Annie Abrahams, Helen Varley Jamieson (eds.): CyPosium: The Book (2014)

“In October 2012, a one-day online symposium created a platform for discussing the practice of cyberformance – live performance that uses internet technologies to connect remote participants. The 12-hour event featured 10 presentations and attracted an audience of over 100 from around the world who engaged in a lively, vibrant conversation. CyPosium – The Book presents a selection of artefacts from the CyPosium – presentation texts, chat log excerpts, discussion transcripts, edited email conversations, creative chat excerpt essays and illustrations – along with invited articles that respond to the event. The contributors hail from a wide range of artistic practice both online and offline, and their writing illustrates the hybridity of contemporary arts involving digital technologies.”

Contributors: Adriene Jenik, Alan Sondheim, Alberto Vazquez, Annie Abrahams, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Cherry Truluck, Clara Gomes, Helen Varley Jamieson, James Cunningham, Joseph DeLappe, Liz Bryce, Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Maja Delak and Luka Prinčič, Miljana Perić, Rob Myers, Roger Mills, Ruth Catlow, Stephen A. Schrum and Suzon Fuks.

Publisher Link Editions, Brescia, with La Panacée, Centre de Culture Contemporaine, Montpellier, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781291988925
171 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (25 MB)
Issuu

Mondothèque: A Radiated Book / Un livre irradiant / Een irradiërend boek (2016) [EN, FR, NL]

“This Radiated Book started three years ago with an e-mail from the Mundaneum archive center in Mons, Belgium. It announced that Elio di Rupo, then prime minister of Belgium, was about to sign a collaboration agreement between the archive center and Google. The newsletter cited an article in the French newspaper Le Monde that coined the Mundaneum as ‘Google on paper’. It was our first encounter with many variations on the same theme.

The former mining area around Mons is also where Google has installed its largest datacenter in Europe, a result of negotiations by the same Di Rupo. Due to the re-branding of Paul Otlet as ‘founding father of the Internet’, Otlet’s oeuvre finally started to receive international attention. Local politicians wanting to transform the industrial heartland into a home for The Internet Age seized the moment and made the Mundaneum a central node in their campaigns. Google — grateful for discovering its posthumous francophone roots — sent chief evangelist Vint Cerf to the Mundaneum. Meanwhile, the archive center allowed the company to publish hundreds of documents on the website of Google Cultural Institute.

While the visual resemblance between a row of index drawers and a server park might not be a coincidence, it is something else to conflate the type of universalist knowledge project imagined by Paul Otlet and Henri Lafontaine with the enterprise of the search giant. The statement ‘Google on paper’ acted as a provocation, evoking other cases in other places where geographically situated histories are turned into advertising slogans, and cultural infrastructures pushed into the hands of global corporations.

An international band of artists, archivists and activists set out to unravel the many layers of this mesh. The direct comparison between the historical Mundaneum project and the mission of Alphabet Inc speaks of manipulative simplification on multiple levels, but to de-tangle its implications was easier said than done. Some of us were drawn in by misrepresentations of the oeuvre of Otlet himself, others felt the need to give an account of its Brussels’ roots, to re-insert the work of maintenance and caretaking into the his/story of founding fathers, or joined out of concern with the future of cultural institutions and libraries in digital times.” (from the Introduction)

Editorial team: André Castro, Sînziana Păltineanu, Dennis Pohl, Dick Reckard, Natacha Roussel, Femke Snelting, Alexia de Visscher
Publisher Constant, Brussels, Sep 2016
Free Art License 1.3
ISBN 9789081145954, 9081145959
225 pages

Project wiki

HTML (updated on 2019-5-31)
Git
PDF, PDF (43 MB)

Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl (2014)

“Hito Steyerl is considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.

Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from 2004-2014. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills.”

Edited by Nick Aikens
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783956790577
247 pages

Exh. reviews: Amelia Groom (2014), Paula Albuquerque (Necsus 2015), Dylan Rainforth (LEAP 2015), Kate Woodcroft (Artlink 2015), Scott Redford (Ran Dian 2015).

Exhibition (Van Abbemuseum)
Exhibition (IMA)
Publisher (Sternberg)
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (single pages, 4 MB)
PDF, PDF (spreads, 4 MB)