Experimental Publishing
Our experimental publishing activities include Servpub – A Collective Infrastructure to Serve and Publish. ServPub is a platform for research and practice around experimental publishing that expands the idea of books as networked objects towards the infrastructures that facilitate their creation and distribution. It embeds publishing in its fuller infrastructural context and creates an ecosystem that supports relative autonomy from US-centric technology companies at every level of the publishing process. The project challenges proprietary software solutions provided by profit-oriented companies that inhibit community-building, open knowledge sharing, experimentation, as well as critical reflection on power asymmetries and exploitative labour within technical infrastructure.
Servpub involves the following groups: noNames (comprised of researchers from Slade Art+Tech Research Lab, UCL and DxD Research Centre, LSBU); SHAPE, a research project at Aarhus University focussed on digital citizenship; Minor Compositions, a publisher of books and media drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life; In-grid, a London-based trans*feminist collective of artists/educators/technologists working in and around digital infrastructure; Syster Server, an international collective run by feminists that offers internet-based FOSS tools to its network of feminists, queers and trans.
The multi-authored book Publishing as Collective Infrastructure, by In-grid, Minor Compositions, noNames, Shape, Systerserver, a.o. will be published in 2026 by Minor Compositions, and supported by Open Book Futures.
For more information about the book project, please visit the project documentation in progress:
* Launch of Experimental Book Publishing Pilot Project Servpub
* Documenting ‘Servpub – A Collective Infrastructure to Serve and Publish’
* Embodied and embedded publishing infrastructure on ServPub
* The (Im)Possibility of Non-Extractive Collaboration
* Collective Infrastructures for Publishing
* After the Pilot
DxD also supports the DATA browser book series published by Open Humanities Press. All books are released as open access, available for free as PDF and for purchase worldwide through most online bookstores.
Image credit: Mara Karagianni