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Book

Photomediations: An Open Book

Typology category

hybrid

Authors

Joanna Zylinska, Kamila Kuc, Jonathan Shaw, Ross Varney, Michael Wamposzyc

Publication year

2015

Experimental aspects:

Photomediations: An Open Book was an experiment in open and hybrid publishing, as well as a celebration of the book as living object. As part of its basic premise, it redesigned a coffee-table photography book as an online experience. Photomediations adopted a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the flows of data that produce photographic objects. This stance was reflected in the set-up of this open and hybrid book. Photomediations used open reusable image content, drawn from various open online repositories such as Europeana and Flickr Commons. In this way, the book showcased the possibility of the creative reuse of image-based digital resources. Photomediations: An Open Book consisted of a comprehensive introduction and four commissioned chapters on light, movement, hybridity and networks. The book also contained three open chapters, the content of which developed and grew over time, most notably into a collection of twenty scholarly and curatorial essays about the idea of photomediations, called Photomediations: A Reader, which was published as a standalone physical book by Open Humanities Press. Photomediations: An Open Book’s final chapter consisted of an offline and online exhibition. The offline remixable flatpack exhibition, exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, featured the work of nineteen international artists who responded to the project’s open call-to-action to liberate the image in the twenty-first century. The Photomediations project also encompassed an online Educational Space. It included a downloadable brochure titled A Guide To Open And Hybrid Publishing, which explained how anyone can undertake a project of this kind for themselves, a pack of Creative Jam Cards, based on four sets of creative tasks, that could be remixed to incorporate further questions and interventions, and a ‘remix generator’, which was designed to provide learners with an introduction to the basic processes and concepts of gathering and remixing open images, by offering a pool of open tasks and content.

Practices