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Public Knowledge is a free online seminar series on the expanded ecologies of publishing. Sessions every Wednesday, 10am ET / 4pm CET. Stay up to date with our program by subscribing to the Besides the Screen mailing list.
Date Guest Session
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Oct 21 Stevphen Shukaitis Publishing as Collective Infrastructure
Oct 28 Ana Rodríguez Navas Private/Public Knowledge: Gossip and its Uses
Nov 04 Janneke Adema Experimental Publishing & Materialities of Knowledge Production
Nov 11 Anna Anthropy Shareware Visions
Nov 18 Lukas Basiskis e-flux Film: Creating a Discourse around Artists’ Moving Images
Nov 25 Divina Prado & Essay-Notebooks
Vitor Cesar
In the same essay in which he issued his famous warning about the deterioration of the aura, Walter Benjamin associated the efficacy of art to its reproducibility. The memetic economy of networks makes it patently clear how values and meanings only exist insofar as they are shared. Though we may deny it, even the power of originality depends on the extent of its collective appeal. Publications are where ideas come to matter; languages are social technologies, after all.
But what happens as excess information engenders a state of continuous context collapse? And boundless connections result in increased isolation and self-absorption? Can there be such a thing as too much publicness?
Public Knowledge is an online seminar series that seeks to address these questions by exploring how different editorial modalities can materialize knowledge, form communities, and produce (relatively) stable frameworks of interpretation. Our program began as a response to the challenges of publishing interdisciplinary and artistic research but has expanded to consider epistemic infrastructures and networks of trust more broadly.
Through weekly conversation with specialists, we’ll be putting to question the widespread logics of content to approach knowledge as a process both dependent on and constitutive of relationships, which builds truths as well as affinities.
Publishing as Collective Infrastructure: Minor Compositions and the Making of Study
Check the Minor Compositions releases
Stevphen Shukaitis is editor of Minor Compositions, a publisher and project for open-access books at the intersection of radical politics, art, philosophy, and social movements. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Composition of Movements to Come, Combination Acts, The Wages of Dreamwork, and Imaginal Machines. His work explores collective imagination, autonomist Marxism, cultural politics, publishing, and the forms of study and organization that emerge in and against capitalist institutions.
Private/Public Knowledge: Gossip and its Uses
Ana Rodríguez Navas is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and graduate director for Hispanic Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Her books include Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia, 2018), and, with Peter Hulme, Tides of Progress: Anglo-Hispanic Print Culture, 1890-1945 (Bloomsbury, 2025). She also co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies entitled “The Legacy of Oscar Wilde in Latin American Literature and Culture” with Nathalie Bouzaglo in 2020.
Experimental Publishing and the Materialities of Knowledge Production Check the Experimental Publishing Compendium
Dr Janneke Adema is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of (book) publishing and digital culture. She is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at the Arts and Creative Cultures research centre at Coventry University. Her research explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production. She also supports a a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, the Journal of Electronic Publishing, Post Office Press, MORPHSS, and the Copim community. Her monograph Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021) is openly available.
Shareware Visions
Anna Anthropy is a game designer, educator and cyborg. Her work spans digital indie games and tabletop role-playing. She has over a decade of experience teaching and lecturing about game design and has written a bunch of books, including Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (Seven Stories Press, 2012) and A Game Design Vocabulary (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2014). She lives in Chicago with her boyfriend and two weird little cats.
e-flux Film: Creating A Discourse around Artists’ Moving Images Check Lukas' website and e-flux Film Notes
Lukas Brasiskis is a New York–based curator, scholar, and writer. He is Curator of Film and Video at e-flux and editor of the weekly publication e-flux Film Notes. He holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and teaches at Columbia University and CUNY. He was an artistic director of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025) and co-curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023–24).
Essay-Notebooks
Divina Prado is an editor, educator, and researcher. Since 2016, she has developed educational materials for cultural institutions such as Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the Museum of Image and Sound, the Museum of the City of São Paulo, and the Museum of the Portuguese Language, among others. She was a curatorial assistant at the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021) and served as coordinator of Escola Tomie (2022–2023). She is currently Editorial Coordinator at Instituto Tomie Ohtake.
Vitor Cesar is an artist and designer. He is Superintendent of Design at Instituto Tomie Ohtake and leads Estúdio Permitido. The studio develops graphic design projects and visual experiments in collaboration with artists, curators, and cultural institutions, approaching design as a space for reflection and debate. His work includes the visual identities of the 34th São Paulo Biennial and the 20th Sesc_Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival. As an artist, he has participated in exhibitions including Panorama of Brazilian Art, the Mercosul Biennial, Águas Subterrâneas, and Seeing Through Stone. In 2025, he received the Jabuti Award for Graphic Design.
TBD
Public Knowledge is produced by Besides the Screen with the support of the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council and Queen's Film & Media. Program by Gabriel Menotti. Production support by Habibi Wang.