Olia Lialina, Dragan Espenschied (eds.): Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect (2009)

“Technical innovations shape only a small part of computer and network culture. It doesn’t matter much who invented the microprocessor, the mouse, TCP/IP or the World Wide Web and what ideas were behind these inventions. What matters is who uses them. Only when users start to express themselves with these technical innovations do they truly become relevant to culture at large.

Users’ endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.

As the first book of its kind, this reader contains essays and projects investigating many different facets of Digital Folklore: online amateur culture, DIY electronics, dirtstyle, typo-nihilism, memes, teapots, penis enlargement, …” (from the back cover)

Contributors: Cory Arcangel, Julia Böger, Manuel Buerger, Helene Dams, Dragan Espenschied, Jörg Frohnmayer, Mark Grimm, Christopher Heller, Yunchul Kim, Dennis Knopf, Stefan Krappitz, Florian Kröner, Tobias Leingruber, Olia Lialina, Leo Merz, Bernadette Neuroth, o+ro, johannes p osterhoff, Isabel Pettinato, Michael Ruß, Alexander Schlegel, Bert Schutzbach, Siegfried Zielinski.

Publisher Merz & Solitude (Merz Akademie & Akademie Schloss Solitude), Stuttgart, 2009
Reihe Projektiv series
Designer Manuel Buerger
ISBN 9783937982250, 3937982256
287 pages

Reviews: Pau Waelder (Furtherfield, 2010), Kevin McGarry (Rhizome, 2010), Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art, 2010), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2010), Richard Schwarz (The Gap, 2010, DE), Marie Lechner (Libération, 2010, FR), Stefania Bercu (Masters of Media, 2010).

Book website
Publisher
WorldCat

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