A Nourishing Network

Alice Strete & Manetta Berends

Day 29th May

TALK

10:30

Networked publishing based on the lessons we've learned from A Nourishing Network - a series of hybrid publications distributed through (snail)mail art, ActivityPub and RSS feeds and designed with Markdown, Pelican, Paged Media (CSS) and Weasyprint.

A Nourishing Network is a publishing project that documented and circulated current research done by a network of artists, activists and programmers that collaborate with the Austrian net culture initiative servus.at.

The project was done as a collaboration between Manetta Berends, Alice Strete (Varia, Rotterdam NL) and Davide Bevilacqua (servus.at, Vienna AT).

During this talk we'll be diving into (snail)mail art, the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems from the 70s/80s), The Black Panther newsletters, and other examples of such networked and community entangled publishing that inspired us while working on ANN. We will also go into detail regarding the design and development process and the tools we used (Pelican, ASCII art generated with Python scripts, cronjobs, layout design with Markdown, Paged Media (CSS) and Weasyprint, combined with RSS and ActivityPub feeds, and, not to forget, the postal network), to present a design and publishing practice that is rooted in open license culture and based on working with non-extractive software.

https://a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org/