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#Post-digital Publishing and the Return of Locality
##By Axel Andersson
Place, site, and locality have returned to the public discourse with a vengeance. Both in paternalistic invocations of national paradigms such as Brexit and in a retreat to salon-cultures in the face of the digital revolution. Locality is also a potentially important concept in post-digital publishing strategies that operate beyond the digital/analogue divide. One challenge is to find meaningful and critical ways of re-territorializing digital publishing practices.
Swedish Kritiklabbet has carried out a number of experiments to investigate the role of locality for contemporary publishing. Under the working title ‘mass-criticism’ we tried to combine locality and public participation with editorial reflection and intervention. One experiment related to the Gothenburg Book Fair of 2016, where a digital montage/fragment work was constructed by a team in Stockholm with solicited texts from participants at the fair in Gothenburg. This experiment contributed to the conceptualization of another experiment at the Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm 2018. For this event Kritiklabbet moved its editorial team to the Supermarket site and contributed as one ‘exhibitor’. The exhibition consisted of a production and distribution site of a physical newspaper, The Last Mass Mail, that was made with critical interventions submitted by visitors to the art fair.
Axel Andersson (SW) is a Swedish writer and critic. He is the author of A Hero for the Atomic: Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Expedition (2010), Den koloniala simskolan (2016) and Atlantvärlden (2018). His essays and reviews have appeared in a number of publications in Sweden and internationally. Andersson is editor-in-chief of Kritiklabbet, an experimental initiative investigating the economic, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of criticism in the new public sphere. His forthcoming book Absolut farmakon deals with art and nuclear waste storage.