Part of the series Time Lapse, by Francis Alÿs, 2001.

Saturday's talk, Publishing the Public: Contextualizing Locality, started with the idea that public spaces (physical or intellectual) are increasingly becoming privatized. A city plaza, for example, is often presumed public but may actually be privatized and controlled through commercialization or surveillance. Someone either owns the space or someone controls the space covertly. A truly public space would have none of these controls, but rather a sort of self- generating  social order. This in mind, the Documenta panelists go on to assert, "we would like to approach writing and publishing as a public act."

It's an interesting statement. But even in Hol's open publishing system, where a "public" chooses their own projects and their own teams, there are certain restrictions set in place not by that public, but by us, the governing body above them. Then again, there are fundamental restrictions in a public space too, simply in the way it's structured:

The city plaza is an area 200 feet square, paved in brick. There are buildings surrounding it, and their are four main entrances to the square from the surrounding streets. There is a statue and fountain in the middle.  

This structure makes the space good for some uses and bad for others, even if the public would like to use it otherwise. And in a way, this is what we're doing: setting up some standard parameters and then letting go. I've previously defined our job (and our relationship to our public) as: 

As a book publisher in this model, it's our job to coalesce this pool of talent, give them the tools to work together, moderate their collaboration where necessary, assist in their personal and professional development, and provide an effective outlet for their collected work.

The question is raised for me is, Will our system, even with these side interventions, prove to be as truly public as a publisher can be? Or, will our few rules prove too constricting for a true public publishing effort? And what does it mean if so?

This post stems from the July 21 lecture during Documenta's Paper to Pixels Week, entitled Publishing the Public: Contextualizing Locality. You can hear the whole talk via podcast on the Documenta 12 section at LabforCutlure.org (note, the first 9 minutes of the podcast are in German, but the rest is in English).