Short report from Get Published and Miscellaneous

Hello Uncommonists, the GET PUBLISHED conference went well on tuesday. I was pleased to be seated next to a pair of employees from Taylor Francis, one of the biggest publishers of academic journals in the world. At the far end was a woman from Cambridge University Press, in between Tony White, who described himself as the "token author" and Anthony Iles from Mute magazine. What made me happy was that I could say that "academic research funded with public money should be in the public domain" (thereby implying not behind the walls of gatekeepers to knowledge such as taylor francis". I could say it twice, once in the opening statement and then again in the discussion as luckily two members of the audience picked up on it. The event was not too well attended, maybe 40 people and the questions from students were a bit lame such as "wont my work get stolen if I put it on the internet" completely missing the point what it means to publish. So thanks for your support by supplying me with quotable statements for my opening salvo. well, actually it was not a salvo, i was wearing my most diplomatic almost english second skin.

Re: the possibility of doing a TNL panel at the SLSA conf: was there the idea to submit it for this year or for next year? as you may have noticed next year I am hosting the "networks and sustainability" panel together with Rasa Smite. I dont know if it would break the rules if there is a panel on this track which relates to my own interests as track host. At the same time you should feel free to propose anything you like.

there is also a track about artistic research which will be held not in Riga but in Liepaja, a small coastal town on the baltic sea which has an arts university and a former soviet naval base. Interesting place to go to. Yet I am not sure if those tracks will be held one after another or all at the same time which would mean I miss out on Liepaja.

Regarding this notion of art and research I wanted to propose if we can make that maybe a more explicit uncommons task, focusing on research methodologies and relationships between theories and practices, starting to create a resource, continuing to post events of that kind and maybe building a shared bibliography. the interest in this in the UK continues to be strong whereas in continental Europe because of the Bologna process this starts to kick in and they are going down also that practice based route.

Unfortunately Adnan and my attempt to organise a follow up of taxi-to-praxi failed as Goldsmiths was notz helpful at all. we wanted to make an application through Grad school but they were not interested it seems and without them we can not even apply. So I continue to stretch out feelers to other art universities to maybe do workshops, so far without success. I think small workshopsn with researchers would be a great way to grow the user base but the message seems to be difficult to get through.

Thanks Doll for your fantastic P2P text which I will maybe advertise on some lists in a couple of days. But now I have to jump on tube and plane to go to Vienna.