Digesting Care is an experimental publication developed with Kendal Beynon for TAKING CARE, a European research project exploring care and kinship within ethnographic and world cultures museums.
How can a publication make connections across a conference without reducing its complex and sometimes unresolved conversations into a single narrative?
We attended the conference as listeners and participants, using drawing as a form of note-taking to capture ideas, conversations and relationships beyond written documentation. Recurring concepts such as contradiction, plurality, fabulation, entanglement and the unknown became a tagging system through which papers, presentations, photographs and workshop materials could be connected.
Rather than separating editorial work, design and development, we built a publishing infrastructure in which these processes could inform each other. Collaborative text files and tags were transformed through Python into a lightweight website, while the same content and visual system extended into a physical publication. The digital version uses semantic HTML and dithered images, with high-resolution media available on demand, considering accessibility, resilience and energy use as part of the publishing process.
The website also became the blue print for the physical edition. Fifty different states of the website were printed, producing 50 unique versions of the publication. Rather than reproducing a single definitive arrangement, each copy preserves one possible reading of the material.
The result is a hybrid publication that treats publishing not as the documentation of a finished conversation, but as a way of revealing relationships between ideas and allowing different readings to emerge across digital and physical forms.