File:Careful A Repertorium on Shadow Library Practice 2025.pdf

Compiled by Dušan Barok, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Nick Thurston

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Careful vs Careless: Library Custodians and Artificial Readers as part of Library Making as Practice, at distro, Basel, 5–17 November 2025. With the Library of Inclusions and Omissions, Monoskop, The Piracy Project, Public Library / Memory of the World, a.o. Organised by Lucie Kolb and Maria Maddalena Lenzi.

"Large Language Models have, in a sense, created the ultimate (un)ideal readers for electronic libraries. By treating e-libraries as vast training datasets, algorithmic scraping has become both the fulfilment and the ruin of a core dream in public library culture: that access to books should be free and unlimited for all. AI systems read everything and nothing, at inhuman scale and speed — extracting patterns and selling what they pretend to know as consequence. What once symbolised a democratic promise now risks feeding extractive logics that empty reading of meaning.

So, why should we care — and if we do, how can we put that care into practice?

The ‘Careful VS Careless’ exhibition centres a new conversation between custodians of radical public libraries, known as ‘shadow libraries’. Organised around that conversation are a mixture of symbolic and tactical gestures that help people to think and act carefully in relation to the infrastructures of public knowledge systems."

 Careful: A Repertorium on Shadow Library Practice
 distro, Basel, November 2025
 [134] pages
 PDF (22 mb)

Exhibition. Publisher.

2025-11-5