One of Thursday's panels for Paper and Pixels Week focused on "processual aesthetics": the idea that a thing's final form (in this case, an art publication) reflects the process of its making, which in turn effects the message of its content. So, in the talk at Documenta, the three art pubs presented all embodied and were defined by the process of their creation in varying ways—an email discussion list, a social networking/community site, and a printed publication paired with online discussion forums.

For me, this brings to mind a recent post by Kenneth Goldsmith at the Poetry Foundation's blog on Writing's Crisis, which I first read about through The Institute for the Future of the Book:

"With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically."

This is what, in many ways, the featured publishers at Documenta are trying to do; allowing their mediums, their processes, even their editorial mission to shift and mutate in order to best serve their communities in ways they were not otherwise being served. In writing and in publishing, we must understand the medium of presentation and choose how to work with or against it accordingly to survive and flourish.  So, what does that mean? Goldsmith offers only this tantalizing idea:

This post stems from the July 19 lecture during Documenta's Paper to Pixels Week, entitled Processual Aesthetics, Processual Editing: Net-Working. You can hear the whole talk via podcast or read the summary and speaker posts on the Documenta 12 blog at LabforCutlure.org.