An Interview With Badlands Unlimited: E-Book Publishing House of the Future

The career of artist Paul Chan has taken many surprising turns; the most recent is the founding of his new e-book publishing house, Badlands Unlimited. The venture has prompted both excitement and dismay, because wherever Chan’s attention goes, the public goes with it. Chan’s past projects have actively engaged political issues–(the 2004 election in Now Promise Now Threat; the Iraq war in Baghdad in No Particular Order; Katrina in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans)–so one can’t help but wonder if there is a note of protest in this latest gesture.

Badlands’ presence at this year’s NY Art Book Fair, organized by Printed Matter, seemed both incongruous and momentous. Their Kindles and iPads floated alone among a sea of paper ephemera and book objects. An unspoken rule was officially broken; one got the feeling that from that moment on art books would undergo a radical revitalization process. Armed with the ability to reflect on history and see into future problems with enviable astuteness, Chan always seems to know exactly what needs to happen and when. I interviewed Badlands’ Director of Operations Ian Cheng about their project: what they (Paul and Ian) hoped to accomplish, what they feared. . . what they did in the office on mescaline. . ..

HYDRA: Aside from the ability to publish art books with more speed and ease, was there anything else motivating the founding of Badlands? Was it a sort of intervention on behalf of the art book industry? Or against?

BADLANDS: Paul was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with traditional art book publishers. They made great books no doubt–Paul has worked firsthand with some great publishers–but they couldn’t see that the historical distinctions between books, computer files, and artworks were rapidly dissolving. Badlands was started as a way to publish books and works that embody the spirit of this dissolution, and moreover books that we really wanted to read and experience but that didn’t exist yet. We’re not against paper books or the art book industry or tradition. We want to publish books in an expanded field. We want to be present in the art publishing landscape, but not have to belong there.

H: Some digital writers and artists who create strictly for the screen view the switching of mediums as inevitable and necessary, because art has to engage the present; make it new. For them it’s an issue of aesthetic integrity. So is Badlands taking a similar stance in renouncing physical matter? I’m thinking how your new downloadable e-book Mans in the Mirror is in 3D, and each page kind of lunges out at you with its own holographic physicality–a new kind of sculpture.

B: I think Timothy Leary tried to renounce physical matter once. But we’re nowhere close to being as tripped out. In any case we relate to physical matter and love physical matter because our bodies are still physical. We publish paper books and artist editions in tandem with e-books. Maybe we can say that virtuality is simply a part of the present, but that it doesn’t have to be antagonistic or zero-sum with the material world.

H: Do you think the screen destroys the reading “experience”? Scrolling isn’t the same as flipping pages, the glare of the screen isn’t the same as paper between your fingers, etc.

B: Well, whatever you think of the iPad, its touch screen is still an acknowledgment that people want to come into tactile contact with immaterial information–to physically move through the virtual. I think “the new” will be dissolving of boundaries, integrative, and strangely mundane or second-nature in this way.

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H: What do you say to critics who insist that the screen simply does not relay information like a book object? Is that a valid argument, or is the goal of the e-book to create a totally new kind of reading experience?

B: At the NY Art Book Fair and elsewhere, we’ve gotten an equal number of enthusiastic responses and fearful, angry responses about our e-book venture. The fear is that e-books are going to replace and kill off physical paper books. This fear is reinforced by the fact that the e-book form is in its infancy, and the first instinct of many book publishers doing e-books, e-book designers, and interface designers is to simply mime the experience of reading a physical book transposed within a digital space. This seems to offend a lot of book lovers, the thought of a simulation of a physical book taking the place of the physical book.

Then there’s the new media tendency to create e-books that are actually interactive apps, with all the bells and whistles of 90s CD-ROMs, a mania of animated distractions that seem to say, “Look! Reading doesn’t have to be a chore!” Which ends up obliterating the activity of reading itself. All of this is just an identity crisis in the gestating infancy of the e-book form. At Badlands we recognize this infancy as a moment of freedom, an opportunity to re-imagine how text, image, and sound can come together to expand the fundamental activity of reading. What that actually looks and feels like is the question we are asking, in the form of the books we make.

The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade's Sake

H: It is interesting to think about how we engage or disengage when we come in contact with a book object or electronic device. I liked the message at the beginning of The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade’s Sake (which I read on the Kindle): “Please turn off all other electronic devices, including mobile phones, pagers, electronic games, media and music players, and delink from all connections that may interfere with the reading experience.” If I was Justine and I was in a room with Marquis de Sade, he probably would have said the same thing: Like, “Ok. Now it’s time to get serious.” Do you think that the act of writing or making a book is like an assault on the reader? And that the problem with modern readers is that we refuse to be totally, utterly assaulted and consumed by one source? (I mean “readers” in the general sense; not just readers of text, more along the lines of Jacques Rancière when he calls for a community of “readers and interpreters” of art.)

B: At its very best, reading is an immersive experience. But to commit to being immersed is really hard these days. Digital space is both glorious and horrifying because desire can be enacted so immediately–desire for information, counter-information, images, contact, response, pleasure– (although not necessarily fulfilled). On the other hand, activities that demand sustained focus– art-making, writing, exercising, watching a movie, even getting to sleep– all require their own set of rituals to prime you, to commit your attention and your body for a duration to come. The message at the beginning of the Sade e-book is partly a joke, but it’s also a rudimentary primer. It’s something you have to pass through that will ready your attention and cue your focus into the e-book.

H: It reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story “Oblivion,” where a couple’s formerly-adequate sleep-priming rituals totally stop working. Not being able to transition fully from state to state is almost the contemporary status quo, right? Like sometimes I dream about my gmail inbox screen.

B: Actually I recently dreamt that I could check my gmail from within my dream, without having to wake up to do it. . . Maybe what you’re describing is a feeling of dislocation, which is different from being lost. There’s no sense of panic or alarm attached to dislocation, it’s just a condition. But when you’re in a state of dislocation, your attention easily enters into a competitive economy, it becomes scarce. Maybe the activity of making new priming rituals for sustained attention could be what raving was to inaccessible health care services.

H: The Sade fonts are really fun and actually strangely addictive. Whatever you type, no matter how mundane–(“Hi, Mom!” becomes “I see hetero-I see trans-incest, lustmurder” in the “Oh Dr. Ebing” font)–the message becomes very sexualized and rhythmic. It turns us all into Sade, really, this insatiable sex writing machine. How do you imagine or hope that users will interact with these fonts?

B: Maybe couples having communication problems will write disarming letters to each other using the fonts. I’d like the fonts to be in competition with YouTube cat videos as the 21st century way to say what we can’t say.

fonts for Mac + PC + Linux

H: (For Paul) The Phaedrus Pron reading at the NY Art Book Fair was really incredible, and I’ve been to more readings than I can count. I was like. . . experiencing a word painting. (Especially in the “Oh, Gertrude” section.) It was visual, sensual, I saw gradations of color, smelled smells. . . anyway, it is hard to verbalize. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say (in recent Opening Ceremony interview) that (à la Socrates) “We are given messages from the gods, and we become mad because we are only vessels for these divine messages”?

B: Divine messages drive people who think they hear them mad. They also and usually sound mad when those same people try to speak those messages. This, for Plato, was not necessarily a bad or wrong thing, since these divine messages held the secrets to another kind of order. A divine order, let’s call it. I’m not sure, however, if Plato would hold madness in such high esteem if he rode that D train at 3am.

H: What’s next? What are you guys working on now?

B: We have exciting things in store for the upcoming year. Newly translated conversations by artists, experimental e-books, works of grossly applied philosophy, and more. . .

downloadable e-book made under influence of mescaline

H: Okay, and the making of Mans in the Mirror. . . the entire office under the influence of mescaline!? Any stories to share about that?

B: Part of being a new young publishing house is to constantly maintain a coefficient of vulgarity in everything we do. We chemically abolished quality control and completed the book in a day and were very professional about not touching each other. The results speak for themselves!