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 Careful vs Careless: Library Custodians and Artificial Readers and 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