Initial Framework: Boundless Bound Conversations as a Relational Publishing Structure

Feixue Mei

Sep 7

7 min read

Core Argument

Boundless Bound Conversations is an ongoing editorial project in which a written interview enters a sequence of relations among contributor, editorial framing, publication, readership, and archive. At each stage, the material changes context and acquires new relationships.

The framework I am developing understands publishing as the presentation and documentation of existing work as well as a structure through which dispersed materials, voices, images, practices, and future contexts can be brought into relation. The central question is therefore:

How can editorial framing create relationships between different voices while preserving the specificity and partiality of each one?

This question becomes especially important as Boundless Bound Conversations grows from individual interviews into a larger archive. The project begins with a relatively simple workflow:

invite → ask → receive → frame → publish → archive

This sequence continues beyond publication. Each published conversation can later be encountered by different readers, placed beside additional conversations, translated, reorganized, printed, exhibited, or incorporated into new editorial forms. Publication therefore occupies one stage within a longer process.

For this initial framework, I identify five core elements: contributor, editorial framing, publication, circulation, and archive. These elements are connected while retaining distinct functions. Each operates at a different register and scale, and each introduces different forms of transformation and responsibility.

1. Contributor: Situated Voice and Material

The contributor is the starting point of each conversation. Each artist or designer enters the project with a particular practice, language, history, set of images, and way of interpreting their own work. The contributor determines how to respond to the questions and which visual materials to provide.

At this level, the conversation begins as situated material grounded in a particular practice. The contributor enters through a specific practice, set of experiences, and body of work.

The Morong Li conversation demonstrates this clearly. His responses move among industrial design, physical play, digital media, fabrication, filmmaking, and publication. His understanding of bookmaking is shaped by his previous experience with moving-image editing and documentation. He describes his project materials as fragments—images, text, video, prototypes—that could be selected and organized into a narrative sequence. Publication becomes a way of translating a multidimensional project into another form while retaining access to aspects of the original work through still images, text, and digital links.

Eve White’s conversation produces a very different set of relations. Her publication grows from an accumulation of photographs made across different moments. Through intuitive selection and sequencing, bodies, landscapes, objects, and interiors become connected. The book makes visible associations that emerged through the process of bringing the individual photographs together.

These two interviews already demonstrate why contributor specificity must remain central. The same editorial structure can contain very different artistic logics. Morong emphasizes translation, documentation, technical knowledge, and iteration. Eve emphasizes association, sequencing, spatial estrangement, cadence, and intuition.

Register: experiential and material

Scale: individual/local

Dependency: primary

The contributor is primary because without the artist’s existing practice, language, and materials, there is no conversation to frame.

2. Editorial Framing: Selection, Questioning, and Relation

Editorial framing begins before the contributor responds. The five questions establish a structure for what may enter the conversation. Asking about process produces one possible direction; asking about material, publication, identity, audience, or circulation produces another.

Framing operates before, during, and after the interview itself.

In Boundless Bound Conversations, editorial framing includes the initial invitation, the questions, the introduction, image selection and placement, sequencing, captions, typography, and the final editorial reflection. These decisions preserve the contributor’s voice while creating the context within which that voice is encountered.

For this framework, editorial framing names the operations that select, question, sequence, and contextualize material. Publication names the formal and public condition produced through those operations: the editorial object or encounter in which the framed material becomes available to a reader.

This makes the distinction between artist voice and editorial voice necessary.

The artist’s responses remain their own statements. The editorial introduction and reflection occupy another position. Making this difference visible foregrounds the mediated structure of the interview.

Editorial framing also begins to create relationships between individual conversations. Morong’s discussion of transforming physical and digital materials into book form can be placed beside Eve’s discussion of transforming dispersed photographs through sequence. The two artists articulate distinct logics, and placing them together creates a relation while preserving the specificity of each position.

Editorial relation can emerge through similarity, contrast, distance, overlap, or contradiction.

Register: formal and epistemological

Scale: intermediate

Dependency: secondary

Editorial framing draws on contributor material and transforms how that material becomes legible and relational.

3. Publication: Transformative Structure

The third element is publication itself.

This framework distinguishes documentation from transformation. A publication documents an existing practice and reorganizes its materials through sequence, scale, typography, page structure, image relationships, rhythm, and access.

The distinction is therefore operational: editorial framing concerns the decisions and mediations that organize material, while publication is the resulting form through which those decisions become materially or digitally encounterable. The same feature, such as sequencing or typography, may be an editorial decision at one stage and part of the reader’s formal encounter at the next.

Morong’s interview demonstrates this through the movement of physical objects, moving images, technical processes, and prototypes into book form. The printed book translates the interactive toy through images and text, while a QR code reconnects the publication to moving-image material.

The project is translated into a new form.

Eve’s case makes this transformation especially visible. Photographs originally made at different moments are brought into relation through page sequence and juxtaposition. She describes the page turn as creating surprise and emphasizes the tenderness produced by the scale and cadence of the book. The publication establishes a temporal encounter in which images appear gradually.

The book later becomes material for another artwork when pages from its first draft are placed inside a clear cube-shaped case, taken into a creek, and photographed. In this case, the publication becomes a starting point for later artistic practice.

Publication therefore operates as a transformative structure.

Register: formal and material

Scale: intermediate

Dependency: secondary

It depends upon both contributor material and editorial organization, while producing a new form through which the work may be encountered.

4. Circulation and Readership: Recontextualization

Once published, a conversation becomes accessible beyond the original exchange between contributor and editor.

Readers encounter the conversation from different disciplinary, cultural, geographic, and personal positions. These encounters extend beyond the control of either the contributor or editor.

Circulation therefore introduces another transformation: a private or semi-private exchange becomes a publicly accessible editorial object.

For Boundless Bound Conversations, online publication is especially important because it allows an interview to circulate across locations and networks. The conversation may reach readers who know the contributor’s practice, readers who encounter it for the first time, or readers who arrive through another Boundless Bound project.

The published conversation may also travel between formats. It can be shared through newsletters or websites, translated, referenced in research, reorganized into a printed publication, or brought into an exhibition.

Circulation describes the repeated movement of material into new contexts.

Register: experiential and relational

Scale: collective

Dependency: derived

Circulation grows from publication and extends the project beyond its original editorial situation.

5. Archive: Accumulation as Active Relation

The fifth element is the developing archive.

A single conversation can function independently. Once multiple conversations accumulate, however, the context surrounding each one begins to change.

The archive functions as an active editorial structure shaped by accumulation and relation.

Morong’s conversation establishes one possible understanding of publication through documentation, translation, fabrication, and continued learning. Eve’s conversation establishes another through intuition, juxtaposition, physical book experience, and the generation of later artworks. Placing these conversations within the same archive creates a new relational field between them without requiring them to resolve into a single position.

As additional interviews accumulate, other relationships may emerge.

A future reader might encounter recurring concerns around memory, technology, migration, language, identity, material practice, digital culture, or spatial experience. Other conversations may contradict earlier ones. Some may resist relationships that initially appear obvious.

The archive therefore functions as an active editorial space in which earlier material can acquire new adjacencies through later additions.

This movement can be described as:

Q&A → edited publication → individual archive unit → relational archive → publishing infrastructure

At this scale, Boundless Bound Conversations begins to move from a series of interviews toward a publishing structure capable of generating additional publications, exhibitions, thematic groupings, translations, and research.

Register: systemic

Scale: collective to infrastructural

Dependency: derived

Accumulation forms the archive, and the archive in turn reshapes the context of each individual contribution.

Here, systemic describes the register at which the archive organizes relations across accumulated material, while infrastructural describes the scale at which those relations can support further publications, exhibitions, translations, and research.

Three Governing Distinctions

1. Contributor Voice / Editorial Voice

Premise: editorial framing is unavoidable and can be made visible.

If this premise is rejected, the interview risks presenting editorial decisions as neutral or invisible. The distinction between the contributor’s statement and the editor’s interpretation becomes unclear.

2. Documentation / Transformation

Premise: moving material into publication changes how it can be encountered.

If publication is treated only as documentation, sequence, scale, typography, materiality, juxtaposition, and format become secondary. Both the Morong and Eve cases suggest that these formal operations actively reorganize the work.

3. Individual Contribution / Relational Archive

Premise: accumulation changes context.

If each conversation remains entirely isolated, the larger series functions only as a collection of separate profiles. If accumulation is understood as relational, later contributions can generate new readings across earlier ones without requiring those contributions to become equivalent.

Provisional Structure

The framework can currently be mapped as:

contributor → editorial framing → publication → circulation / readership → archive

with a second movement operating across the sequence:

specificity → mediation → transformation → recontextualization → accumulation

with return movements:

archive → new publication / exhibition → renewed circulation

circulation / readership → future contributor

publication → new artwork or contribution → renewed editorial framing

The structure remains open and cyclical. The archive may return material to publication through future zines or exhibitions. A published interview may generate another artwork. A reader may later become a contributor. A conversation may be translated or resequenced. Each stage can therefore produce another entry into the network.

At this stage, the framework remains provisional. The two published conversations provide the first concrete cases through which its distinctions can be tested. As additional conversations are produced, the framework will need to account for new forms of relation as they emerge.

The central problem remains how a growing publishing structure can establish meaningful relations across different practices while preserving difference.

For now, I understand Boundless Bound Conversations as a developing relational publishing structure in which editorial practice operates through the production of individual publications and the design of relationships across voices, materials, formats, readers, and time.