Kim Kleinert: Notes on Publishing Ecologies
Kim Kleinert: Notes on Publishing Ecologies
An interview with Kim Kleinert about contaminating websites
Dear reader
Most websites copy conventions. As a result, everything ends up with similar trending colours, sans serif fonts, responsive grids and placeholder texts. It is a seamless user experience. I rarely struggle to locate what I’m looking for: the about page, contact information, and everything else is easy to find, and without much thought, I can proceed with my day.
The convenience comes at a cost. Not only is it boring when everything looks like an e-commerce template, but I also struggle to differentiate the sites from each other. As the sites assimilate, they become indistinguishable and interchangeable. No wonder they rely on search engine optimization and digital ads to get visitors. I remember them as a convention and forget them as individual sites.
Therefore, I love landing on websites where I don’t immediately understand what is happening. Especially when it is clear that the chaos is made with care and intention. Today, I’m bringing an interview with a person who makes such sites. Kim Kleinert’s work radiates strong visions, and a devotion to websites’ material and cultural histories. Enjoy.
With care
Kristoffer
An interview with Kim Kleinert
K: Can you explain the thoughts behind Compiling Edge Effects: Notes on Publishing Ecologies?
Kim: It deals with the digital not being a cloud or far away or intangible, but something located, although it might sometimes be hard to tell. It originates from my own reading practice. Whenever I read a book, a newspaper or anything physical, it is contaminated and touched by my reading process. I bring it to different places and go through the pages. It gets marks and stains. It looks different depending on the place and the time of the year I read it. It contains memories, marks and annotations, making it relational to its environment. I wondered how this might happen if I read and published something online. What are the relations a digital publication might undergo? What are the forms of contamination? What are the forms of influence and change it undergoes while reading, but also while being carried somewhere?
K: Why did you name it “publishing ecologies?”
Kim: The notion of ecologies encourages us to understand publications as more than mere texts. An ecology is not only a list of living beings. It is also the relationships between those beings and their environment. I like to think about publishing and text in this way. Their meaning only emanates in context and relation.
K: And it is part of your bachelor studies with Klasse Digitale at HFBK?
Kim: Exactly.
K: It's a wonderful and elaborate project.
Kim: Thank you. I just did what I enjoyed the most. I looked at ideas of self-hosting to start with the groundwork and infrastructure. From there, I continued with APIs and interfaces as zones of encounters that not only appear in digital technologies but also in other fields, like contiguous ecosystems.
K: I love your thinking about the ways we contaminate a website. You told me you will exhibit the project for a school show in January. How do you approach representing the website in a physical space?
Kim: What I'm going to show in January is continuing some of the ideas, but it is also a project on its own. I'm working on a questionnaire to get deeper into the ideas of requests and responses, something APIs also work with.
K: So it will remain digital in form?
Kim: It is still a digital project, but I will bring it into an exhibition space. This is not my point of expertise. Luckily, my friends who studied fine arts have more experience in making exhibitions. I already asked them to help me drill some holes into the wall.
K: Do you consider the physical space in the survey design?
Kim: I feel the physical and digital don't exclude each other but go hand in hand. One approach I have is to make a mobile-first website so it can be perceived and interacted with from your own device inside the exhibition.
K: It is difficult to present websites in physical space…
Kim: Absolutely. But it's interesting. For the thesis website, I made a printed publication. It used the same underlying grid as the website, but the grid was invisible, and the publication was without animations. Instead, I was left with these text blocks that are weirdly positioned.
K: Your work is often text-based and graphical. I know you were considering studying photography. What happened to this interest?
Kim: My photography was very graphical. For example, a light situation or colour I found beautiful. This approach is still there. I no longer have to capture it every time because I use other visual representations such as graphic design, coding and other artistic approaches. But what I make still originates from perceiving things in my environment and being open to small details.
K: Why do you prefer to go from specific elements?
Kim: I would easily get overwhelmed if I did not focus on those small details before the bigger things. It's easier to start small and explore the different dynamics, and then go on to the bigger picture.
K: You bring the same focus on details to words. What do you think about the language we use to talk about the internet?
Kim: This is hard to answer because everyone's internet is different. My internet is a lot of Are.na, it's an environment where I feel safe, curious and empowered. And I guess other people's internet might be more Twitter and news-related platforms. It would be tough to talk about all of them because they differ so much from each other.
K: So when you write on your website, who do you write for?
Kim: I'm always surprised when people visit my website. I guess, at the moment, these are containers or systems for myself.
K: It's interesting how idiosyncratic your publishing is. It’s almost like there is no public.
Kim: I'm aware of the public when I publish on Instagram, a platform where I see who likes and engages with what I post. Meanwhile, I set all of these small web publications and appearances free. They undergo different routes and ways. It's okay for me to not have them under my control anymore. I hope that someone encounters them and maybe can relate or resonate with some of their contents, just like I'm happy when I find a small, nice snippet or website or insight on the internet,
K: You read a lot. Why do you read? What are you looking for in reading?
Kim: What I mostly enjoy about reading is discovering words for feelings where I lacked the vocabulary to describe them. It has become a way to make my thoughts legible to me and, when articulating them, eventually to others. To read something and feel like it verbalizes something I couldn't until then is a very wholesome and regenerating feeling. On the other hand, it's also about diving into small, detailed worlds, ways of perception and modes of connectivity. It is a way for me to encounter the world, an outside world, but also worlds of texts. References, footnotes and bibliographies work better than any search engine.
Reading is something that I always did. I have the practice of re-reading books. Many books I read two or three times. I enjoy how it influences me, my language and my thoughts. I don't remember everything but the words sit with me and return in unexpected situations.
K: You are contaminated by the books that you spend time with.
Kim: All the time.
Follow Kim on Are.na or Instagram. Thanks for reading this special edition of Naive Weekly.