Demo Site: https://richtext.de.pub/

Rich Text is a first of its kind do-it-yourself independent publishing software or tool that enables a website or blog to be printed as a book. It is freely available and open source for download and installation on website hosting servers for writers and publishers to write and print zines, novels, and anthologies. The Rich Text tool turns all hyperlinks within the site content into a QR code bibliography at the end of each chapter or section when printed. The intent is that the bibliography better bridges the loss between what’s on the screen and the printed page, and to build stronger hyperlinks through print and digital publishing. The Rich Text software has been designed and developed with portability and sovereignty, not tied to a single hosting server and can be archived digitally and in print. Leveraging the inheritance of the early web to protect and prioritize artists and publishers intellectual property rights and labour.

To demonstrate the capacity of this tool, I developed and tested it with 10 artists, writers, coders and hackers who each contributed to the first publication. Contributors Cody Caetano, Elida Silvey, Elizabeth Benke, Francis Whorrall-Campbell, Fiona Glen, Lucy Petersen, Mac Andre Arboleda, Olu Niyi-Awosusi, Willem Deisinger, & Zakiyyah Deen - tested the bounds of the interface in a unique open development process where they ‘hacked’ the code.

Featuring experimental writing that engages with code language(s), search engine optimizations or obfuscations, main-character matters, unseemly stimulations and simulations, kinky desires, guilty pleasures, and aggressive ascii ambitions! Mining the gap between handmade high and low-tech criticism, developing a design discourse that inspects the critical code behind our contemporary silicon context. Rich Text will invite work that subverts algorithmic rankings, including slutty superstitious fan-fictions, gay gossip and other creative and criminal clickbait that will seduce platform 'users' to the more counter-cultural crevices of the world wide web.