the unbook talk

presented by finn brunton at the Computers & Writing Conference, Friday May 21 2010

Hi! My name is Finn Brunton. I’m a research postdoc at NYU. By profession I work on mostly digital media stuff — I’m writing a book about spam — and by inclination I like to hang out with engineers, architects, industrial designers, and programmers. About two years ago I noticed more and more people at the overlaps of these fields were doing interesting things with paper documents, especially books. I like cross-pollinating ideas, and I started wondering how these developments might be of interest to us in the academic world. This talk is a draft statement on the subject, a way of trying to strike some potential sparks. It’s a pretty simple idea, right now, but it’s a simple idea you can start doing things with during this talk, if you open your laptop and tune me out for a bit, and there’s something to be said for the power of immediate affordance.

I’m going to go pretty fast, but the notes for this are all online: finnb.net/a/unbook. And if you want to push any of these ideas further, or get into the gritty practicalities, please email me or just come up and say hi. I’ll be doing a poster session, too.

initial definition

So let’s get a definition. The meaning and application of these ideas is still a matter of open conversation, but the simplest and most formalized definition of the unbook is this:

An unbook is just the principles of software development applied to the production of a book. What this means, in the first formulation of the word by Jay Cross and David Gray, is a book that’s available from a print-on-demand service, and thus is constantly subject to change. When you upload a revised version, the next person to order the book gets the revision. It develops in versions, marked by version numbers just like software, with the numbers reflecting changes, improvements in stability and reliability, and so on — always open for further refinement. And the production of the book is the reflection of a community of contributors, readers, and stakeholders. So in this definition the book is a communal permanent-beta project, with any given copy being one instance.

adoption

A lot of people took up this term unbook, and ran with it in their own directions. Rather than book as beta social software, they adopted the idea of book as provisional, full stop, enabled by cheap print-on-demand: you could make a notebook that turns into the book itself, pre-populating the pages with material you might need or incentives to thought. You could create a book where you remain the sole author but you release intermediate drafts for anyone who wants to take a look, they can send you their thoughts, and you retain the right to make changes in the future — after all, the power of versioning numbers is that there’s no last number, no necessary end. Like this, David Gray’s Marks and Meaning, version zero, all the materials which may eventually become a book of that title. It’s a conglomeration of sketchbook, textbook, workbook. Speaking of textbooks, try this one, made in eleven days by updating, refining and elaborating a Creative Commons textbook about Python, and available from the University of Michigan’s print-on-demand service. Or Adam Greenfield’s forthcoming book on networked urbanism, The City is Here for You to Use, whose expression as a kind of unbook he sees as balancing “the dynamic and responsive nature of discourse on the Web” with what books are good at, “coherence, authorial voice and intent.” Many other unbooks act as the physical instantiations of events: someone’s working process, a conference, a gathering. Like this one for Bookcamp — an experimental book about experimenting with books — or these, made by Russell Davies and full of experiments with notetaking and materials for stuff he’s currently working on. Arguably the purest form of the unbook, though it doesn’t use that term, is Wikipedia’s new publishing service, a bound paper snapshot of the current state of the collaboratively produced articles you select. I love this three volume, 2300 page edition of the European Union materials. “By Wikipedians!” This is a genuinely strange artifact of our contemporary moment, and you can stub a toe on it.

old new(s)

Okay, so far so straightforward. And, for us as academics and scholars, so far so nothing new. We’ve always lived in a community of commentators and peers engaged in our revision process. We’re used to books being iterations. This idea is not new in thought — consider St. Augustine’s Reconsiderations, or Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s amazing final commentary on and reinvention of his life’s work. Or the New York editions Henry James did, a complex act of revision that leaves us with two versions of much of his major work. More recently, Harrison White did a beginning-to-end revision of his Identity and Culture a few years ago, a 2.0 release if ever there was one. It is nothing new in practice, either. Consider Proust or Heidegger, the bane of typesetters everywhere, filling their galley proofs and copies of their own books with more text, emendations and additions.

(This is my fantasy of Proust’s git account, of the commit he made for the revisions to The Fugitive a few days before his death.) How many different versions are there of Leaves of Grass? In so many cases the “book” does not end with the last page but with the author’s death, then and only then. “The Man Without Qualities” ends when Robert Musil dies of an aneurysm while weightlifting. We could talk about Marvin Minsky, we could talk about Walter Benjamin. Ted Nelson, the coiner of “hypertext,” was doing books with version numbers back in the 1980s. So. Why talk about this today?

faster is different

I’m sure you’ve heard the famous phrase of Philip Anderson, the physicist, that “More is different” — I want to present this because “faster is different,” too. New affordances and new possibilities. This is the 48 Hour Magazine, which made issue zero in fourteen days from announcing the theme for contributions to having issues in mailboxes. Or Stranded magazine, built online entirely by contributors trapped in airports by the volcanic ash cloud, which will ship in a week or two. Collaborate from anywhere, and click to move paper you can scribble on, give an ISBN to, file in a library. Add machine readable elements and you can close the loop, taking someone back to the database, the latest errata, or network-only parts of your project. These are phenomenally responsive means of production for something that’s not on a screen. Being able to work on a book, have it in hand, and iterate from there, is something rather astonishing. The book becomes a slice of an ongoing process. For many of us this may sound like a nightmare, and it’s certainly not suited to all intellectual projects or disciplines by any means; but given the right circumstances it might open some new paths. I’d like to close with four brief possibilities, four possible modes for unbooks.

dubplate

This is a dubplate. And this is a dubplate cutter, which I’m going to leave up here because it’s such a beautiful machine. A dubplate is an aluminum disc coated in lacquer. Industrially they’re used as the testing medium for the record before you make the final master. They’re really cheap to make, and thoroughly temporary: a dubplate will last about 50 plays. They will literally flake to pieces. And this makes them a great format for rapidly evolving a piece of music in public: dubplates have played a huge role in the competitive worlds of reggae soundsystems and various club music scenes, because you can take something you’re still working on and play it in the full machine of mix, dj, room, night and audience. You can use it to demo a new sound, and feed the results back into your production process.

dot dot dot

This is Dot Dot Dot issue 15. It’s from this extraordinary group Dexter/Sinister, who are exploring new ways of dealing with the entire production process of things on paper: responsive, reflexive, and case-by-case — suiting the production itself, from the tools used to the arrangement of roles, to the subject in question. And #15 here is a great sample of this: It’s a magazine whose content reflects its situation, being produced as part of a group exhibition in Geneva, by literally being produced there, with the writing, editing, proofreading, layout and typesetting, and printing happening on site, and all the roles overlapping. The cover photograph is an image of the materials used in the printing. Imagine academic documents with this level of reflexivity! Every conference and workshop with their own book, a book that in turn sparks conversation about the nature of the conference as well as its content, by embodying both.

oma

This one of the shelves of models for the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas’s firm. Models are a big part of their practice, and often used in client presentations rather than smooth, composed digital images, where the building is presented as finished and gleaming in a sunny city, pre-populated with visitors. Instead, the models, made of razor-cut blue foam, plastic, and posterboard, offer what Koolhaas calls “thinking in its raw form.” He can pop bits out, show the clients shapes and the dynamics within forms. In the same way you can see the jittery pencil in Frank Gehry’s buildings, you can see the razor’s cut in OMA’s. How might a book be, where you could still see the razor cut, where the thinking is still raw, gritty, rough around the edges, but to become a building, maybe?

generator

This the unbuilt — appropriately — building by the architect Cedric Price, called the Generator, which he worked on between 1976 and ‘79. It was to be a corporate retreat. He designed it as 150 12’ x 12’ cubes, each with various paths, openings, and catwalks, which could be rearranged by a mobile crane. So people could order it appropriate to whatever activities they were pursuing. These cubes would each carry a microchip, so you could computerize the process of keeping inventory, arranging different layouts, and so on — but also, marvelously, getting bored. As Price envisioned it, if the house was being inadequately used — too predictably, not often enough — it would get bored, and rearrange itself. What a thought! I dream of a book that grows on its own, that quietly evolves whenever you’re not paying attention, and periodically you can order a copy to see how your garden has grown.

Thank you very much.

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