Free Press

This summer and fall you are invited to contribute to the creation of
an open-access publishing house, a "Free Press," to be launched at
Röda Sten contemporary art center in Göteborg, Sweden. A project of
artist Sal Randolph, Free Press will accept all kinds of writing from
the public; contributions in any language can be as short as a single
word or as long as an encyclopedia and can include manifestos,
statements, documentations, studies, stories, recipes, poems and
whatever you can imagine.

"Even in the age of the internet, book publishing is a walled garden
where editors and commercial interests filter out most of what is
written," says Randolph. "To publish is to 'make public,' and the
published materials of the world create their own kind of public
space, a city of books where readers and writers are citizens. Free
Press aims to open up access to that public space. Like any city,
Free Press is bound to include both ugliness and beauty, though the
definitions of each will certainly differ."

All participating manuscripts will be published as printed books in
the Free Press series, available in the project's library and reading
room at Röda Sten, where events and discussions will also take place.
Additional copies will be placed on shelves in local bookstores and
libraries. Readers will be able to download copies from the website
and order them at cost from an internet book printer.

Free Press builds on several earlier projects by the artist -- in
particular, Free Words, where 3000 copies of a free book were
infiltrated onto the shelves of bookstores and libraries by a
worldwide network of volunteers, Opsound, a gift economy of music,
and Free Biennial/Free Manifesta, in which the form of an art
biennale was appropriated and re-imagined to create large open- participation exhibitions of free art in the public spaces of New
York and Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In her work, Randolph explores
the effects of gifts and gift-economies in the creation of social
architectures. [more...]