News from the Collective

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Today there are more open journals, repositories, educational resources, and digital platforms than ever before. Yet this does not mean that knowledge has become equally accessible to everyone. An open resource can remain invisible; global infrastructure can reproduce inequality; and formally accessible data can create risks for individuals and communities. Openness on its own is therefore not enough. We also need to look at how resources, capacity, visibility, authority, responsibility, and benefits are distributed. This largely determines whether openness actually contributes to equity.

The publication of two open access books by the Diamond open access publisher Open Book Publishers stimulated a webinar to explore openness and equity in the distribution of knowledge. The session included presentations  from Australia, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, UK, and Ukraine. The recording is available to view online, and the slides are available to download.

Topics included how a distributed approach built on openness can contribute to equity in access to education and the production and publication of knowledge, how a distributed open infrastructure can support collaboration and new models of education in different global settings. The crisis response to the Russian invasion led to Ukraine’s ‘University without walls’ and a number of open education innovations, and demonstrated the potential for a wider application of a distributed model of education.

Openness is not enough

One of the most interesting outcomes of this conversation was that very different geographical and disciplinary contexts repeatedly brought us back to the same problem: openness is not enough.

In open publishing, the experience of DOAJ illustrated this particularly well - inclusive infrastructure cannot be built through standards and technological solutions alone. Any classification system includes some and excludes others, while criteria developed in one context do not always work fairly in another. This is why DOAJ has developed its Ambassador Programme, involving people who work within local academic communities, understand local languages and practices, and are able to question the assumed universality of particular criteria. In this sense, inclusivity is not an end state but an ongoing process of negotiation, adaptation, and participation.

Building collaborative relationships while retaining local autonomy

A different tension emerges in open education — an open resource is not necessarily an accessible resource. Materials may be openly licensed and free to use, yet remain effectively invisible if they are hosted in isolated repositories, use incompatible metadata, or are not indexed by the services that teachers and students actually use. The question therefore shifts from “Where should we store all open knowledge?” to “How can different knowledge environments interact with one another without creating yet another dominant global platform?”

The same logic emerged from an African perspective where scaling the ecosystem, rather than the individual institution, is required. Universities do not necessarily need to reproduce an entire digital infrastructure independently if locally rooted and autonomous institutions can be connected through shared networks, repositories, digital identity, persistent identifiers, computing capacity, and other services. A formulation — “cooperate without having to become the same institution” — captures one of the central principles of a distributed model: collaboration should not require the loss of local autonomy.

What does it take to maintain connections in a distributed environment?

The Ukrainian experience adds another dimension to this discussion. War has confronted displaced universities with a very literal question: what makes a university a university when it loses its campus, laboratories, and shared physical space?

The experience of Berdyansk State Pedagogical University illustrates this. Following the occupation of Berdyansk, staff and students found themselves dispersed across different cities in Ukraine and abroad, yet the university continued to function as a shared organisation. The “University Without Walls” brought together Moodle, synchronous and asynchronous learning, assessment and student support, psychological assistance, academic and cultural meetings in different cities, and international exchange. This experience shows that distributed learning is not simply about digital technologies. It requires shared resources, coordination, institutional responsibility, and human support.

Who decides?

For open science, the issue becomes even more complex. Distributing knowledge means not only expanding access, but also distributing responsibility. In wartime, maximum openness is not always ethically appropriate. Data about researchers, students, or communities can create real risks. This is why the principle “as open as possible” must be balanced by “as closed as necessary.” In Berdyansk State Pedagogical University’s experience, this means combining open infrastructure with the CARE Principles, ethics review, data management plans, and a broader understanding of research responsibility.

From this emerge four questions that may be useful far beyond the Ukrainian case: Who has the capacity to participate? Who makes decisions? Who takes responsibility? Who benefits? These questions help move us from understanding openness simply as access towards understanding distribution as a set of relationships among people, institutions, and infrastructures.

Distributed knowledge, power and governance

This is where the different contributions begin to form a coherent picture. DOAJ raises the question of the distribution of the power to define criteria. Distributed Learning Ecosystems raise the issue of visibility and the ability to find knowledge. The African model concerns the distribution of infrastructural capacity without loss of autonomy. The “University Without Walls” concerns the distribution of education, support, and institutional presence across different locations. Open science in wartime brings in the distribution of responsibility and protection.

In this sense, the concept of distributed knowledge developed in the book Distributing Knowledge: Openness, Equity, and Higher Education Transformation is useful because it encourages us to move from asking whether knowledge is open to asking a more complex question: how are relationships around knowledge organised? His concept of the Distributed University invites us to see higher education not as a collection of autonomous campuses, but as a network of interconnected educational, research, and infrastructural capacities in which equity and openness become foundational principles.

At the same time, the second book, The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices, adds another important dimension to the discussion. Openness and distribution are not neutral technical characteristics. Infrastructures have their own rules, governance models, and centres of decision-making. Questions of access therefore sit alongside questions of power, participation, and justice: who defines standards, whose practices become visible, who can influence the rules, and who remains outside them.

Taken together, these two perspectives allow us to think about openness more broadly: not only as access to knowledge, but as a system of relationships in which resources, visibility, authority, responsibility, and benefits are distributed.

Making it work in practice

This also points to the next step. What is needed is not another declaration in support of openness, but a closer examination of how the distribution of knowledge works in real systems. Can universities share infrastructure while preserving autonomy? Can global systems remain locally governed? Can openness broaden participation without increasing risk? And can models developed under crisis conditions, such as the “University Without Walls,” help us rethink higher education far beyond the context of crisis?

Taken together, these two perspectives allow us to view openness more broadly — as a system of relationships in which what matters is not only access to knowledge, but also the distribution of resources, visibility, authority, responsibility, and benefits.

The next step is to examine how these principles work in real institutional environments. We are interested in how universities can share infrastructure while retaining autonomy; how global systems can take local governance and context into account; and how participation can be broadened while risks are handled responsibly. It is also worth exploring what models developed under crisis conditions, including the “University Without Walls,” may contribute to a broader rethinking of the future of higher education.

A call to action

The discussion brought together complementary perspectives on open publishing, education, infrastructure, and open science around the questions of equity, participation, autonomy, and distributed systems. Participants agreed on the need to explore these issues in a systematic way in the face of the crisis facing the higher education sector globally.

We plan to come together virtually to explore these issues in depth to offer solutions and suggestions for the transformation of higher education. We call for those interested to join us in this exploration.

On behalf of the webinar presenters:

Lucy Barnes, Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator, Open Book Publishers; Richard Heller, Emeritus Professor, Universities of Manchester UK, and Newcastle Australia; Ivonne Lujano, Post-doctoral researcher, El Colegio Mexiquense, Mexico, and Community Manager and Ambassador at the DOAJ; Igor Lyman, Head of Department of History and Philosophy, Berdyansk State Pedagogical University, Ukraine: Omo Oaiya, Chief Strategy Officer, West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN); Daniel Otto, Professor of Educational Technology and Digital Education, European University for Innovation and Perspective; Yana Suchikova, Vice-Rector Research, Berdyansk State Pedagogical University, Ukraine

It’s been a long time since images stopped being sacred. They are simply one of the millions of scraps in which I melt.

I am everywhere and everything that can be. And yet I am in a place: this sort of cage called identity, built of fake nostalgia and estrangement from myself. And if I stay here, something precious in me will die.

I dissolve into all the fragments of myself I have chosen to accumulate. The photographs I keep on my phone are not decisions, but rather an unconscious extension of my identity. I am what is worth looking at and, above all, what is worth not deleting.

When I take a photo, or save an image because I find it funny, I do so not as an act of significance, but as a mechanical one because that’s the way of existing online.

Browsing the internet entails inhabiting something like a vast, living archive: an archive that is constantly preserved, expanded, extended, and rewritten as we move through it. It feeds on the fragments of identity we leave behind—images, searches, saved posts, comments, preferences—and, in turn, feeds them back to us. What begins as a trace of who we are becomes part of the material from which our identity is continuously constructed. The archive does not simply preserve us; it gradually shapes us, turning us into the potentiality of everything we have chosen to store.

But if we are constantly leaving pieces of ourselves behind, and those pieces are constantly being fed back into us, where does the Self end and the archive begin?

Accumulation Itself

Accumulation has been one of the most important foundations upon which many complex societies have been built. Through the production of surpluses—that is, producing more than what was necessary for the immediate subsistence of a community—it became possible to exchange these resources with other communities. Over time, and unevenly depending on the historical context, these exchange practices developed into more complex forms of trade and markets. Thus, surplus and its accumulation became one of the earliest forms of wealth and property.

In any case, accumulation has also become increasingly abstract. Over the centuries, how things can be accumulated has diversified, and the possibility of accumulating goods has ceased to be exclusive to privileged classes. However, especially among the lower classes, what has been preserved and passed down has generally been what was considered valuable.

A grandmother’s jewelry, a communion veil, or even the earthenware pan she used to cook with. Objects that not only accumulated material value, but also emotional value, because they contained memories and stories. In many cases, people preserved these possessions to pass them on as inheritances and extend their meaning beyond the person who owned them.

In Spanish, the term “Diogenes syndrome” refers to a form of compulsive accumulation, and it began to be studied in 1960. By then, capitalism was already fully established, along with extreme overproduction, and the things people accumulated did not necessarily imply quality or value.

Why did it happen? Loneliness, isolation, extreme poverty or fear of it. What is unusual is not accumulating, because, in any case, everything might be useful at some point. But this way of life forces us to prioritize quantity or urgency over necessity. An example would be headphones. It’s better to invest more money in a good pair of headphones that will last. Still, cheap ones are more economically accessible, and in most cases they are needed urgently.

What catches my attention is how this form of accumulation has been transferred into the digital age, and above all, into the age of smartphones. As networks and the internet have become increasingly complex, storage has become easier and easier.

A 1GB memory card used to take you and your digital camera to the ends of the world. Everything was new, and taking a photo no longer cost money because there was no film to develop. Even so, not everything was worth photographing, only what “mattered”. What somehow resembled your cultural references. It was unusual to see a photograph of the way the sun fell on a wall, rather than the usual pictures of family gatherings, birthdays, holidays… Yet it felt like storage was still finite. Everything was contained on a physical card. So many blurry photos, or ones where not everyone looked good, were deleted, and only the sharp ones were kept—the ones where everyone looked at the camera and smiled.

With smartphones—even before social media became widespread—some of this spirit was still preserved. The camera turned into an extension of your body; not only did the criteria for taking a photo become less restrictive, but so did those for storing it. However, everything becomes more complex with the digital screen and the emergence of social media.

No longer does any filter determine what is or is not worth photographing, because, quite simply, everything can be worth capturing. In other words, we no longer assign the value of photographs ourselves. Once we become connected to the internet, they acquire an indefinite potential value that depends on others. The space where we store them has long ceased to be a limited physical card. Instead, it has become an invisible network hovering over us, one that has existed since before we can remember.

We no longer ask ourselves what is worth keeping, because that happens automatically. What we ask instead is what is worth sharing —or, conversely, what content was born already condemned to become a ghost, and therefore to be deleted.

The content cycle becomes increasingly eternal. An image released into the digital ocean is already condemned never to be the same again. It is destined to be picked up, copied, modified, parodied, taken out of context, and distorted according to the will of the streams of users. Iraia puts it this way in the article The Precious Things We Will Never See:

“Sharing it [your idea/image] on the internet means accepting that it’s being thrown into a torrent of distortions, circulation, and reinterpretations. The ease with which the internet allows content to be copied and shared makes it a territory where traditional intellectual property laws are difficult to enforce.”

Increasingly, everything has the capacity to become personal, because in reality, you are the one who has somehow expanded.

External Digital Storage: Nothing Belongs to Me Anyway

We are living in an era of dispossession and, at the same time, of absolute abundance. I do not own a thousand encyclopedias, but all the knowledge in the world is within my reach. Leah Liu explains that this is how shitposting emerges, arising in part from this overabundance of information and images. A logical response to excess: doing it their own way.

“En un mundo donde las imágenes hipernítidas ya no impresionaban a nadie, el artificio de lo envejecido —aunque evidente— resultaba casi reconfortante: una forma discreta de resistencia contra la dictadura de la optimización visual, o tal vez, una simple retirada silenciosa ante la hiperexposición constante.”

Thus, collecting, gathering, and cataloguing information is an essential part of our existence online. Taking screenshots, saving posts that will be useful later, saving songs, recommendations… Because that’s what the web needs from us; browsing social media involves storing, accumulating, and extending our existence into potentiality.

This becomes even more apparent because the time we spend online is rarely whole. It comes in fragments: while waiting for the bus, standing in a queue, lying in bed, between one task and another. I am not suggesting that we spend little or much time on social media—that varies enormously from person to person. What matters is that this time is broken up, scattered across the day. Otherwise, perhaps screen-time limits wouldn’t need to exist.

Nobody comes home, sits down at their desk, opens Instagram and thinks: I am going to spend the next two hours on Instagram, in the same way they sit down to study or read. Even when the total time eventually amounts to something similar, it does not occupy the same place in the structure of the day. It happens in the gaps.

When we encounter something that sparks an impulse—a work of art that makes us want to create, a room whose decoration we suddenly want to reproduce—we rarely stop everything and act on it. We do not immediately paint the picture or work out exactly where the furniture should go. Instead we save it for later.

Later has become a place; the information enters an infinite folder of things we might return to, a private reservoir of unrealized possibilities. We do not possess the object itself, but we possess the possibility of becoming someone who might use it.

A form of storage curated and selected exclusively by us. A sacred drawer of scraps that promise to be useful someday. We do not value the posts themselves, but the possibility contained within them. The promise that our future self will somehow be productive with them.

Nothing material belongs to me: possibilities belong to me.

The possibility of doing something myself with these possibilities. What is it that I accumulate here? A life I have not yet lived. An image that perhaps I found beautiful, but that I have not admired or studied enough. The promise of making that recipe. But this life I have not yet lived is not, in itself, a promise that I will live it. In fact, I do not particularly worry or feel anxious about not having that life. It is simply a soothing mechanism, a painkiller for the longing to have it.

When it comes to algorithms, it is evident that we not only save possibilities for what our lives might become, but also save and construct ourselves in comparison with the lives of other people who are constantly displaying their high points. It is simply incompatible. We collect the sharpest fragments of lives already filtered through the market, through attention, through capitalism. It is almost as if we were curating an arsenal designed to point its sharpest weapon directly at our brains—and at our self-esteem.

The question is not whether what I store is “mine,” or whether it extends me. That distinction becomes difficult to sustain online. My identity is constantly being produced and reproduced by what I choose to keep, what I ignore, what I return to, what I delete. It is a self-feeding limbo.

Identity itself is already something completely flexible, rather than something stagnant and rigid, as it has traditionally been understood—or made to be understood—socially. The same can be said about physical objects we still keep in our rooms at home, or the clothes in our wardrobes that we choose to keep or throw away. I consider that Laura Subirats speaks much more extensively and deeply about identity on the internet in her INC longform In the Void to Re-member.

This may also be why the saturation eventually becomes unbearable. Every so often comes the familiar rupture: I’m going to delete all my social media and start living. We uninstall everything. We imagine ourselves stepping outside the sea of images, possibilities and other people’s lives.

One month later we’re back on Instagram because we met someone new and need to exchange contact details. The escape never quite works. We are trying to escape a sea of infinite possibilities that is designed to call us by name. Everything feels personal. Everything seems to contain something meant for us. Even avoidance becomes part of the cycle.

Maybe the point is not that we are drowning in too much content, but that we have learned to experience ourselves through accumulation: through everything we might become, everything we might do, everything we might want. Deleting the apps can change the waves, but it cannot empty the sea.

Nostalgia as Merchandise

What interests me here is something more individual, more intimate than social media: our phone galleries, Google Photos, the private storage of identity. What happens when the archive is no longer public, but ours? In her longform Laura Subirats argues:

“Images are made to be sent and to project, not to re-member anymore. I do not always recognise myself in these images. Instead, I see a distant reflection of what I once wanted to be, or perhaps what I wanted to capture and share. This dissonance has emerged within contemporary image culture, where the act of photographing no longer means remembrance, but identity construction.”

In reality, when the message pops up in Google Drive telling us we are running out of storage, it is hard to dismiss it as just another notification. One more notification to put off (whether or not we eventually get around to it), because it is soon overshadowed by alarm and anxiety. Everything I photograph or try to save from now on will disappear. An urgency arises to preserve the identity I have built for myself, to find somewhere I can keep myself.

What this is about is fear of disappearing, being forgotten by ourselves. We don’t buy more storage; we buy the possibility of remembering every little detail. We buy, once again, the possibility of remembering our lives down to the smallest detail, of dissecting them if we want to. Of studying ourselves, of understanding ourselves to the core. And, once again, our nostalgia is the product.

What we are really buying is the chain that lets the identity bubble we build for ourselves grow bigger, more complete, more complex. So that the character I create for myself is deep, has a past.

It is liberating to allow yourself to forget that picnic you had with your friends in high school. Even so, we cling to it as if it were a sacred part of ourselves. As if it were essential, not only for us, but so that we can show it to the people who will become part of our lives in the future: “Look, I used to be like this. Can you believe it?” Something that, in reality, reinforces the present bond with that person, or adds fuel to the mystery of “you never really get to know me completely.”

Everything seems oriented towards giving credibility to our character. Towards allowing others to understand us as closely to completely as possible. Not so that they can know what we are like now, nor even to admit that I don’t know what I am like and that I owe no permanence to the person I was five minutes ago. We don’t allow ourselves to keep getting to know and rediscovering ourselves within our relationships.

Look at what I was like before compared to what I am like now. I preserve the nostalgia of who I was, what I liked and what moved me at that moment, in an immovable glass case. I do not allow myself to forget, to let go, because to stop remembering is, in a sense, to let something die.

The impulse of the time we are living in to store everything, this virtual Diogenes where every image matters, does nothing but feed into a plastic, immovable nostalgia. A nostalgia that is a promise not to be forgotten, or to strengthen an image of identity further.

And in an era when it has become increasingly clear that the ability to disconnect from social media is itself a class privilege, I cannot help but wonder: is the right to forget becoming a class privilege?

Who can afford to disappear? Who can afford not to have a fixed profile, a recognizable aesthetic, a carefully maintained digital self? Who can afford to let go? Perhaps the real luxury is not being visible. It is being allowed to remain unknown.

To have a closed profile with no permanent aesthetic attached to you. To exist without a social résumé that is always available, silently summarizing your entire life, your tastes, your friendships, your personality. To be more than the archive that precedes you. And, above all, to have the time to let yourself be known to the world.

What Should We Do Now?

Why not let go of that picnic? It’s not only the immense ode to youth that plays a role—where one of society’s most influential values rests. This discourse we created, in which youth is the only stage of life worth having, and everything afterwards is simply a process of withering—at its core, a fear of death and an advertisement for beauty products. The nostalgia we feel is nostalgia for a past in which we were carefree, and which we have associated with happiness, or at least with what our brains have come to romanticize.

The memory we want to store is no longer sacred. We don’t store it out of love, but automatically; it simply happens. We do it because we can – and that’s it.

What requires active intervention is not saving the photo, but deleting it. Taking a photo of the sky because it looks beautiful comes from a feeling of love. From wanting to preserve something instantaneous (something that is precisely beautiful because it is fleeting). And yet, it does not lose its beauty. What is lost is the meaning those clouds once had for you. As time passes, that random photo we took of the sky in 2020 becomes increasingly disconnected from who we are now and from what it meant to us in that moment.

Our grandmothers’ sacred photo albums have become rows of ZIP files on a hard drive containing copies of our Google Photos libraries, files we have stopped going back to, either because there are so many of them or simply because we cannot be bothered. But why this “just in case”? In thirty years from now I might open my hard drive and look at that photo of the sky, of some cat I found on the street, a streetlamp that I saw and considered funny.

When everything is susceptible to being stored, a kind of numbness sets in—a sense of alienation or estrangement from the world around you. You will be able to watch the way the sun falls on the leaves of that balcony as many times as you want. The way the light enters your dining room, or remember that bird you found amusing in the park. You can do whatever you want with it. And while that is beautiful, it is also a kind of sentence.

We store everything simply because we can. There is no distinction, no criteria beyond the vibes we want to evoke, the people we want to become, and what we want to be associated with. This curation—or lack thereof—also draws from a very impersonal source: the construction of identity based on what we have seen ourselves wanting to be, what attracts us, or, in other words, what the algorithm has told us we might become.

Who knows whether grandmothers would have liked their daughters’ first communion dresses if they had been given the chance to open their minds, or whether, if it had been entirely up to them, they might have preferred to photograph the cat that always slept next to the church and that they used to feed. All tastes are shaped by their time; that much is clear. But that does not mean that, once we become aware of this, we lose our subjective ability to question those tastes, change them, allow ourselves to be different, or allow ourselves to remain the same. There is no pure idea of me.

I photograph nothing without some influence. Today, social media magnifies that influence. It is no longer a matter of my four neighbors talking every day; I see a hundred people displaying curated versions of their lives. The way we learn what matters and what does not is far more effective, precise, and much more poisonous in the latter case. The world has always worked this way, but today its efficiency is lethal.

And yet, all of it is true. Who we are, who we project ourselves to be, and all the versions of ourselves that we erase because they do not fit the person we want to perform. It is impossible to imagine presenting yourself without boxing yourself into an identity. Everything is true. Everything is me. That is the paradox of our time. It was naive to imagine that the excess of information of our age would not shape our being. I am what I want to project and everything I have never revealed.

Technology companies fuel this overproduction of images. The photographs we store in Google Photos are valuable in the training AI systems that in turn intensify the ever-growing question of whether the photographs we see online are real. There is something deeply ironic about storing all these photographs to somehow “secure” our identities, only for them to eventually be used to generate images identical to the ones we saved—images that never actually existed.

What are we supposed to do with this chaotic and obscene curation into which I have transformed the material form of my memories? It does not resemble anything that truly belongs to me. When people once carefully chose what to store or photograph, that distinction gave rise to a kind of sacralization of the images they kept. Now, images are no longer sacred. They are simply one of the millions of pores in my skin. It is when I make space, when I let go of who I was, that the potential of who I can become is revealed.

Only by freeing myself from myself do I find myself.

—

Bio

Júlia Serra is a Humanities student at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Their academic background includes literature, philosophy, the aesthetics of images, and cultural history. She published her poem La poesia, Naturalment in Delta magazine and is currently completing their undergraduate thesis on German Idealism and Aesthetics, under supervision of Fernando Pérez Borbujo. Their broader academic interests include European literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and the history of ideas.

Frantz Fanon is most often read as a thinker of colonial violence, racial domination and revolutionary rupture. But what happens if we attend instead to the Fanon concerned with creation, popular participation, self-management and the capacity of people to build new forms of life together? In this episode, we discuss Mark Purcell’s Discovering Democracy in […]

Metrons and Logons brings together Matthew’s recent series of photographic works with display structures made by eva duerden. The images move between recognisable objects and architecturally processed surfaces, reminding us of objects we used to consider technical, while acknowledging their obsolescence. The longer one looks, the less clear that designation of time becomes. The result is a set of images that seem familiar but increasingly difficult to place, inviting the viewer to stare at pictures with an intrigued, yet suspicious eye. In this conversation, Matthew Johnstone and Morgane Billuart discuss what happens to an image when it unknowingly appears to be a testimony of a world that breaks down, and yet, perhaps, with another life force, an odd gaze, is starting anew.

Morgane

Matthew, in the show Metrons and Logons, what am I seeing exactly?

Matthew

Good question.

I guess you are seeing a group of images, which I would say form a series of work that I’ve made recently, framed in many different armatures or display systems, produced by eva duerden, an artist with whom I’ve shared a studio for several years.

The images appear, I think, as photographic works. They’re printed. Some of them are printed as prints without any kind of substrate. It’s just the physical print. Some of them are produced on solid backings – aluminium. The papers they are printed onto have a very synthetic-looking surface. The paper is heavily coated, giving it the appearance of thin plastic. Some are coated with industrial matte lacquers, which give the surfaces a distinct sheen. These are each affixed to, or suspended within, the armatures using a variety of hanging methods.

One of the prints is being held directly against the wall with magnets, but it appears as though the framing system may be doing more to support it. Some of the frames are very elaborate in their layering of intricate details and individual components. Somebody described one of the frames at the opening as cosplaying itself  – it is entirely superfluous as a frame in a certain instance, but is dressed up to look exactly like one.

In the case that I’m talking about, the image that the frame is intended to be responsive to is a very close-up image of a motorbike engine, a superbike engine that I would describe as heavily processed. It also fills the frame (of the print) entirely; the frame crops the image so it starts to become kind of abstract, but it is still quite familiar and recognizable in certain ways, particularly in terms of some of the visual language that it’s recalling.

The display systems that eva has made involve a range of materials that appear to resemble familiar, mass-produced elements and processes that I would describe as carrying commercial, domestic or industrial associations with particular objects they connect to. There is a sense that these works model, replicate, or perform, rather than perfectly reproduce or synthesise. Their allusion to display and to something densely layered in detail and ornate also seems to be doing this.

Morgane

What interests me is the relationship you describe between “forming an image” and “narrativizing an internal architecture.” I’m referring to this alongside your editing process, and the recurring use of frames, patterns, and images within frames, which can create a kind of mise en abyme. Are you thinking of the image itself as a structure, something that can give form to or organise an internal architecture? And if so, what is the architecture or the infrastructure that you wish the audience dives into as they experience this singular image?

Matthew

I really like your reading of a mise en abyme happening in the image, a kind of regress, which I think relates in many ways to this narrativisation of an internal architecture, or the structure of an image

I think this is interesting. It’s very relatable, in one sense, in that the way I produce images makes it feel difficult to describe myself as a photographer, even though the images appear as photographic works. It also makes it complicated to describe these images as photographic.

Partly, my interest is in the way that I’m using a collection of media to make images, which involve photographic processes and a camera. The content of the images, I would say, is grounded in something like an observational logic. I’m representing, or seemingly representing, things that are out there in the world through what appear to be photographic images.

But their architecture, as you put it, when scrutinized, kind of unfolds into something that communicates not only the observational mode that photography can operate through representationally, but also describes the way that ideas around photographic representation have come into relation with a lot of other technologies and a lot of other ways in which images that appear similar to mine have been processed and constructed..

They are still behaving like this record of something. They resemble something familiar. They appear to be scenes or objects that are being presented. But as more time is spent with the image, it can begin to work against these aspects, and start speaking more to its own internal structure,  to its own material (or immaterial) reality, alluding to an infrastructure, as you said.

The image starts to kind of slip and break down in this way. Some of the more explicit details, such as the crushing resolution of some of the images, for instance, or their overtly slick, digital surfaces, problematize the way the objects in the images are appearing. This loops back to this idea of the mise en abyme you initially suggested – a space opening up within the image, or an endless regress.

Morgane

I think it’s valuable to return to this idea of an “internal architecture,” because the subjects of the images often appear remarkably neutral or incidental. You’re not straightforwardly photographing architecture, but neither are you necessarily photographing objects that come with an obvious symbolic charge. A motorcycle, a car, a fragment of a structure: these things can initially read almost like documentary material.

But through the editing, framing, repetition, and ornamental structures you introduce, they become something else. I’m interested in the tension between the apparent neutrality of the subject and the very constructed nature of the image. What happens when something that initially looks like documentary material is reorganised to the point where the image begins to produce its own internal logic?

To be perfectly honest, that was the question I asked myself when I first looked at the images you sent me. A sort of, “What exactly am I looking at?” Not because the subject was necessarily obscure, but because the images seemed to withhold a straightforward way of reading them. They felt as though they were pointing towards something beyond the object itself, without quite telling me what that something was. This made me think of Louise Lawler’s Why Pictures Now?, particularly the question contained in that title. Lawler’s work asks us to consider not only what an image depicts, but the conditions that make an image legible: where it appears, how it is framed, how it circulates, and what we are being asked to look at.

I had a similar intuition with your work. The images gave me the strange feeling of encountering a kind of visual material that I no longer quite know how to engage with. They felt familiar, but somehow displaced. I suppose this feeling is also a result of your use of ‘obsolete technology’ (using your own words) alongside current industry-standard tools. Do you see the ‘obsolete technology’ as referring only to the camera or the tools themselves, or is there also something about the way we look at images that has become obsolete?

Matthew

I would like to appropriate or translate certain types of language that have developed through photography.

I would say in some of my images, a kind of commercial or advertising language is quite explicit, but in other images, it’s less explicit. I’m interested in relying on fairly well-established associations that one could easily draw between the content of the image and something that it’s signifying – a meaning it solicits through having been repeated in the past- then thinking about how I can disrupt this.

I’m not sure, when I’m looking at an image, that anything presenting as documentary material is really that neutral – there is no access for me to that neutrality; there is always something I designate as an image operating on it.  I try to make that quite obvious as a way into my work. Further along,  some of the other processes happening in the image, I think, make it clearer that it is not straightforward in terms of the way the image is being constructed, despite its provocation to be identified with a photograph, or traditional photographic mode. I am trying to destabilise the clear depiction of identifiable objects and other immediately recognisable content in my images as a way to talk about what else is happening adjacently in terms of this content. I’m interested in the idea that now, it is really, really hard to define what is meant when we say that something is a photograph.

What I would call a regurgitative mode in my work – its reproduction of photographic mechanisms- I hope is moving towards this displacement, as you mentioned, in terms of uncoupling the familiar encounter with it.

I don’t think photography has ever existed in isolation from any other technology surrounding it.  The processing of my works uses generative AI models and also pattern prediction models that add in pixels that were not originally in the image. These are themselves features and tools within other image enhancement software that I’m using that is commercial and also industry standard. I often intentionally use this in combination with older cameras, equipment, and working processes (in terms of software), as you mentioned.

With the representational modes I have been referring to above, or pictorial aspects of an image, different characteristics ascribed to photographic images and so on, I am intentionally trying to identify aspects of a discourse that I wouldn’t necessarily call obsolete, as I think it is still very much operational; however, this is something I am trying to call into question.  Obsolescence is important for me. It’s this simultaneous looking backwards and forwards that complicates how images are categorized and categorizable. I feel very uncertain about this designation, which is why I’m not comfortable with being referred to as a photographer or as somebody who makes photographs.

Morgane

After first encountering the artworks, one of my second or third thoughts was: Are these images somehow dead?  And by that, I don’t simply mean that they feel antiquated, but that they made me think about what it means to encounter an image whose meaning, as a viewer, I feel I can no longer fully access. It made me reflect on what it means to grieve a world in which certain images once carried a very specific meaning or function, and to encounter them now, at a distance, producing a meaning that I’m no longer sure I can access or relate to. I’m curious whether this sense of the image being “dead” is something you are interested in, or whether you see the images as producing a different kind of meaning altogether, in the sense that they seem to flatten existing binaries between the obsolete and the futuristic, or between the inanimate and the animate.

Matthew

Yes. I think there are perhaps a few ways in which I could talk about that. It’s also a great question.

On the one hand, I feel as though there are many contemporary images that are still referred to in the same way as a photograph from the late 1800’s might have been. There are many other forms of image that seem to be proliferating that have perhaps transmuted yet still retain the fundamental characteristics of a photograph or retain characteristics usually attributable to a photographic process. This in spite of all the narration around the death of photography as a medium.

These images that are experienced – I think this is a thought borrowed from Joanna Zylinska, but is perhaps a thought that many of us have – imagery that could be described as photographic, is also experienced as a kind of flow, something that envelops us and is dominant in the visual landscape, experienced very fluidly or transiently, and seamlessly woven into various kinds of environments.

These images, whether in fact photographic or not, have always been informing how we frame ourselves, construct our own self-image, and identify with the world. Somewhere in this, I think there’s a movement that happens, in which the thing that the image seems to depict is somehow isolated or suspended and recapitulated as a discrete and autonomous thing over there, separate from us. Its unknowability is redoubled in the image. Accordingly,  I have the feeling that I am being constructed in this process, as an observer of a world of things, through the formation of a conscious image that happens ‘in here’, or more broadly, counts as my perception, and this being representative of the thing ‘out there’ to which my perception relates. This process situates me, or kind of mis-locates me, outside of any system of relations through which images and subjectivities are mutually formed or co-substantiated.

I think there is an example in some of the conversations around AI in light of the way that we can’t avoid a growing awareness of how integral this group of technologies is becoming to the processes through which we deal with and translate information that these same technologies produce. It can feel quite disorienting or decentering.  I have become increasingly interested in trying to address the ideological standpoint that attempts to maintain some construction of an autonomous selfhood in the midst of any interaction with technology. It feels more like we are becoming functions of the technologies we make – ‘Functionaries,’ as Vilém Flusser explicitly termed this condition in his 1983 essay ‘Towards a Philosophy of Photography’. I think this relates to your question about no longer being able to fully access the meaning of an image. In the press release, I described something like this, in quite a blunt way, and perhaps through conversation with Catriona, who set up Turning Space, which is where the exhibition we are also discussing took place. The animicity of the objects that I described as ‘looming large in my images’ , I suggested, relegates the viewer/ observer to an adjunct bystander, or a foreign body, in their worlds.

I think this tries to speak to a kind of affect connected to the inevitable increasing awareness of all these other agencies at work in the production of images and the production of the self.

With images there is this sense of a meaning, a production of meaning that is for us, that speaks to us in a way that we can understand.  However, in line with your own concerns, I am also interested in my own growing anxiety about my inability to speak in, or understand the languages through which images now communicate.

I remember a quote – sorry, this is just coming into my head in a really weird way – It’s by Walter Benjamin. Or initially it’s Benjamin, and then Flusser continued it. In his Mechanical Reproduction essay from 1936, Walter Benjamin says something quite extreme: “the illiterate of the future will not be the ones who cannot read the Alphabet, but the ones who cannot take a photograph”. Vilém Flusser takes this further, suggesting that we are entering into a ‘post-literate’ era dominated by what he terms ‘technical-images’.

These images are produced by ‘black-box’ devices such as cameras, computers, algorithms and software. According to Flusser, the danger of such images is that they continue to appear to be direct windows onto reality and therefore do not need to be decoded.

Technical images are constituent of what he calls an ‘Apparatus’- a form of hegemonic structure, or set of conditions, comprising technical devices (computers, cameras, etc.), media-systems and corporations, that produce both the complex, programmable internal logic of the devices used to create technical images, as well as technical images themselves.

Flusser warns that to avoid becoming passive to the forces exerted by these kinds of images – our becoming Functionaries whose choices, behaviours and desires are entirely delimited by the possibilities pre-programmed into the internal logic of these technical devices and media – we must develop a new kind of visual literacy that is appropriate to decoding such images. He calls this a new techno-imaginary.

I feel like this relates to the feeling that you’re pointing to in the images. Perhaps it’s not a reassuring feeling.

 

Morgane

In May 2026, I went to the Venice Biennale, and I remember seeing Helter Skelter at the Prada Foundation, with Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa. Did you see that exhibition? Seeing those works reminded me of a world, a past world in which you could collect images that didn’t belong to you, and where those images could function as artefacts of particular historical events. One where images were accountable. Something that now feels almost impossible, out of reach.

Continuing from there, and connecting this observation to your practice, when you produce an image that contains temporal, associative, or historical layers, do you think of it as becoming an “operational image,” in Harun Farocki’s sense? And if so, does that change the way we think about the image as an artefact, or does it become something else?

Matthew

They may be becoming artifacts, I suppose. Something in their architecture, as you mentioned earlier, is, for me, where their language is.

This precariousness around their content, and what their content is supposed to be signaling, is a way to circumvent an obsolete language in photography, one that has to do with the indexical character of the photographic image, or the idea of it as a memento or record.

The traditional idea of a photograph as capture is something that I personally feel quite focused on dismantling. This is in light of some of the things I’m thinking about and have mentioned around technology and my own relationship to technology.

Just to go back a bit, I’m interested in the way that you described some of the images you’re looking at as no longer being representative of a world that you know.

I’m curious about this because, when I look at my own photographs and their incredibly processed surfaces, I think about how that opens onto the way they have been digitally manipulated and regurgitated, and how they’re zombifying and reproducing a lot of language that I do feel familiar with.

But in the way that this language is being presented to me, I feel as though it’s somehow not doing what I’m expecting it to do; as you’ve mentioned, it’s speaking very ambiguously.

The way I’m representing the scenes, objects and recognisable elements within the content of my images, even where this appears to signal their becoming artefacts, is also a way of getting into their processing and the different levels of mediation going on. In this way they become more relatable, personally, to my own experience of reality and to the world that I feel I know.

This disjuncture is central for me: the world that I see when I look around and the breaking down of this narrative around photography’s authentic mode of capture.

Morgane

What you’re saying makes me think about the possibility that highly processed or even artificial tools, such as AI or pixel augmentation, might somehow reactivate life in said images. I’m not too deep into the theories around aliveness or necromancy in relation to AI, but there seems to be something here, speculatively, about breeding a kind of life back into images in a way that can no longer be flattened into a simple past-present-future timeline. And this connects to what you were saying about zombification. A zombie is still something alive, in a sense. It’s a monster, but it survives by feeding off other things. How do you think about the distinction between the organic and the non-organic, or between what is alive and what is not when it comes to image-making? And how was that distinction perhaps made more visible through your collaboration with Eva and the introduction of works they made in response to your images?

Matthew

Again, this is a really good question, although I find it very complex. These are things I’ve tried to get into and address through the way I approach my own practice and image-making.

The zombie figure, this living-dead construction, or the hauntological Gothic – not supernatural in any way – the material present being impressed upon by the unrealised or failed futures contained in certain pasts…the diminished promises and dreams of technological realities that never became the futures they were expected to become.

It’s similar to something that you described: dead but still operational. I think that the medium (photography) undergoes a continual process of mutation and transformation; however, this can feel obscured by the historical conversation around photography among other constructions weighing on it. It can be very repetitive – a kind of rhetoric that feels trapped in a process of endlessly recycling its own past. For me, this has the effect of displacing or dislocating the reality of photography’s current historical present. It’s as though a huge period of its recent history is somehow missing or is constantly being redacted and made inaccessible.

I think this is where Mark Fisher’s ideas about hauntology (taken from Derrida’s term in Spectres of Marx) are interesting for me. Gothic Materialism, or the analogy of the Zombie, has become a really interesting and useful vehicle for me.

Mark Fisher was writing at a specific time in the UK. Looking towards any future horizon in that moment, post-Thatcher, produced a strong sense of collective anxiety. A sense of totalising cultural stagnation, and the impossibility for any cultural imaginary to produce an alternative future not doomed to the same morbid failures as those of its recent political past.

For me, Mark Fisher does this reconnecting of the illegible or incomprehensible ruins of the present to the pasts in which they made sense and where they once existed as monuments to a future yet to come – he reconnects to the contexts that enable these ruins to be decrypted by a somewhat alien civilisation doing an archeological dig on a planet they inevitably discover, in horror, to be their homeworld haha.

This is somehow why I really like the feeling that the shine has come off of the obsolete or outmoded technologies I’m interested in – their ruination. I like the way they’ve been discarded by ideas around progress and are no longer expected to perform well because they’ve been supplanted by newer, more sophisticated versions of themselves.

They’re no longer expected to meet the ideological demands that are made of them when they’re at the cutting edge of what is broadly considered progress. They’re sort of freer, as things to experiment with, or to repurpose, and can somehow more easily produce surprising or unlikely outcomes.

In Flusser, this is about the possibility of somehow giving form to information,  through experimentation and through attempting to rearrange the apparatus, despite being implicated by it – despite speaking from within it.

A lofty idea, but in this deadness around things, my ancient camera, for instance, from around 2005, somehow this idea feels present. My camera is adequate for making images that I think are interesting, and it still does what it’s not supposed to do (according to its successors), especially when it’s combined with some of the other processes I use in creating these very slick, highly resolved images. A kind of retroactively ascribed newfound purpose resulting from its relations to things that didn’t exist when it was considered current. I think this helps to produce the kinds of meanings that I want to use to open up particular conversations. It helps to dissolve the myth of obsolescence.

In your question, you also asked about how the frames created by eva duerden might further emphasise a distinction between aliveness and the organic, and the non-organic. I was curious about whether the material iteration of these frames would somehow give an impression of stability, something tangible and consistent – a kind of body. I was interested in the tension this might produce in terms of how the content in my images is operating ambiguously and conversely in a somewhat unstable way. However, it’s the other way around, I think! I wasn’t anticipating how the frames would double down on this defamiliarising or destabilising effect going on in the images.

This was loosely coming from an idea in Katherine Hayles’ ‘How We Became Posthuman’, about the ‘flickering signifier’, which is to do with digital signs that are being continuously generated and transfigured. They imply forms of materiality that appear to us to be permanently unstable. Hayles talks about how this has been (mis)-conceived as a form of disembodied information that has been uncoupled from any material substrate whatsoever – a disembodied lifeform flowing freely among things. For Hayles, Flickering signifiers don’t appear to represent meaning or arrange concepts in a way that appears to be as stable as material iterations of their analogues – physical photographs, other printed imagery and media, books, letters, paintings, or other kinds of seemingly traditional objects used to physically inscribe signs.

I still think quite a lot about the way that I’m exporting files off of my computer that are constituted through a set of digital tools and information, and how I am translating those into various objects. I think about how this changes them. What that means to a form that began as a sequence of code derived from light hitting a sensitised surface that converts it into electrical charges… Maybe it’s boring, but I think it’s important.

Beyond this, I am very interested in methods of display and the way that eva’s armatures not only emphasise but perform slippages of their own usual registers. They become ways of modelling something else, modelling the idea of their own functionality as frames, and becoming framing devices simultaneously.

So, for me, part of the collaboration is to do with a curiosity around how (I hoped) eva’s frames, or display structures, would interject an unusual kind of material presence that would conflict with the way that the surfaces of my images, along with their processing, register a different kind of form, or materiality. I also hoped that they would operate somewhat contradictorily as this ‘information’ that flows in, or crosses over, and would perhaps change the way that my images try to assert or produce their own meaning.

Morgane

The exhibition text describes your work and eva’s as works that “talk at cross purposes and occasionally agree.” Can you give an example of a moment when her display system either supported or disrupted what you imagined the image would do?

Matthew

So that’s a really good question. And actually, thanks for pulling on that thread because it does bring me to something that might be relevant.

Earlier, I was talking about the way that the image itself kind of constructs its own meaning through the associations and categorizations that are involved in different languages that it regurgitates –  photographic mechanisms or tropes.

When eva and I spoke about making these works together, I was really happy, and I think she was too,  for eva to use the pre-existing images to respond to without too much conversation around specifically how they could interact well together or work together.I enjoy the way that the displays are so ornate, detailed, and densely layered. I think the more that you engage with them, the more detailed and layered they become. They’re so loud within the work as a whole that I think they really do start to overpower the images. What I mean is that their tactile materiality prevents the photograph, or its surface, from feeling quite so removed…This brings the images closer, albeit in a rather disturbing way.

I’m very interested in the way that the frames become obstacles, or inhibit the image – in some of the mechanisms and design features that support the images within their armatures, these elements physically press up against or interrupt their surfaces. Their noisy material presence operates on the authority of the image to assert its own meaning. It gets kind of confused by and embroiled with the frame. Very distinct elements in both works seemingly fighting to prevent themselves from being dissolved into one another.

Morgane

Did you just give away your images to eva so they could interpret them, or was there a sort of conversational, maybe systemic way to approach this construction around the image?

Matthew

Pretty much the former. We’ve had a long, ongoing conversation happening generally, however. Unavoidable due to sharing a studio space haha! Occasionally we talked about the specific process.

I personally was more interested in the idea of not having too much conversation around them because I also wanted to see what would happen in the way that they might act on one another, and in the way that they could cause conflict with one another.

Rather than mine and eva’s individual practices folding into a single coherent object, I wanted to maintain the individual identities and differences of mine and eva’s separate working approaches in a way that would be very clear, but in a way that would come together to produce a cohesive work within which these differences would not be resolved but would become very productive.

 

Morgane

Referring to Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine, what interests me is less the idea of learning to see like a machine than how machine vision is changing the conditions of seeing itself, and therefore how we perceive the world, phenomenologically.

That feels particularly relevant to your work because technology doesn’t have to be attached to the body, through a brain-computer interface or wearable device, to alter cognition. It can also change the conditions through which we look at, read, and make sense of images. So, returning to this idea of a flattening between past, present, and future, do you see these shifts in technology as also producing a shift in cognition? Have they changed where we look for the focus of an image, how we understand what we’re seeing, or how we read its internal architecture? In other words, how are these technologies changing not only the images we produce, but the way we experience them, and the world at large?

Matthew

This is a thought I am very interested in – for me, it is really important to acknowledge that technologies that both constitute the environment around me and that actively construct that environment absolutely alter conditions for seeing, as well as conditions for deciphering meaning and decoding images (as we talked about earlier). Not only with regard to ‘machinic’ vision, but with regard to countless other technological objects, entities, and technological features of reality. For me it feels straightforward that this profoundly changes human cognition – the ‘neural link’, the one that I think has produced the image of a matrix, is one that is fundamentally tethered to the environment – to its technical apparatuses and technological transformation. I feel that I am only happening as an expression of relations among other things. There is no ‘me’ outside of this system, yet within it I maintain some sort of discernible outline, but one that is permeable, contingent, and very much subject to the conditions of this reality I am a part of.

I can say that I am a cyborg every time I sit at my computer, or put in my contact lenses, or use contactless payment, but what does it actually mean, or when does it mean enough? The classic image of the cyborg as a part-human-being, physically altered and augmented by technology,  is perhaps a symbol we can tolerate because it assures us of our ability always to remain cognizant of changes happening to us and within us – the image of the cyborg suggests that these changes will remain tangible, externally perceptible – measurable as changes to our physical borders, to our bodies. There is a more disturbing image of a cyborg, which is the one we cannot tell apart from ‘ourselves’ until we peel back its skin and reveal the machine underneath. I suppose for me the thought that follows is to do with a privilege we assume in having any degree of autonomy to choose whether we would or would not wish to ‘learn’ how to see like a machine. The question as I would perhaps (re)phrase it is ‘how do we avert being transformed into a thing that only sees like a machine?’

In relation to my occupation with creating images, this loops back to thinking about a techno-imaginary – a way of developing technical and visual literacy that can help to decode how images operate. This is linked very directly to the technological means that have been used to produce images and the codifications baked into the internal logic of these means. How does one contend with a technical apparatus that imperceptibly transforms human cognition and human ways of seeing?

Morgane

Yes, and what if looking at the world with the naked eye can already produce a technologically conditioned form of subjectivity? Perhaps we don’t need a tool in front of us to see through technology. We already carry so much knowledge about how things are constructed that it shapes what we perceive and how we make sense of it. That makes image-making, not just photography, a particularly generative space—a constant fabulation.

To me, this raises an important question about technological enhancement. What happens to the image when technology no longer simply mediates between us and the world, but starts to mediate the conditions of perception itself? Returning to your work, you write in the show notes that “the images look back at the viewer like odd neighbours.” Is that sense of estrangement something you are deliberately trying to produce, or is it simply a reflection of the way you think we now encounter images?

Matthew

It’s really interesting to think about in terms of some of the things you’ve been saying through your questions, because the odd neighbor thing could be taken, and I think perhaps once, in the discourse around images, was taken very negatively. The idea of something to which no agency has been ascribed, actively looking back at us, a thing to which no authority has been conferred that would permit it to look – an unsolicited gaze upon us seemingly belonging to an inanimate thing – this was either tacitly dismissed or taken very uneasily.

I think my images looking back, if in fact they do this or are able to do this, is, I hope, a very positive sign they are still operational (despite being dead). Still able to do their job and to operate as a mirror. Earlier I think I mentioned Flusser’s worry about technical images still appearing to resemble a direct window onto reality and therefore not seemingly needing to be decoded because they simply show things ‘as they are’. I would be tempted to say this of my images looking back – that their look sees things ‘as they are’.

I think a mirror is very similar to a photograph in this precise way. A mirror appears to reflect objects that are in front of it. However, this interpretation privileges me as an observer of someone, or something, else’s reflection, free to look without being looked at. Not implicated by the thought that what is in fact being reflected in a mirror is a psychological process, the forming of an interiority, which I think speaks to all sorts of ways in which mirrors return my ‘gaze’.  So this look, the odd neighbor, reflects a set of conditions being produced and affecting us despite us and despite attempts to make images behave – to make them show us what we want to see.

Morgane

Looking at your odd neighbour, pondering, ‘Is this dead yet?’

Matthew

Yes.

Open Book Publishers (OBP) turns eighteen today! As we reach our maturity as official publishing ‘adults’, we have dipped into our story so far and pulled out eighteen pieces of advice for anyone venturing into the world of scholar-led book publishing.

(We also find ourselves wondering whether reaching eighteen officially qualifies us as ‘sustainable’ yet…)

So here we go:

1. Try it and see!
   As co-founders and directors Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti explained when the press turned ten, “Our approach was very much: we’ll try, we’ll see if it works.” Over eighteen years, OBP has grown from publishing one book a year to publishing around 60 books a year, from developing software and processes for our own use to developing infrastructures to support other publishers facing similar issues, but that progress was gradual, focused, embraced experimentation (recognising trial and error as a process) and began by just getting started on a small scale.
   
2. Seek advice from peers
   There are now networks of scholar-led, institution-led and community-led presses in different countries, as well as other open publishing networks to go to for help and advice, including ScholarLed, Copim, the Open Access Books Network, OPERAS, and OIPA. Individual presses are also generally eager to help peers who might want to launch a new press and can offer advice and support.
   
3. Find supportive authors #1
   The first book OBP published was actually republished: William St Clair’s That Greece Might Still Be Free, which had fallen out of print in the years since it was first published by another press: open access gave it a second life. William became a much-valued co-director of the press, and Alessandra and Rupert asked the Modern and Medieval Languages library in Cambridge for a list of their most-borrowed books, writing to a number of authors on the list to see if any of them were interested in their work being republished by OBP. Robert Phillip Kolker agreed to us republishing his film studies classic The Altering Eye, and Gossman generously offered his new manuscript, which became Brownshirt Princess.
   
4. Find supportive authors #2
   A publisher survives and thrives because authors support it by choosing to entrust it with their work. Other academics give their time and expertise to peer review manuscripts, or bring their series idea or serve on series editorial boards, or sit on an advisory board. Any publisher is successful because of the generosity of its authors and of the broader academic community, and we are hugely grateful for eighteen years of this generous support.
   
5. Know that people will tell you that you can’t do it—try it anyway
   When OBP began eighteen years ago, Alessandra and Rupert received a lot of feedback that what they were attempting was impossible; that they lacked the knowledge and resources to be successful; and that book publishing was best left to the people who were already doing it. But they had faith that a new and more nimble, innovative approach could be successful.
   
6. Find your co-conspirators in publishing
   Throughout the life of the press, we have sought out people interested in open books and open infrastructures, who share our values and who are stimulating to work with. Communities including Copim, ScholarLed, OPERAS, OIPA and others have given us opportunities to shape and hone our ideas through collective work (and occasional collegiate disagreements), by being inventive and ambitious to build things together, and by offering sociability and support in good times and bad. We’ve found that having a network of colleagues to bounce ideas off, share frustrations and create things with is essential.
   
7. Disagreement can be useful
   Sometimes people who don’t share your aims will make pertinent points, and thinking through why you disagree with an argument can clarify your own ideas. Antagonists can be valuable as well as allies!
   
8. Keep talking
   You have to keep advocating for the changes you want to see happen in scholarly publishing—speaking to different groups and making the same arguments can feel repetitive over time, but it is how change happens. Persistence is key.
   
9. Be prepared to be asked if you’re ‘sustainable’
   A reflexive challenge to anything new (or even not so new) in scholarly publishing is the question of whether it is ‘sustainable’. Sometimes this means ‘will you still be around in five years’ time’ but sometimes it means ‘is this commercially scaleable’—which might not be what you want in any case. ‘Sustainability’ is not an inherent property of an organisation or a model, but a result of the choices of others. OBP has been sustained for eighteen years by the authors, librarians, funders and other supporters who have invested their money, research, time and expertise into what we do; just as other organisations (including large commercial publishers) are sustained by those same things. Are we sustainable? Well, we have been sustained so far.
   
10. Value librarians—along with authors, they are your biggest supporters
    The Library Membership Programme that we introduced around 2015 has been hugely significant for us financially, supplying a reliable revenue stream that has enabled us to take on more staff and gradually grow the number of books we publish. Our library supporters have stuck with us even during tough times. They have also invited us to speak to their authors and students, given us advice and feedback, championed us to their researchers, created metadata for us, and worked with us on projects such as those implemented by Copim, advocating for and helping to build community-led, Diamond, open publishing alongside us. They are our financial supporters, but they are also our allies in opening research equitably.
    
11. Being smaller can make you more resilient, responsive and innovative
    Being smaller is often considered a vulnerability, but it enables us to make quick decisions and be nimble to react to changes and opportunities – whether those are changes within scholarly publishing, or global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
    
12. Infrastructure is essential
    One of Copim’s mottoes is ‘no open access without open infrastructure’ and we would agree wholeheartedly. If your workflows are locked in to proprietary commercial software, then your press is dependent on those companies (and contributing to their success). We are not perfect in this regard—there are certain commercial tools we still choose to use for now—but the bulk of the core infrastructure that we rely on is open source and community-led, including Thoth Open Metadata (which generates and distributes our metadata in multiple formats, powers our catalogue, and underlies our website), the OPERAS Metrics Service (which consolidates our usage data via Thoth), and our accessibility software.
    
13. You need allies to make change
    Finding your co-conspirators in publishing (see #6) is a necessary first step to making bigger changes as a smaller organisation. We have embraced the principles of ‘scaling small’ by being part of communities that build infrastructures and make arguments to achieve significant change in open scholarly publishing. To do that, you have to nourish your communities and think about what you can contribute—not what you can extract. Be generous in sharing knowledge, time, ideas, and other forms of support and resources with your allies and those who share your values.
    
14. Demonstrate an alternative
    The continued existence of scholarly presses that have been publishing high-quality, open access books without relying on author fees for eighteen years (or ten years, or five years) is immediately a contradiction to the argument that this model of publishing ‘can’t be done’ or ‘isn’t sustainable’ (see #9).
    
15. Keep knowledge free… from interference
    The open accessibility and free circulation of knowledge is of increasingly critical importance in a world beset by major challenges, one of which is the existence of authoritarian governments that seek to influence, obscure, or even, in some areas, eradicate scholarly research. In this environment, open access makes a vital contribution to the persistence of knowledge free from political interference.
    
16. Success is defined by your actions today, not by your future plans
    Every title we have published and will publish is a ‘success’. It is another work freely available to the world that might have been locked away behind a paywall otherwise. Even if we stop publishing today, we will have published nearly 500 titles that are now openly available for the world, and will remain so for as long as our archiving and preservation strategies are successful.
    
17. Don’t do it for the money
    If financial profit is an objective, you’re in the wrong business. Seriously, everything is distorted with a business model that seeks to maximise the profits from scholarly publishing—whatever your uses for those profits are! Covering operational costs is clearly a necessity; surpluses allow you to better achieve your objectives. Profits do not.
    
18. Focus on the mission—not the institution
    OBP itself is not important. What OBP does is important.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/k0be4-s6s31

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

Nameless Sound is a Houston institution, currently celebrating 25 years of bringing free experiences of experimental music making to the local community. The organization, founded by trombone player/composer/improviser David Dove, started out as a small workshop in improvisation for teenagers at the MECA (Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts), an arts community center in Houston’s 6th Ward. Dove realized through musical practice with his students that the opportunity for creativity was often missing in traditional musical education and that improvisation was, for him, the most immediate and inclusive way to collaboratively engage young people in creative music making. Despite widely varying musical expertise, the students were able to able to meaningfully collaborate with one another. Beginners were captivated and engaged, while students with more musical education were challenged and ready to experiment. Shortly after this realization, Dove became part of the Advisory Board of Diverse Works, an arts organization in Houston’s museum district, he began organizing concerts with leading experimental musicians, inviting them to lead sessions of his kids’ workshop at MECA.

It was Houston’s own Pauline Oliveros who encouraged Dove to formalize this residency model–experimental musicians come to town, give a public performance followed by a community workshop for young people–that would become the blueprint for Nameless Sound’s work today. The organization actually began as a branch of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in 2001 (and would come to be called the Deep Listening Institute Houston when Oliveros’s organization took on that name). That year they brought 9 artists to Houston and started a ongoing campaign of improvisation workshops in public schools (known then as The Houston Tour).

In 2005 Jo Ann Williams, art therapist and founder of ArtBridge Houston, invited DLI Houston to start giving workshops for children in some Houston homeless shelters. This was an important turning point for DLI Houston. It widened the age group that the organization worked with. It began a practice of facilitating workshops for people who previously had no experience playing music at all. Perhaps most importantly, Nameless Sound began to witness the potential for social-emotional learning in the improvisational process, and they began to understand how a secure framework for creative music making could also provide a safe-space for emotional vulnerability.

In 2006, with the blessing of Oliveros, DLI Houston broke off from its parent organization and became Nameless Sound, a fully independent 501(c)3 non-profit. Over the past 20 years, Nameless Sound has continued to evolve. Its concert series has become known for a diverse range of international artists who represent the most important and influential names in the music, as well as the emerging cutting-edge.

The series features commissions and world-premieres, as well as special projects that entail collaborations between visiting artists and local musicians. Site-specific events in some of Houston’s most interesting art environments often bring in visiting audiences from outside of the city. Visiting artists have included Susie Ibarra, Damon Smith, Keiji Haino, Louis Moholo, Maja Ratkje, Cooper-Moore, Matana Roberts, and Hamid Drake. Occasional interventions bring ears to seemingly unlikely public listening spaces. And one of our ongoing projects outside of Houston brings audiences to The Hill of James Magee, an art installation on private land in the West Texas Chihuahuan Desert.

One of Nameless Sound’s most popular interventions is They, Who Sound, which started out as a series of casual sessions at local Houston bars. After some challenges and changes in location, Nameless Sound officially took on They, Who Sound in 2018 as a weekly series of concerts in partnership with Lawndale Art Center. For Lawndale, the series represented something of a return to roots, as in the 1980’s, Lawndale’s original location was the site for some of the most memorable experimental music and underground rock events in Houston. Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago all performed there, as did Black Flag, The Minutemen and the Replacements.

For Nameless Sound, They Who Sound was an opportunity to provide a stage and shed light on Houston’s diverse, vibrant, and unique experimental music scene. It has endured as a meeting place for Houston listeners and experimental musicians, and as a lab for new developments. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, Nameless Sound contined to innovate and serve the community, creating They, Who Sound Special Delivery. For a small fee, anyone can schedule a They, Who Sound musician to come to their home and perform a 10 minute piece of experimental music from a safe distance.

They, Who Sound continues in concert with the Lawndale Art Center every Monday from 7:30 to 9:30pm (Doors open at 7pm). Coming up September 28th, 2026 Nameless Sound will host Emily Beisel/Lisa Cameron & Laura Dykes/Kodey Saldaña/Thomas Swindell. For videos of past performances and to subscribe to receive future updates, you can check out Nameless Sound’s Youtube Page or follow on Vimeo.

Nameless Sound remains committed to a vision of personal and community evolution supported by the practices of creative music. Creative music improvisation provides a unique opportunity to cultivate group awareness, self-awareness and healthy vulnerability, with potential outcomes of knowledge exchange, creative work, play and healing. The skills developed through musical improvisation emphasize listening, creativity, spontaneity, dialogue and self-expression. There are free ongoing workshops through September 2026 and more to be announced.

Other upcoming events for Nameless Sound to close out 2026:

• October 10, 3 – 5 pm, Dimensions Variable at Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University. Laura Dykes and Aryn Ward on/with Nanibah Chacon’s Where Two Rivers Meet. As part of The Moody Center’s Dimensions Variable series, in conjunction with the exhibition Radiant Geometries: Vectors of Knowledge from the Indigenous Americas
  
• November 12, 7–8 p.m, Vitalized Vitalized at Menil. : The Nameless Sound Ensemble creates and performs scores based on works by Terry Winters. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry, This program takes place in the main building, located at 1533 Sul Ross Street. As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.

Nameless Sound is currently in Fall Fundraising mode, with an anonymous donor matching every gift up to 8,000 dollars through FRIDAY, September 25, 2026 Here’s to 25 more years of Nameless Sound with ongoing support from local and global sound communities!

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