La Société Anonyme: The SKOR Codex (2012)
Filed under artist publishing | Tags: · archive, archiving, art, code, data, digital heritage, media art, preservation, print, storage
The SKOR Codex is a printed book which will be sent to different locations on earth. It contains binary encoded image and sound files selected to portray the diversity of life and culture at the Foundation for Art and Public Domain (SKOR), Amsterdam, and is intended for any intelligent terrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find it. The files are protected from bitrot, software decay and hardware failure via a transformation from magnetic transitions on a disk to ink on paper, safe for centuries. Instructions in a symbolic language explain the origin of the book and indicate how the content is to be decoded.
La Société Anonyme noted that “the package will be encountered and the book decoded only if there will be advanced civilizations on earth in the far future. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about art on this planet.” Thus the record is best seen as a time capsule and a statement rather than an attempt to preserve SKOR for future art historians. The SKOR Codex is a project by La Société Anonyme.
Published in July 2012
304 pages
Interview with authors (Annet Dekker, Open!, 2014).
Comment (0)Elizabeth Armstrong: Before Copyright. The French Book-Privilege System 1498-1526 (1990)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1500s, book, copyright, france, print, publishing
“When printing first began, a new book automatically fell into the public domain upon publication. Only a special law or privilegium enacted by a competent authority could protect it from being reprinted without the consent of the author or publisher. Such privileges for books are attested before 1480, but in Germany and Italy their efficacy was limited to a relatively small area by the political fragmentation of the country. During the 1480s and 1490s France became one of Europe’s main centres of book production and, as competition intensified, privileges were sought there from 1498. Although privileges were to last as long as the Ancien Régime, the period to 1526 is the least-known stage of their development and the most important. Most privilege-holders printed the full text of their grant, and many others a summary.”
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1990
ISBN 0521374081
344 pages
Alessandro Ludovico: Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894 (2012–) [EN, IT]
Filed under book | Tags: · archive, book, e-book, filesharing, library, networks, print, publishing, reading, text, writing
“In the post-digital age, digital technology is no longer revolutionary but a normality, everywhere. For music or film, circulation as bits and bytes, downloads and streams are no longer a big deal. But for the world of book and magazine publishing, change has just begun.
New ways of networked and electronic publishing had been envisioned by avant-garde artists, activists and technologists for more than a century. Even though in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now become a reality. How will analog and digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?
In this book, Alessandro Ludovico rereads the history of avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the opposites of paper and electronics. He covers, among others, artists’ books and manifests, zines, net art and experimental publishing projects, up to e-readers and print-on-demand.”
With Afterword by Florian Cramer
Publisher Creating 010, Hogeschool Rotterdam & Onomatopee, Eindhoven, May 2012
Onomatopee 77: Cabinet Project
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789078454878, 9078454873
192 pages
via Florian Cramer
Interview with author: Teresa de Andrés (VisualMag, 2012).
Reviews: Franz Thalmair (Springerin, 2012), Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art, 2013), Rob Myers (Furtherfield, 2013), Paul Prudence (Neural, 2013), brnrd.net (2013), Kate Cunningham (Yapp, 2014), Eloïse Cariou (Critique d’art, 2016, FR), Benjamin Caraco (BBF, 2017, FR).
Book launch (Eindhoven, 2012)
Post Digital Print (series of activities around the publication, 2012)
Book website
Publisher (EN)
Publisher (IT, archived)
WorldCat (EN)
Wikipedia
Post-Digital Print (English, 2012, updated on 2012-5-31 to the latest version of the book, Internet Archive)
Post-digital print. La mutazione dell’editoria dal 1894 (Italian, trans. Alessandro Ludovico and Rosa Antonicelli Verrelli, 2014, added on 2020-6-3)