Midstream aims to develop the concept of the audience as the centre of production. In an experimental setting with art institutions around Europe the two-year project aims at finding new hybrid “midstream” forms of publishing and audience development for the cultural realm.Midstream publishing goes beyond primarily focusing on the end product. It applies the broader viewpoint that publishing starts from and generates specific social contexts for knowledge production and creativity and develops new strategies based on this approach. This is what connects (or even merges) the topics of publishing and audience development.Based on analyses of historical examples in the visual arts (from the historical avant-gardes to the current hype of 'self-publishing' fairs) as well as critical experiments in post/social media and online social networks, Midstream aims to develop new concepts, strategies and practices. Following Deleuze and Guattari the project applies a concept of the middle which arises at various instances: between languages (text production and publishing between languages, not just translating into another language), as translocality, and also between electronic and print publishing which do not appear as separate possibilities but rather as a combined process (also comprising a whole palette of smaller forms on the web, from blog comments to alternative forms of social media communication).The project is based on a clearly calculated mix of methods/formats: archive research to experimental publishing, social media interventions, art exhibitions and a broad range of discursive events, workshops, seminars, roundtables and conference.The new forms of audience development evolved in Midstream transcend conventional methods. Relating it to the production of publics can add open-ended processes, invention, new connections, non-linear developments and a perspective focusing on dynamics in the arts or publishing that traverses the logic of individual institutions.