquire, edit, and make public. The table below lists possible verbs for how each of these actions can take form. We will use this system to organise our work, dedicating one day for each task. On the first day we will acquire, on the second we will edit, and on the third we make public, on the fourth day we go back to acquiring, and so forth. The choice of verb to use (or add to the list) is up to you.

REALM

The culling and dissemination of information operates in different zones across a spectrum of private/public. We will abstract these into three spaces while keeping in mind that it is oftentimes the case that the boundaries between them are blurred. These are the personal, public, and official realms. These three realms will dictate the sources of our acquisitions.

PLATFORM

Publishing became possible with the invention of writing, and became more practical upon the introduction of printing. Prior to printing, distributed works were copied manually, by scribes. Traditionally, publishing refers to the distribution of printed works such as books and newspapers. With the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include electronic resources. Our third parameter has to do with the outcome of the published piece, and divides it into print, virtual, and street, again noting that any work can navigate through all of these platforms like an image of a street tag printed in a magazine, or a scanned page of a book found on Pinterest.