Salon Digital – Anja Groten: "Designing Sideways, Inefficient Publishing as a Mode of Refusal.”

In this talk Anja attempts to trace the convoluted ways of designing publications collectively⸺how unreliable publishing infrastructures and awkward work-arounds shape and bind together collectives of tool-makers and experimental publishers. More specifically, it will explore and discuss the intersections of self-organization, self-hosting, (of technical infrastructure) and self-publishing (of small edition experimental books and websites) drawing from the experience of working collectively as a designer.

Proposed will be several collective attempts, subtle tactics, as to (re)shape the discourse around technical innovation from narratives of progress and innovation, 'software as a service' at the cost of continued extractivism and exploitation, towards an understanding of free / libre open source publishing as a collective 'inefficient' process of mutual entanglements.

Short bio: 

Anja Groten (DE, NL) is a designer, researcher and educator based in Amsterdam. Anja's work revolves around the cross-section of digital and physical media, design and art education and the involvement in different interdisciplinary collectives such as Hackers & Designers and the Feminist Search Tools.

In November 2022, Anja completed her PhD at PhDArts (Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden) as part of the NWO-funded consortium, "Bridging Art, Design, and Technology through Critical Making," exploring the relationship between design and collectivity.

Since 2019, Anja is leading the Design Master’s program at the Sandberg Instituut, Master of the Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam. As of 2024, she also supervises PhD candidates at PhDArts as an assistant professor of design theory and practice.

https://www.hackersanddesigners.nl